Today, with instant world communication, this probably doesn’t happen, but once upon a time…
I was siting today cleaning out my “junk closet.” Came upon old issues of “Starlog” magazine from about 77-82, roughly my teen and high school years. In those days I lived in a small town in southern KY, and such monthly mags were my only connection to the world of filmmaking.
In an issue it is simply announced that Lucas and Spielberg were teaming for a movie called “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Nothing else, no plot hints at all. I definitely recall thinking it might be about a “space ark” version of Noah, and perhaps it crashed on some planet and the inhabitants actually “raided” it. Of course, I soon learned that it was about some archaeologist, the Ark of the covenant and Nazis.
Good one and a good point you make. So, let’s expand the OP to include TV program titles, book titles, song titles, whatever, whose plots were vastly different than the title may have immediately lead one to believe.
**The Spanish Prisoner
**
I’d never heard of the con before, so I thought it would be a prison life or breakout movie in Spain. Not sure if that would have been worse than the Mamet movie…
I’m originally from Dawson Creek, BC. When I first saw “Dawson’s Creek” in the TV listings I assumed it was some crappy local show or farm report or something. Took me a while to figure out that it was a smidge more widely watched.
The classic one is Fight Club. Amongst the many reasons why some people hate it with a “one star” hatred and others love it with a “five star” passion, is that some people came in thinking it was more an action movie devoted to bare knuckled boxing, rather than an anti capitalistic satire on modern days cults…
The video shop in my old neighborhood had Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads in the horror section.
I think I realized their mistake about 30 seconds in when the words “A Spike Lee Joint” (yeah, he was doing that all the way back in his film school days) appeared on the screen.
They put it in the right section after I told them.
And I did initially think 28 Days Later was a sequel to 28 Days.
My father passed the following wisdom to me when i asked about this movie, he said “son, do no see this movie for it contains no womans, no spiders and no kisses”
Sorceror is a classic in this. It was years after I saw the movie that I finally learned why they called it that. From the title (and the time it was released), you’d have thought it was about that Carlod Castaneda stuff. The fact that the trailer was filled with South American jungle scenery helped reinforce the idea that maybe it was about native American shamans, or something.
Visionquest is another one that sounds like a shaman movie. Or maybe a Tolkienesque fantasy. Or even H.P. Lovecraft. But not a movie about high school wrestling.
I was tricked into seeing this movie by an ex-gf. She called me and asked me to hurry into the city to see a showing of the movie “Edge of Reason”. What’s that movie? I hadn’t heard of it, what’s it about? Sounds interesting enough.
I originally thought “V for Vendetta” was going to be a boring mystery along the lines of “M for Murder” or “K for Killer” and whatnot. I didn’t watch it in theaters because I thought the name was so cheesy. Turned out to be a pretty good movie when my friend rented it several months later.
