Wow, that’s going waaaaaay back!
This is a little heavier than goofs, but I saw the new Angel Has Fallen over the weekend. My son and I love this series and this one was a lot of fun.
Except for one unnecessary scene. The hero’s wife is home with their little girl, about 1 year old, in a high chair at table when thugs break into the house. The little girl was genuinely terrified, startled by something sudden out of frame that was supposed to be the thugs coming in. She was not acting at all at that age, and it completely took me out of the movie to see that. I was thinking about how that was a child “actor” who doesn’t understand what’s going on and she was actually as terrified as she looked. They did that to her for a realistic looking scene, but it actually had the opposite effect on me and it took me right out of the movie I was enjoying.
(If you haven’t seen it, you have to take my word for it that the girl’s reaction was much more than just crying. It wasn’t just “I want out of this chair” or “I want my mommy.” They did something to startle and terrify her.)
I was watching an episode of ***Gidget ***this morning (my God, what a crush I had on 18-year-old Sally Field :o ), and the living room of the house where her boyfriend lived was that of the Stephenses in Bewitched. They didn’t even bother rearranging the furniture.
The exterior of the house where Gidget lived was on the Columbia Ranch back lot, where ***Bewitched ***was also filmed. In some shots, you can see the exterior of the Stephenses’ house as well.
Not a movie but I was watching original Star Trek and for the first time noticed Spock was holding an E6B mechanical flight computer. It’s an aviation slide rule. Was Spock trying to calculate the cross wind component of warp speed? I laughed at myself for never catching this. Looking at the link the prop shows up more than once.
On location, when a scene is set in a small room, but you can see that it is a small corner of a large room. My mind starts filling in the camera men, production assistance, sound engineers all off camera.
I’ve gotten to be quite the “location snob” over the years. Now when watching older movies or TV shows, when they have a scene that’s supposed to be urban or even a suburban town/village, I scoff, damn near cringe, and have to restrain myself from yelling “Set!!! Set!!!” whenever I see fake studio back lot scenery. Kills it for me.
Some try to add some eye candy to make a city scene look real, but it all looks too stilted and sanitized. I like the classic “film noir” era, and many great films were hatched, but boy were there some low-budget turkeys too.
I think that happened on the set of Fatal Attraction. The little girl actress walks in on her parents fighting after Mom finds out Dad has been sleeping with Glenn Close. Apparently Michael Douglas had to be quite vicious to the little girl in order to get her to cry on cue.
It always makes me wonder about the child rape scene in Bastard out of Carolina. How the hell they managed to pull that off without permanently traumatizing the actress astounds me.
My dad said something similar to my sisters and me when, as kids, we were freaked-out-scared by a vampire movie on TV. “Just remember the director and the cameraman are just out of sight, and that this was the third take of that scene because someone farted, and at least one of the cast is wondering what to have for dinner when they finish for the day…”
“I feel like we’re in a movie.”
“We *are *in a movie. See? There’s the director, the cameraman, the script girl…”
That reminds me of a scene in “The Stunt Man” a film which is a complete mindf - OK - it screws with your mind. IMDB describes as “A fugitive stumbles on a movie set just when they need a new stunt man, takes the job as a way to hide out and falls for the leading lady.” Which is accurate, as far as it goes. Peter O’Toole plays the director who manipulates the cast to get the performances he wants, and the film keeps popping into the movie within the movie and popping out again, so by the end you don’t know what’s “real” and what’s “movie”.