You’d actually be wrong. Cincinnatians don’t sound the least bit like folks from Lou-vl. They don’t even sound the same as the folks just across the river in Dayton, Covington, Newport, etc., if you take people who are there for more than one generation. Of course both towns have people with some steep accents and some that are newcomers with no local accent at all.
Also, although George Clooney is from Maysville or Augusta, depending on who you ask, his father is a famous Cincinnati TV guy and his aunt is an even more famous singer, so don’t expect him to sound exactly like other folks from that town. I imagine good grammar and diction were very important in that family, not that he probably can’t affect a local accent quite well.
Bad - Cold Mountain. Mountain people don’t talk like they’re sipping mint julieps down on the delta.
Good - Jodi Foster in Sommersby. It was located in the mountains of East Tennessee. It’s not a Southern drawl. It’s a flat, fast paced accent, and she did a pretty good job. Richard Gere, not so much. :rolleyes:
On a related note, characters who live in rural run down trailer parks and characters who “sip juleps on the ver-ander” have the same accent- there’s no class distinction in accent. Plus, those who’ve never been to the South might be amazed at how many umpteenth generation Southerners (especially those raised since cable television became the norm) have very little accent at all.
One of the worst I’ve heard: Lucas Black, the kid from SLINGBLADE, gave a particularly awful Southern accent in a TV remake of The Miracle Worker. In real life Black is actually from north Alabama as was Helen Keller’s brother (the character he played), but evidently his normal accent wasn’t aristocratic enough so the director had him replace it with an “oh Bel-vu-dee-ah, cum heah boyyyy!” Magnolia in the moonlight patois that I’ve never heard any southerner speak with.
On several television shows (Quantum Leap, Dallas and some others come to mind) and in some movies (JFK comes to mind) characters from New Orleans also have the “Hollywood Stock Accent #5” dialect when in fact anybody who’s ever even BEEN to New Orleans can tell you it’s the most distinctive Southern accent there is. It actually sounds far more like Brooklyn or the Bronx [in part due to the same history of massive Italian, Irish and other immigration into an already polyglot French, English and African population] than it does Houston or rural Bama.
On the subject of dialect coaches, I remember an interview in which Johnny Depp was telling the story of working with a dialect coach in Ireland on a film he shot there with Marlon Brando. He became furious because the coach told him he wasn’t getting the accent and the fact that nobody seemed to notice or care that the Irish people who were in the crew, who were extras, who lived all around the countryside and drove the actors to work or worked in their hotels and restaurants, etc., sounded absolutely nothing like the “Frosted Lucky Charms” accent the coach was trying to impart. Depp instead picked up the accent of the locals and was accused of being “difficult”. (Meanwhile the studio went broke and the movie was never finished or released.)
Oh, lordy! Bless that poor boy’s heart. The Yosemite Sam accent! Baw-ey, ah say baw-ey, ah say whey-ah’s mah mint julip!? I rather imagine that, if he wasn’t yet jaded by age, he was thinking to himself, ‘What the hell? Oh, well, just show me the money’.
Kenneth Branagh did a killer Georgia accent in Dead Again (I think). I remember being amazed that it was identifiably Georgian instead of generic “Southern”.
IMO, Robert Duvall usually does a very good southern accent when required. But, according to IMDB, he knows a lot more about southern culture than Gone With the Wind and The Beverly Hillbillies. They say he’s a direct descendent of Robert E. Lee and owns a large estate in Virginia. Link.
Last week’s episode of Las Vegas had two “German” blackjack players and they had the phoniest, worst so-called German accents I have ever heard…even worse than Hans and Franz from SNL, and that is saying a lot.
But the worst southern accent goes to Laurie on Tading Spaces. Some idiot producer must have told her the accent is cute and sexy…oh, I don’t doubt for a minute she really is from the south, but as the show goes on, her accent gets thicker and thicker and her forced drawl is lathering thick enough to be insulation in the attic.
Well, I’ll be damned. I guess the Ohio is more of a boundary than I gave it credit for. I guess my example would only work for cities across the border from one another where there’s not a major river involved …
Not from the Appalachias, but in my part of Mississippi we pronounce ‘something’ as ‘sum’im’ with a soft gottal stop in the middle. Of course, our state is also called ‘Mi-sippi’.
Kevin Costner is responsible for some of the worst southern accents ever put to film. We can start chronologically and just document them: Fandango, Silverado, Bull Durham (I only noticed it in one line from that one: “God I love this song”), JFK, A Perfect World, Wyatt Earp (the WORST one, IMO), The War, Tin Cup…for God’s sake, make him stop!!
And don’t even get me started on his “English” accent from Robin Hood or his <snicker> New England accent from Thirteen Days…
I recently stumbled across “Deadly Whispers”, the usual Lifetime TV child abduction and murder fare. Unfortunately it also featured Tony Danza as a blue-collar husband opposite Pamela Reed. She is usually able to fake some sort of accent, but Tony Danza tried in vain to hide his Brooklyn twang in a generic poor Southern one and it was unbearable.
Miss Miss: What did you think of Morgan Freeman’s accent in Driving Miz Daisy? I thought it was pretty good, even before I found out he was from Mississippi (me too).
Yeah, I never heard anything quite like it until I first visited here before I moved here. If any non-native has ever pulled it off, I’m impressed. I would NEVER think somebody from New Orleans had a “Southern” accent anyway; it’s almost like somebody picked up a city from somewhere else and dropped it here. I haven’t much experience with accents outside of the city, but I’m willing to bet that the various rural Louisiana accents don’t sound anything like New Orleans.
If the Hollywood people could just get it in their heads that there are about a million different Southern accents and dialects…but of course, that would require dialect coaches who actually knew, say, Poor Black South Georgia dialect. Generic Bad Southern for everything is a lot easier to handle, to the annoyance of anybody with a halfway-decent ear.
I see nobody will admit to having seen Con Air, home of (IMHO) the worst movie Southern accent, bar none.
I am quite irritated that somebody beat me to Robert Duvall, who may have family ties in the South but is from California, and whose accent in Days of Thunder was so good that for half the movie I didn’t even notice he was doing one, because he just sounded appropriate (and close to my accent, which was correct for the film.)
I rather imagine that, if he wasn’t yet jaded by age, he was thinking to himself, ‘What the hell? Oh, well, just show me the money’.