Yeah, but notice that they don’t actually give any scene time to the engineers working through the problem; they’re just presented with a box of stuff and twenty minutes later, “Bingo!”, they have a solution. It was a fun scene, though, and I was going to engineering school at the time it came out as were probably half the audience in the theater in which I saw it; the guy sitting two rows behind me yelled, “I had that class!” and the most of the audience cracked up, because we did, in fact, have a very similar class in the MAEM department.
That’s not my big gripe about the film, though, which is instead how they show Ken Mattingly working with a single engineer to figure out how to route power from the LM to “wake up” the CM before LM jettison prior to re-entry. In reality, a number of NASA and Grumman engineers worked the problem, which was not the big revelation as portrayed in the film, as Grumman had already done considerable studies on using the LM as a rescue ship and space ferry. I know they need to restrict the action to a few focal characters and make them seem like iconic heroes, but that just isn’t the way it usually works.
I cannot even watch most legal shows. I find myself yelling “Objection!” constantly.
I’m a transactional guy, but even I know when to object. “You like the taste of baby blood, don’t you you unconvicted murdering scum!?” is the proper time to object.
My wife keeps saying, “Honey, I’m a lawyer, too. But you need to just shut up.”
She has the sane ability to “turn it off” for 44 minutes.
Back when I was in law school a classmate came in one day and told us all about a police procedural show where they got everything wrong. He went into chapter and verse about what they did wrong, and then he concluded by saying, “And then Andy said to Barney…”
Ken Mattingly agreed with you- like many people familiar with the actual situation, his take was that the movie was quite good as far as it went, but didn’t begin to show just how MANY people were working on the problems. Like all astronauts, he had a healthy ego, but didn’t want to claim credit for what hundreds and hundreds of people accomplished.
In Virginia (back in my day) different counties had different policies. The three counties I usually haunted had complete open discovery – you could go in and get copies of everything. It was quite a shock for me to take a case down south a’ways, walk into the Commonwealth Attorney’s office and be met with amusement when I asked for copies. They made me go through the hoop of drafting and filing a discovery motion, and then nit-picked it to death. At first I thought they were just screwing with the out-of-towner, but I found that was standard practice there. :rolleyes:
Well, one of the things I learned working for the litigation consulting practice of a large management consulting firm is that no movie or TV show accurately captures the discovery process of a large corporate litigation. Possibly because it is so boring IRL.
Most movies basically show our idealistic lawyer heros dilligently working on their matter when all of a sudden, a bunch of aids walk in and start stacking bankers boxes full of documents around them. Usually they make a “they’re trying to bury us in paper” comment. Yet no matter how much evidence they are presented, they usually get through it over the weekend.
In reality it can take months or years for a team of a dozen contract attorneys to sit in a room reading through hundreds of thousands of documents. The discovery process alone can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sometimes millions. The law firms have to hire Big-4 accounting/consulting firms like Deloitte or KPMG or smaller boutique firms like the one I worked for and the consultants often bill out as much as the lawyers themselves.
Speaking of consultants, Office Space has probably the most realistic portrayal of management consultants. 90% of what we do is actually sitting with people in a room and asking “so what would you say you actually do here?”. Michael Bolton does indeed suck though.
There are counties here like that here as well. I don’t understand why, because they’re just making more work for themselves. If I walk in and they read me the facts or let me look at the file and it looks like they have a solid case, I go relay the information to my guy and we get him pleaded by next Monday. The only time I have to file a discovery motion is if it looks like it’s going to trial and I need to cover all bases for the appeal.
Our policy here isn’t completely open file, but some DA’s will occasionally give you a police report if they’re feeling generous or if it would take you an hour to take notes and they need to go somewhere, so long as your client isn’t a known jerk or a writ writer. All the DA’s here are friendly and easy to deal with, some are even go-have-dinner-or-beer friends outside of work.
How realisitic is rounds, though? Last night Comedy Central aired an older episode where Eliot did the Walk of Shame and Kelso totally called her on it when she answered a question wrong during rounds. Do attendings go out of their way to humiliate interns?