In the film the Bureau of Investigation taps phones and records telephone conversations. Did such a system as portrayed in the film exist then?
A more general question, as time goes by does it become easier or harder to portray period settings, e.g. the 1930s? The period cars, media, technology in general, are these easy to replicate or are refurbished originals used?
I wondered the same thing about the telephone tapping. Didn’t seem likely to me.
It would have been simple to plug the line into a recording device (or just make a transcript) when making the connection. Wire recorders existed, or you just cut a wax disk. According to Wikipedia, telephone tapping was available in the 1890s.
Trying to film “on location” can be a bit tricky, though. While you might be able to find a couple store fronts that are original, you can rarely find a whole block or two that is. (Proud to say some of the location filming was done about 45 minutes from where I live!)
For cars farther from the camera, they use shells–recreated period chasis that either don’t run or that you can mount on an axle/gear/motor and move short distances. They did this with Tucker (because there were only a finite number of cars available for the shoot) but is not an uncommon practice if you need a lot of vehicles, but only a few that are fully operable.
There was a recent article in the Chicago Trib about the filming. Talked in some detail about the guy who owned one of the main cars. Also what went into the locations in Indiana and around the Biograph. Apparently for the jail they did extensive remodeling of the original building. For the Biograph they laid down fake trolley tracks, removed all of the modern lighting and such, and installed a false front for a block or so allowing near 360-degree shots.
I’m always surprised at the little period details, like old boxes of cereal.
In one respect it seems filming period may become easier as time passes, because fewer people remember exactly what it was like, so you need not be quite as accurate.
Yeah this had occurred to me. There aren’t many people going to be seeing Public Enemies who will say “We didn’t have this/that in the '30s”.
There’s a scene where there’s a magazine rack and IIRC the magazines looked kinda yellowy. Is this what the printing process was like then or is the yellowness not more indicative of degradation of the paper over time?
It can be done easily enough using set dressing and the right camera angles. I watched as they filmed The Age of Innocence in downtown Albany – standing in for 19th century Boston. It was a matter of putting dirt over the road, putting period materials on the marquee they were using as the hotel entrance, and then shooting the scene so the modern buildings were never in the shot.
Plus, of course, matte paintings (which were still glass back then, but are now largely digitally rendered)
Yeah, I saw the film in Madison, Wis.,the guy behind kept talking, ‘There’s the State Capitol, there’s Columbus’.
Michael Mann would likely still try and get things as period accurate as he could.
We live pretty close to the old Biograph. There were a couple of weeks during filming where you would see a caravan of period cars travelling to or from the neighborhood (depending on time of day). I assumed, like suggested above, that the filmmakers got in touch with local car clubs and got a bunch of privately owned vehicles to take part in the filming.
A one- to two-block stretch of Lincoln Avenue was done up with facades to look like it did in the 1930s. Fake trolley tracks down the middle of the road, a reproduction of the old Biograph marquee - the works. It was pretty impressive. When you looked hard at the facades you could tell that they weren’t “real”, but just driving down the road it looked quite real. I can’t wait to see it on film.
It seems to me that, regardless of ease, the standards for historical accuracy are much higher now than they were 20 or 30 years ago. I don’t know if that’s the triumph of the geek brigade, writing letters at every little thing, or the advent of the information era, which makes it much easier to find out exactly which cereal boxes were being used in 1942, or simply a shift in the zeitgeist, but what worked in Ben Hur or old westerns would not work today.
It would work just fine. You’d just get a bunch of complaints from showoffs.