Why in some 50’s & 60’s tv and movies does the driver enter a car on the passenger side? A friend said it was because of the size and angle of the camera. I saw an Andy Griffith rerun recently where Andy & Barney exited the courthouse and entered the squad car on the passenger side. The camera was filming from in front of the car on the driver’s side and could have captured Andy entering on the correct side. Any ideas?
That same question was asked within the last couple of months. I’m supposed to be writing a program though, so I don’t have time to use the search function.
Good luck.
Somae states had/have laws requiring people to enter from the curb side, NOT the traffic side. That might explain it - we were showing nice, law-abiding folks, not wild-eyed radicals.
This was also before the advent of bucket seats, so this wasn’t as much of a pain as you might think.
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- And back then a particularly big car had enough room for you to almost stand up and do jumping jacks in.
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- And back then a particularly big car had enough room for you to almost stand up and do jumping jacks in.
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All I remember is Robin hopping into and out of the Batmobile over the closed doors, never bothering to actually open the doors.
I asked this question a couple months ago,and all I got were guesses.
Maybe some director has joined the board in the interim.
It had ** nothing ** to do with the way cars were built,or how people entered cars IRL,since they’ve always entered the way they do today.
The best guess has to do with camera angles and/or keeping the scene moving.
Two examples I’ve seen of this recently is 1-in an old movie the actor was reciting lines as he walked around from curbside to get in drivers door,and another in an Andy Griffith a ( sheriff’s?) man putting criminal in back seat,while his partner ( I had it taped and rewound,then slo-mo watched) ran a 100 yd dash time around front end of car to get in driver’s seat.
Looked comical on close inspection,but in realtime you really didn’t notice the runner,he was simply a blur,since the action was focused at the curbside backdoor.
These 2 being exceptions to the slide on the seat/jump over the convertble seat trick.
Has ** always ** annoyed me.Smacks of laziness to me.
Maybe it was done to make life easier for the focus puller. As an actor in the scene being filmed moves towards or away from the camera, the focus puller refocuses the lens, so that the person remains in focus throughout the shot. It’s not easy to do well - you can’t just look through the lens and fiddle to get it right. There are markings on the lens barrel (like there are on an SLR camera), so if the person in the scene is 20 feet from the camera at the beginning of the shot, and then walks towards the camera until he’s 10 feet away, the focus puller gradually moves the lens barrel from the 20-foot focus point to the 10-foot focus point, in time with the motion of the actor.
So, when someone’s getting into a car, and the camera’s in front of the car, having him get in the passenger side and slide over means that he’s roughly the same distance from the camera during the entire shot. If he comes around either the front or the back of the car before getting in, on the other hand, his distance from the camera changes quite a bit (especially with a big 1950s land yacht of a car), requiring a major change of camera focus.
Well, I suppose this post by me in that thread must have been invisible or something:
Insofar as some cars were impossible to unlock from the driver’s side, thus forcing passenger side entry, I’d say that the construction of cars may very well have had something to do with it.
My old 1947 Hudson pickup had a door lock on the passenger side only. The equivalent sedans had lock on both sides, so I suspect some of the reason was a cost saving; the pickup was pretty carefully “value engineered”.
Although I am at a loss to explain why the lock wasn’t on the (convenient) driver’s side…
But Cheesesteak, why would a car on a TV or movie set be locked at all? We’re talking about actors on a set, here, not about real people in real life!
I’m not saying the door was actually locked on the set, but the existance of actual cars with passenger side only locks indicates strongly that drivers in real life would have regularly entered through the passenger door. Thus, seeing such an act on the screen would not have been as silly looking then as it is today.
Just chiming in to say I noticed this behaviour while watching Psycho the other day and kind of wondered about it as well.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the camera angle (front vs driver or passenger side) … maybe Gus Van Zant will post & help me out 
But they were educated guesses.