Since I haven’t started my second cuppa joe yet, I’m not sure I can adequately explain; but I’ll try. I’ll be watching a movie, and I’ll notice something that is incidental to a scene and wonder about it. Usually it’s an aircraft. I’ll wonder if it’s still registered/flying or if it still exists at all. This morning there was something different.
The Spy Who Loved Me just started, with its famous opener of James Bond skiing over a cliff and then pulling his parachute. He jettisoned his skis. I wonder: Did anyone ever retrieve the skis? Or did they just leave them where they fell in the Alps (or wherever)? In hundreds of years, will they be found, and will a future archaeologist wonder how they got there and to whom they belonged?
What happens to all the zombie carcasses in The Walking Dead? Sometimes there are hundreds and hundreds milling around to be dispatched through the head one way or another by our heroes. (Like in the prison yard - it seems they spent a lot of time stabbing the mob outside the wire fence with bayonets. The zombie mob just kept coming and coming). Yet there are seldom any signs of rotting zombies piled up.
I wonder why they didn’t do that? I wonder why Eugene didn’t build wood gas generators? How can zombies find their prey when their eyes are rotted? Do zombies defecate? Zombie films require much suspension of disbelief.
This both morbid yet also probably pretty common with older dopers like myself, but whenever I watch an older movie I’m always trying to figure out whether the actors are dead or not. If the movie is old enough that the adults are all surely dead, and if there are children in the movie, I do mental math to try to figure out whether they could still be young enough to be alive. For example Zuzu, the youngest Bailey child. Still alive? (Googles answer- yes, Karolyn Grimes is still alive, at 84!)
Not sure I’m clear about the question. Does it pertain to the real world, which would call upon the production company to clean up after themselves and have someone retrieve the skis, but what if they didn’t? Or is it “in world”?
I can’t help but wonder about what might happen after The Hateful Eight, thinking about some unsuspecting sap coming along later and finding what there is to be found in Minnie’s Haberdashery.
I think I intend the question to be more about the real world, as in the OP. I think there are plenty of threads about ‘in-world’ speculation. My reply on zombies is a little out of bounds, but I do wonder what people in the real world would do.
Fair enough. I sometimes wonder about things like the “anatomy sculpture” (let’s call it that) in A Clockwork Orange, the one we see in Alex’s attempted burglary. I think that was originally a piece of artwork on its own, as opposed to being a prop created for the movie. But where is it now? Who has it, and would its appearance in a Kubrick film have any effect on its value?
After writing the above, curiosity led me to google it, and I found this.
Yes, this. It even hasn’t to be a kiss, sometimes two actors get their faces so close together when talking, mostly in argument scenes, that I always think “Hopefully none of them ate garlic the day before”.
I hope I get the link right to embed this thing. We have Jack Nicholson’s answer to the breath question, courtesy of Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s daughter:
It occurred to me that, given the recent passing of Teri Garr, Gene Hackman is the only “name” actor who appears in Young Frankenstein who is still alive.
(Yes, I know that Mel Brooks is still living. But he doesn’t actually appear in the film. He does make some sound effects and such, but I don’t believe that he appears on camera)
In one of David Nivens books he wrote about the filming of The Prisoner of Zenda. The actor playing the herold had bad breath so bad you could smell it at a distance and was nicknamed Halitosis Harry or something.
I can’t remember the name of the actor, but I not too long ago read about a certain famous actor who disliked his costar (his romantic interest in the movie) so much that he would intentionally eat garlic before a kissing scene.
Might have been Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepard, and not a movie but the show Moonlighting…?
We love watching old tv shows and thanks to the miracle of imdb we can immediately find who is alive and who is dead. And it’s really depressing to see that a guest actor not only died young (like say 47) but looked 67 in the episode. Stop smoking, kids, those things’ll kill ya!
Adam 12 often accidentally photographed a street sign on location shooting. With a little cleverness, sometimes the assistance of imdb location information. and the miracle of google maps, you can see what that location looks like now. Quite fascinating sometimes.
My original contribution to this thread is: do you, dear reader, ever contemplate that when you leave home today, you may never come home again? Some random act of violence, and someone has to clean up your house. All those projects you meant to take care of? The stuff you left on the counter, meaning to put it away tonight? No longer an issue. For you, at least. You’ll never finish that book, that puzzle, see your cat, again.
I admit I watch our British/Canadian mysteries (Midsomer, Murdoch, etc.) with my iPad or laptop out, paying half attention, but if there’s a kid actor I’ll often look up if they had any kind of subsequent career. The vast majority don’t seem to go past a small role every year or two and a handful of short films.
The story, for many years, was that Diana Rigg had done this to George Lazenby in his only Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service . However on looking up a source for it I now discover that it was all BS anyway.
Often, while watching a movie, I’ll wonder whatever happened to a certain prop. In the case of A Christmas Carol (1984, George C. Scott) though, I never wondered what happened to Scrooge’s tombstone. I figured it was probably made out of foam and painted to look like stone, and then thrown away – to the extent I thought about it at all. I was more interested in how fake the snow looked on it.
It turns out that the tombstone was not a disposable prop. It was actual stone, and had become a bit of a tourist attraction in Shrewsbury where the scene was shot. Not only that, it was an actual tombstone.
The gravestone wasn’t always a prop. Before the film, it had marked a real grave in the churchyard for hundreds of years, according to BBC News’ Tim Page. The stone’s original inscription had faded over time, and the church permitted the film’s production team to inscribe the unknown grave with “Ebenezer Scrooge.”
“They had to go to the Home Office to get permission and the rest of it, but nobody knew [whose grave] it was,” Martin Wood, a Shrewsbury resident who appeared in the film, told the broadcaster in 2023. “If you look at the bottom of the grave nearest to the path, you can just make out a little bit of writing. It was [in] an ideal spot for what they wanted.”
So why am I bringing up a random prop that I never gave much thought to? Sadly…
I do that all the time too. As I remember, George Carlin had a bit where he said, “You ever wonder if the people in old movies are still alive? Say, that guy’s dead now. He wasn’t dead then, but he’s dead now.” My family never thought that line was funny…
But it’s fun to see if various actors have other credits. LIke what happened to the snotty kid from the Poseidon Adventure?
Does anyone have any idea how productions staged car wrecks in the old days? Specifically in the 70s show Emergency, they’d have a car flipped upside down and have to pull an old geezer out. Did they roll the car then put the actor in? Did the actor get into the car then they gently rolled it?
