Sometimes I get so frustrated watching TV because of the ridiculous way they portray everyday events. You can just tell those sheltered Hollywood people are just making stuff up and have never been in these situations in real life.
I served on jury duty a few years ago and one of the things we were told is that jurors are not allowed to try any experiments or to reenact the crime while in the jury room. We were supposed to base our decision strictly on the evidence presented in the courtroom and they’d have to declare a mistrial or something if we were caught recreating anything ourselves. Yet in just about every “jury duty” episode on TV, the jury usually finds the defendant not guilty after trying to recreate the crime and deciding that if they can’t do what the defendant is accused of, then he couldn’t have either. (I think they did the same thing in the movie “12 Angry Men,” too.) Maybe this rule varies from county to county, so maybe I’m hating this hackneyed plot device more than I should, but it still bugs me and makes me wonder if anyone in Hollywood has ever served on a jury.
Last night, I sat through that dreadful Norm show, and was rolling my eyes at the way his supervisor kept freaking out over Christmas decorations because they were in a government office. I work in a government office and we’re allowed to bring in decorations from home, plus we have a Holiday party (we don’t call it a Christmas party, though, so as to not offend anyone), the bosses passed out cards and candy, some of the bosses are even participating in the Secret Santa gift exchange, and we get Christmas day off! I’m sure if anyone didn’t celebrate Christmas and wanted to decorate their cubicle for their religion’s holidays instead, they’d be allowed. In fact, if the bosses objected, they’d probably be sued for discrimination and/or obstructing freedom of speech. No one is forced to participate in anything if they don’t want to (except for the day off, which is being hashed over in the GD forum). But no one in Hollywood works in a government office. Instead, they hear the debates over separation of church and state and whether teachers should lead prayer in school and automatically assume a government office must be a cold, Scroogey, Grinchy place. Bah, humbug to that!
So… I’ve rambled enough. What ignorant things do you see on TV or in the movies that makes you think, It’s obvious no one in Hollywood has ever… ?
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
I am usually taken aback at sports in movies and what they show happening during a game. The most obviously stupid occurance is in Teen Wolf.
Michael J. Fox is shooting the free throw to win it all and the opposing player is standing under the basket watching!! Maybe no one else understands just how wrong this is, but this is something that isn’t even remotely allowed in the sport. The guy should be back at his bench just like everybody else. Oh well, who needs accuracy, it’s only a movie.
Well, shut my mouth. It’s also illegal to put squirrels down your pants for the purposes of gambling.
You would think that someone at Winfred Lauder would have noticed that Drew Carey always has the same program on his screen. When you place a phone call on TV it only rings once. Every terrorist bomb has a red display that counts down the time untill it blows up. And could someone tell me where you can buy Oatie O’s.
Keith
There are so many Hollywood cliches that the web page for them (the Hollywood cliche list) takes hours to load. Plenty of things that, if you think about them a minute, make no sense. For instance, when someone hangs up on you, you don’t hear a dial tone, yet that’s the way it happens in the movies.
Sports movies often break rules for the benefit of the plot. In THE BABE, for instance, the plot indicates that at the end of Babe Ruth’s career, others ran the bases for him. Not pinch runners, but the runner stood at first base and ran once Ruth got there, like a tag team (and evidently Ruth stayed in the game afterwards). This, of course, is against the rules (it’s sometimes allowed in pickup games, but that’s it). The only reason to do this was so Ruth could dramatically wave off his runner when he hit his last three home runs.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
How about, when you’re in a helicopter, chasing a train through the chunnel, and the helicopter explodes, the force of the explosion throws you against the train, and you still have enough strength to hang onto the train, go inside, and kill some bad guys? (see Mission Impossible)
I bet no Hollywood writer has ever tried that in real life. Believe you me, it’s harder than it looks.
Quand les talons claquent, l’esprit se vide.
Maréchal Lyautey
Several years ago I edited a very nice little suspense novel by Peter Abrahams called THE FAN. It became one of the stupidest movies ever put out by Hollywood.
The director and screenwriter rewrote climactic scenes, wanting to have a big finale during a major league baseball game. At some point in the proceedings, the director felt that it would be more dramatic if the scene took place during a raging thunderstorm. They went ahead and put the storm in.
That’s why the final scenes of THE FAN take place during a major league ballgame that is being played during what appears to be a monsoon.
I went to an advance screening with the novel’s author (a huge baseball fan himself, who of course had nothing to do with the screenplay). He emerged looking like he’d been hit in the face with a shovel.
GOod one, ARnold. Or how 'bout when you’re escaping from a high rise Swiss bank and you tie one end of the shade pull to a passed out guy and jump out holding the other end, and it’s EXACTLY THE LENGTH from the window to the ground so you can drop the last half inch to the pavement and get away with the briefcase full of money. (See “The World is not Enough” – no wait, on second thought, don’t bother.) Every time I try to do that, the cord breaks or something. I guess I need to frequent Swiss banks with better windowdressings. ::shrug::
Car explodes in mid air or when it hits something. Completely ignoring the fact that gasoline has to mix with air before it becomes an explosive mixture.
Being chased by a car - run down the middle of the street instead of moving over and running where the car can’t go.
i remember hearing about george bush(not hollywood, but the same idea)
during his campaign for a second term (we’re talking 1992), he took a trip into a local supermarket.
He was astonished to see the scanners at the checkout aisle. he was truly amazed by the technology.
talk about out of touch with the average person!
Ukulele Ike, you edited that book (The Fan)? I read it (before I gave it to my girlfiend of the time, a sports/suspense novel enthusiast.)
I remember seeing a word misspelled on p. 217, or was it p. 138. Is that your fault then? And why was the “bad guy” french-speaking? An insult to french speakers everywhere.
Quand les talons claquent, l’esprit se vide.
Maréchal Lyautey
Cars explode in the movies for any reason, including no reason at all. They made fun of this on The Simpsons where a truck that looks like a gasoline truck explodes, but you can clearly see MILK written on it in big letters.
I always leave TWO words misspelled in every book I publish, in homage to Francesca and Paolo, the great doomed lovers, who were two people. Now go back and find the other one.
The bad guy in THE FAN was originally a Nazi concentration-camp director. I drive a Volkswagen and I didn’t want to offend my auto mechanic, so I coerced the author into making him a French-Canadian. Man, I hate those goddamn frostbacks.
The car explosions reminded me…where are all the fruit and vegetable stands that MUST be knocked over by the speeding getaway car? I hate gratuitous fruit-smacking.
Why do women portrayed as intelligent ALWAYS go poking around helplessly in dark corners alone in the middle of the night? In high heels? Where their hunches tell them the bad guy is likely to be hiding?
Pay attention to Act 3 of the above program. It’s about the movie version of a southern accent (Foghorn Leghorn) vs the real thing. There’s this speech therapist who trained Julia Roberts out of her southern accent, and is convinced he trained her out of speaking habits she didn’t even have! The best part: teaching her again her southern accent for Steel Magnolias, he gave her the Hollywood southern accent instead of the real thing, and she sounded nothing like she used to!
Given the fact that the stories are made up, there are still some things that our outside the “suspension of disbelief,” which make you go “Huh?”
My example:
In one of the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” episodes, Kingfish and Andy come across a diner that is doing super business–bus after bus, loaded with people come in–and the owner is looking to sell at a bargain basement price.
Kingfish and Andy jump right on it, and as soon as they take over–there is absolutely no business.
The reason: A new highway was scheduled to be opened, which was going to take away all the traffic, and that’s why the owners were willing to part with it at such a rock-bottom price.
So, Kingfish and Andy send their legal eagle ,Algonquin J. Calhoun,( whose hotel in NYC was a common meeting place for such luminaries as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, and Robert Benchley) to the city transportation office to see about getting the bus routes changed back to the old highway–which the transportation office ends up agreeing to.
OK, now, a new highway is opened presumably to improve traffic flow, and because someone has a diner suffering from the reroute–you’re going to change it back???
Odieman: You can get Oatie O’s, in California. They come in big plastic bags on the bottom shelf of the cereal aisle - there’s a whole bunch of different kinds, with names similar to the type of (trademarked) cereal theyre imitating. Like “Lucky Stars” or stuff like that. They’re quite inexpensive, and I suspect the names arent trademarked, or copywrighted, or whatever.
Uke, it’s good to know that Abrams (and you) were as appalled as I was by the movie adaptation of that book. Didn’t the movie completely ignore the fact that Gil’s father founded the company he worked for, making it particularly poignant that he was skating on thin ice? And the framing device of having the book end with another phone-in caller to the same talk show (IIRC) was completely lost on the filmmakers.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
God, don’t get me started. I had lunch last week with the Hollywood agent of one of my authors, who told me the script they were shopping (based on his upcoming novel) had a few changes in it to make it less “dark.”
One being that the absolutely jaw-dropping murder that occurs one-third of the way into the story becomes…an…accidental death.
I’m sitting there thinking “Okay, the guy doesn’t beat the woman to death with a blunt instrument; she must…hmmm…slip on a banana peel and fall out the window.” Started to giggle uncontrollably.
