The cliche about handguns having unlimited bullets and never needing reloading is way old, but some movies still show it anyway (as well as the cliche about someone racking a gun to make a menacing click-clack sound just before pointing the gun at someone, which is a needless action) - is it that movie directors do not know that these are cliche, or they just like it (or think that the audience prefers it this way) and so they still have pistols with 400 bullets?
I’m not a director, but I know that all directors face the same issues, including having to work with what they have. For example, directors rely upon second units, who can get enough things wrong that the director is forced by schedule and budget to use the film/video they are given. Also, directors rely on other crew members for continuity, set dressing, props, firearms handling, animal wrangling, and so forth.
So it’s not surprising when there’s something in the second unit material that draws attention when it shouldn’t. Or the firearms guy loads only two blanks and the slide locks back at the end of a shot, even though the gun is fired again in a subsequent shot.
I used to let these things bother me, but I’ve started cutting the directors more slack recently. The director is probably concentrating on the actors and the movement at the moment. Later on, in the editing room, he sees that the slide on the pistol is locked back. What’s he going to do? Set up and re-shoot the scene two months later? Same with the “infinite bullets” trope. Maybe there was a reload scheduled for a shot. Maybe it didn’t fit or had to be cut for time. Maybe everyone was paying attention to something else that day of shooting.
I suspect that it comes down to the fact that they’re creating fictional entertainment, not documenataries. A (likely small) number of viewers get perturbed over that inaccuracy (or any other factual inaccuracy that movies regularly engage in), but most people either don’t notice, or don’t care.
I also suspect that, even for those directors (and writers) who actually know enough about firearms to know how they’re supposed to work, it comes down to whether things like reloading add to the story. If the need to reload is relevant to the plot, you’ll see a movie gun that needs reloading. If the plot is simply based on bullets flying, the guns are “able” to hold enough bullets.
I think they’re well aware of (at least the most common cliches/tropes). They (mostly) all went to film school and were taught plenty of these things. Many of these things, like unlimited bullets, are to save time. The directors know how guns work, the actors know how guns work, the script supervisors know how guns work, the props department know how guns work and all of them know that we know how guns work. Similarly, as stated above, unless it plays into the plot, we really don’t need to seem them reloading.
Just off the top of my head, Deadpool and Dirty Harry both make a point of showing a gun to have a finite number of bullets. I know if seen plenty of other movies where the ammo runs out or the gun jams and there’s even movies like Terminator (2?) where we see Arnold spinning the shotgun around to chamber the next round (which has been done in other movies as well).
So, yeah, plenty of counterexamples, but typically only used as a plot device or to make you feel a certain way about a character. Otherwise, it’s infinite bullets for everyone.
Misspellings DO drive me nuts. I mean, the set guy has to produce a lettered arch that says “Mosswood Cemetery,” but the set ends up with an arch that says “Mosswood Cemetary.” The guy had ONE thing to do…and he fucked it up. Same thing with a prop newspaper that has the headline “Prominent banker killed when breaks fail.” Drives me up the wall.
Again, that’s what’s there the day the director has to shoot. Is he going to reschedule and take the hit, or just keep going and stay on schedule?
I feel like the ‘set guy’ had a whole lot more than one thing to do. On the other hand, the dinosaur supervisor on Jurassic Park. Well, he did kinda fuck up.
If it’s not too huge, it probably just makes for good entries on IMDB goofs pages and youtube videos about mistakes in movies.
People like that kinda thing.
Some cliches are useful shorthand even though they’re inaccurate because they’re so common. They don’t have to reflect reality, they have to convey necessary information to the viewer without getting bogged down.
Swords always make that “sliding metal” sound when sheathed, even though real scabbards are probably not lined with metal to dull the blade, because audiences can tell that’s what’s happening.
A character always pulls up and parks right in front of where they’re headed because that way you get the information about the character arriving somewhere all in one frame.
All wild birds are Red Tailed Hawks because that’s what we expect birds of prey to sound like.
Characters have Hollywood OS installed on their computers with 72-point fonts because real computers have way too much information to parse when shown briefly on screen.
Are you bothered by the equivalent cliche where characters are always awake (unlimited bullets) and are never shown sleeping (reloading)? Is it preferable that characters never eat (unlimited bullets), or that the director shows characters eating, drinking, and eliminating (reloading)?
I’m not convinced all directors know how guns work. Some are as gun-scared as the right wing meme about Hollywood liberals would have you believe.
I’m also fully convinced that Hollywood filmmakers have never heard of maps, or have been out of the city. Otherwise, what explains the fact that characters never use the Interstate Highway System? You do not, and probably physically cannot in any reasonable time, drive from LA to Texas on two lane roads.
I feel like it should be pointed out that real gunfights are either over in two seconds or four hours.
The only way to make this “cool” is to make everyone miss every single shot they fire and yet largely stay out in the open or run towards another human being with a gun rather than do what’s smart and hang back and try to snipe.
Any realistic fight scene would either be like the one scene in Indiana Jones where he pulls the gun, shoots the guy with the sword, and carries on or it would be like those hostage situation movies where you see people hanging out looking at one another over the parking lot and occasionally yelling a curse at the other side. No Matrix. No T2. No El Mariachi. No Crank. No Shoot Em Up.
And, to be fair, there are ways to do 2 second shootouts and 2 hour standoffs in an entertaining and interesting way, but it’s fair to say that viewers don’t want to have most of their entrainment be that, but nor do they want most of their movies to be plot.
Once you’ve decided that you’re going to have your expert gunfighters stand in the open and miss each shot at each other, caring about bullet reloads is sort of inconsequential.
What incentive do they have to get these details correct? Most viewers don’t care. Even if you care, do you care enough that you’d stop watching movies from that studio/director/writer?
Those aren’t equivalent, because there is nearly always a cut to a later time in these instances, and thus sleep (and eating) could have taken place offscreen. However, with the infinite ammo trope, it is most often a single continuous scene, where time to reload is not available.
I didn’t check your link (because it appears to be a slideshow), but I do know a better example of what I think you are getting at: time compression in school classes. Plenty of times you’ll hear the starting bell of the class, have the class, and then the bell will ring to end the class, all in a continuous scene. And almost never did enough time actually pass.
Yes, sometimes you just don’t see everything that are supposed to assume happened, even without any cuts. Instead of cutting, time can just be compressed.
Just in case you were wondering, he was actually the guy they originally hired to do the stop-motion dinosaurs. When they decided to go with CGI instead, they still kept him on as the supervisor for the dinosaur effects, because he knew how to make dinosaurs look good.
Hence the title “Dinosaur Supervisor.”
He has since been demoted to “Dinosaur Consultant” in Jurassic World.
How do you KNOW most viewers don’t care? I submit a whole heck of a lot care, but we all realize there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. All we can do it post on message boards, and post “goofs” in imdb.
It is most of Hollywood that doesn’t care. When action movies make billions of dollars, there’s no incentive to care. But individually, there could be a billion people who DO care, but they are just powerless individuals. Everyone in the theater could simultaneously cringe at needless gun racking, but no one is going to stand up and complain, or leave. We just wish they’d fucking stop already. So no one knows how many of us there are.
We are legion. [racks shotgun] And we are pissed. [racks shotgun again]
But two-lane roads look better, and given the choice between realism and a good shot, 9 times out of ten, a director is going to choose the good shot.
Plus, 2-lane highways have much more storytelling options. You can pull over and have a meaningful conversation, you can drive through a small forgotten town, you can watch a sunset without dozens of semitrailers roaring by, and lots more things you can’t do on a freeway. Freeways are boring, and thus not conductive to good storytelling.
Writing is hard. Sometimes, you can adapt your story to fit reality, but that doesn’t always work, and then you have to alter reality to tell the story you want to tell.
Just watched Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, and running out of ammo is a major plot point. They end up wounded at the end because they spent ten minutes trying to run back to the horses to grab their extra bandoliers of bullets for a shoot out.
The highway/freeway choice is a good example. That’s true, and I’d rather be entertained than nitpicking a movie.
And in a well-written movie with good casting where (and here’s the bottom line for me) I CARE about the characters, I can ignore minor cliches… which are mostly good ol’ fashioned mistakes.
But damn, why can’t we have both? A great movie without idiotic mistakes?
In my defense, I didn’t really mean that the “set guy” made the sign or the prop newspaper himself/herself. He/she gave the job to some technician or mechanic and THAT guy screwed it up. (I’m thinking about a particular movie where the sign was made out of individual black wrought iron letters. You know they gave the job to some welding or fence shop and they got back a beautiful arched sign, complete with misspelling. I’m sure it took hours to make and the subcontractor couldn’t take a minute to check a dictionary.)
I can understand that some people may not understand that you can run a machine gun, on full auto, for minutes at a time. Knowing how long a magazine will last in a gun like that isn’t common knowledge. OTOH, I don’t care how gun scared you are, you understand that a revolver or pistol can’t be shot forever. Even if you didn’t know, someone, at some point, will tell you. The have infinite bullets because the director doesn’t want to stop the actual to reload unless it moves the plot forward.
“Accuracy” must always be sacrificed to the story. If may be OK with you to watch a movie about someone traveling on the Interstate or something else equivalently boring, but most viewers would hate it.
No one ever left a movie saying, “That was really dull, but they got the trivial details right.”
