Silent Running starring Bruce Dern is the only science fiction movie that I can recall where exterior shots of the space craft were totally silent. No zoom sounds when the engines ignite.
I haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t comment on it. However, I respectfully disagree that the quotes you cite are evidence of notable insight into either card cheating or second dealing.
To be suspicious of a ‘mechanic’s grip’ makes no sense on any level. First of all, there’s nothing suspicious about that grip. ‘Mechanic’s grip’ and ‘dealer grip’ are essentially the same thing, and it’s perfectly normal for anyone who is dealing cards to use that grip. It doesn’t suggest any cheating is going on. It just suggests they are accustomed to handling cards and dealing them in the most customary, comfortable and practical way. Secondly, if a card cheat were operating, he wouldn’t give himself away by adopting any kind of special or noticeable grip.
And so to second dealing. There are two common second dealing techniques - the ‘push off’ and the ‘strike’. I’m not going to describe these techniques because that’s ‘magic secret’ stuff and I don’t do that. The point is that neither technique makes any kind of special sound, not even at a subtle level. Although I do a lot of card sleight of hand, I’m not an expert at second dealing. However, I have had personal demonstrations and tuition from the guy whom I regard as the best second dealer in the world. His name is Simon Lovell, he’s a pro magician based in NY, and he gets paid good money to teach casino chains how to spot customers who are cheating at the card table. His second deals are imperceptible and make no special kind of sound - it just sounds like a card being dealt off the deck, which isn’t much of a sound at all. Other top flight second dealers have also demonstrated their techniques for me, and I assure you there is no give away sound or noise.
FYI, I’m pretty sure that was Al Michaels.
PoorYorick, have you seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? 
You need to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Yeah, yeah, both you and Dooku pointed that out. I guess I had a mind freeze. Thanks for pointing it out.
You need to go watch 2001
Seriously.
I can’t comment on that, but Rounders did have one scene in which people are supposedly playing Hearts (in prison), and it in no way even remotely resembled an actual game of hearts. Which makes me suspicious of all the poker.
pepperlandgirl, those books that have been dumped for cheap prices by students are nearly always low-level undergraduate texts. High-level math textbooks are always expensive, even when used. They’re usually kept by the students. The ones that Will Hunting would have had to consult are not textbooks really but the sort of books (and journals) that are only found in university libraries (and maybe on professors’ shelves). And in any case, it’s just not possible to read as much by the age of 20 as Will Hunting is supposed to have read. Speed reading doesn’t really work anyway. It certainly doesn’t work for high-level math, where you’re doing good to read 20 pages in an hour. I’m 52, a fast reader, with two master’s degrees, who spends all his spare time reading, and I haven’t read as much as Will Hunting is supposed to have read.
I’m not saying that a kid from a working-class family can’t be brilliant. They just can’t be a prodigy. Look, I grew up in a struggling working-class family. I have never met a mathematician who grew up in a poorer family than mine, and I’ve met hundreds of mathematicians in my life. I’ve met a number of prodigies, and every single one of them had a mentor, usually a parent, who was teaching them from an early age. A kid from a working-class family could be brilliant enough to get a Ph.D. and go on to be a great mathematician, but he couldn’t be a prodigy. He could grow up in a family who allowed him to do well in school, get into a good college where he did well, get into a good grad school where he did well, and go on to do great mathematics. He couldn’t do it any faster than that. It always takes a mentor to do it faster. It certainly would never work if he was brought up in a series of foster families where he was beaten. Kids who are beaten do not rise above it and become prodigies. Most often, they grow up to beat up other people.
Will Hunting is depicted as being much more of a prodigy than Ramanujan, the mostly nearly self-taught mathematician of all time. Heck, Will Hunting is depicted as being much more of a prodigy than John Stuart Mills, the greatest prodigy of all time. Mills was as well-read (and already productive in writing philosophy and economics) at 20 as anyone in history ever was. Mills was taught almost from birth by his father (who was pretty smart himself), who pushed him as much as is conceivably possible. We’re supposed to believe that Will Hunting, with no one to push him, with no one to discuss math with, while spending much of his time drunk and getting into fights with his friends, is able to learn enough math to dazzle a Fields Medalist and to learn enough about subjects like history, law, chemistry, and psychology he would be more well-read than Mills was at 20.
Good points, all. I hadn’t realized he had something more advanced than the textbooks most students dump. Probably because i don’t own any math books at all…As for the prodigy bit, I suppose you could always watch it as some sort of fantasy movie. Like that one about the autistic kid who could fly, called, aptly enough, “The Boy Who Could Fly.” Or alternately, just shrug and say “it’s a metaphor.” That’s what I usually fall back on.
I don’t like Good Will Hunting because Damon and Affleck are a couple of liars. Yes, they wrote a screenplay together. They worked on it for years, and it was about a brilliant young man who worked for the government. However, that was not the movie or the script that was ultimately made. Oliver Stone (entirely uncredited) wrote the script that they won the Oscar for.
Both are the product of the fight direction of William Hobbs
Hobb’s zenith, however, was The Duellists where the first fight captures the fear of facing an armed opponent.
Really? How did you hear this? A Google search turned up nothing for me. And William Goldman certainly thinks they wrote it. (That trivia page also gives details that, if true, support the idea they wrote something substantially similar to the finished product, or at least that the initial script wasn’t as completely different as you seem to be suggesting.)
I have to admit, though, the idea of a Hollywood conspiracy involving Oliver Stone does strike me as funny… 
Unfortunately I doubt “My screenwriting prof filled me in” counts as a cite, and in hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have posted at all about it, since I don’t have anything other than “my screenwriting prof told me…”
Though she has all sorts of ties and connections to “the Industry” and I trust her, I don’t really expect y’all too.
ianzin said:
The typical person (not a professional dealer) who picks up a deck of cards to deal will hold it so that their fingers wrap around the long side of the deck, with the deck rotated so that the index finger slides underneath the bottom of the deck. I assume you’re a magician, so maybe you’ve been doing it so long that a mechanic’s grip is natural to you. But for the average person, it isn’t. If anyone reading this is interested, just pick up something near you roughly the size of a deck of cards or an actual deck if you have one handy. Hold it like you’re preparing to deal a card. Note where your fingers are. It is likely that you are currently holding the deck in the palm of your hand with all four fingers on the long side of the deck, and your thumb on the top of the deck. When you deal, you use your thumb to push a single card onto the tips of your four fingers. The thumb holds the card in this place until the thumb and index finger of the other hand grabs it and deals it across the table.
A mechanic grip is different. There are different types, but generally the index and middle finger are stretch around so that they come up under the front of the deck. Some people may do this naturally, but most don’t. Therefore, a mechanic’s grip is evidence that someone *may be a better card handler than they are making themselves out to be. That was the point of the scene in the movie.
A valid point, but it doesn’t change the fact that if you spot someone with that grip, they may in fact be cheating.
As for the ‘snap’ when dealing seconds, I just tried it. It’s inconsistent. Under the right level of thumb pressure and location, there is a little ‘click’ as front edges of the first and third cards snap together again. But it’s very subtle, and I’m not sure you could hear it in a room with normal background noise. And a really good mechanic would probably be able to do it silently.
Regarding things movies get right: I like that during the fights in LOTR people got really dirty, and well, it looked real. For example, at the end of FOTR when Aragorn fights Lurtz. I have seen lots of movies where people even fights or long treks or whatever don’t look dirty, smudged or stained in the least. This may not really be a detail - it’s actually a pretty big thing to attend to in an action film, fantasy sci-fi or real world. But they don’t always pay attention, and that bugs me.
I haven’t seen the movie, either, and I don’t know dick about cards, but I’d expect a professional magician with a sideline in casino security to be able to do just about any sort of card sleight without being at all perceptible. However, I imagine that a two-bit crook cheating in backroom poker games would be siginificantly less apt. Unless the character is specifically described in the movie as a “top flight second dealer,” it seems likely to me that he’s simply not as good at cheating as the professionals you know.
Well in the movie Les Murphy (aka Worm or Edward Norton) is just about as professional a card-handler as you can get. He’d been practicing his chops for several years in prison - showing them off to his buddy Mike (Damon) once released. Apparently according to Mike, (in the movie) “he’d become a real artist too… (mentions several different types of grips and sleights)”
Wagner writes:
I would like someone to elaborate on this please. Is there absolutely NO WAY of getting high-level (such as those discussed about in the film) mathematical text-books outside of university? I mean is there any way of ordering them from somewhere?
Of course anyone can get high level math textbooks. You can buy them new or used from any university bookstore, or from any second-hand bookstore near a university. Or order them through Amazon.
The point is that Hunting has thousands and thousands of dollars worth of upper-level math textbooks.
True, the character in the movie might not be as adept as some real-life pros. Nonetheless, I’m just trying to point out that a second deal doesn’t make a sound, and there’s no reason why it should make a sound. One may argue that this (whether it makes a give-away sound or note) depends on how adept the dealer is. I would respectfully suggest this is not the case. You can either execute a second-deal sufficiently well to use it in a real game, or you can’t. If you can, then it doesn’t make a sound. If you can’t, whether it makes a sound or not is going to be immaterial, because everyone at the table will be able to see that you are second-dealing.
There are some sleights you can get away with even if you don’t execute them 100% perfectly. But the second deal isn’t one of them. Either you can do it really well (in which case you can’t see it and you sure as heck can’t hear it) or you can’t (in which case you’ll get nailed the first time you try it, because a less-than-perfect second deal is pretty darn obvious to anyone nearby).
The second deal is one of the hardest moves there is, and there are very few guys who ever really master it. I’m very privileged to have met some of them, and to have had my own private demonstration, show and tuition. Sadly, even though I’ve put in the practice, it’s just not a move that works for me, so I have to achieve the same ends via different methods.