I watched it on TCM the other day, and there’s a line I never paid attention to before that makes no sense to me:
Richard Dreyfuss, the girl that goes with him, and the other guy that’s been a character actor in a ton of movies have removed their gas masks, escaped the back of the helicopter and are scaling Devil’s Tower to see what’s on the other side.
The other guy keeps falling behind b/c he’s out of shape, and at one point as he’s resting the other two scream for him to come on b/c helicopters are coming, and he points at one and says “They’re just crop dusting!”
Then he holds up a pumped fist towards the helicopter and yells “LOS ANGELES!!!”
My guess is that the movie was filmed during the Medfly spraying in California. Due to infestation, the authorities took to spraying malathion from helicopters all over California. It ate the finish off of cars and gave the tin-foil hat brigade fits.
I remember that scene, and I remember him pumping his arm and shouting at the chopper, but “Los Angeles” rings no kinda bells. Are you 100% sure that’s what he said? I seem to remember getting it, or at least have no memory of going “WTF?” so perhaps I misheard it as something that made sense.
There were a few people in the room, one of them from LA, and we all said “Los Angeles? Why would he say that?” So I’m pretty sure that’s what he said.
silenus’ answer makes enough sense to me I suppose - everyone in the room was a little kid living in the Mid West when it came out, and I’ve never heard of this medfly spraying thing so I doubt they would have either.
I just popped it into the player, and I turned on the subtitles. He definitely said, “Los Angeles!” It’s been a while since I’ve watched the movie though, so I don’t know the context.
I was living in the desert north of L.A. County when CE3K came out, and I don’t remember the medfly sprayingl; but I did see it in progress when I lived in L.A.
Actually, if I recall correctly, he’s sticking his thumb up in the air when he screams “Los Angeles.” I took it to mean he he was being a smart ass by pretending to want to hitch a ride home. He didn’t take Army helicopter seriously and didn’t realize what the gas was that was coming out of the chopper.
Zey belong here Mozambique
I was really disappointed when I got the DVD for CE3K. For the longest time I wanted to know what Truffaut said to the interpeter. (in a scene very near the Los Angelos bit) They are yelling at the head Army guy and he just blows them off. They are quiet for a moment and Truffaut said something that I always assumed was in French. That he spoke in his native tounge to him and said something like “What a A-Hole” but in French it sounded really classy.
So when they launched into a story about that line I was pretty excited. But what he said wasn’t in French, it was in badly mangled English. He tried to say “They belong here more than we” and with his accent they had to do numerous takes. The crew had t-shirts printed up with the Mozambique line.
