I just saw the movie “Thirteen Days”. The movie was good, except for all of the microphones hanging in the screen, the tops of sets peeking everywhere, and other glaringly piss poor editing. But on to my question.
I remember reading (Dark Sun?) that Gen. Curtis LeMay (of SAC fame) had actually hot-wired our ICBM silos. He did this so that they could be launched without authorization from the White House (because of a weak president, or a loss of command and control).
I just did a Google search on “Curtis LeMay” and “Dark Sun” and I’ve found a couple dozen mentions of Richard Rhodes’s book Dark Sun. Nobody mentions the hot-wiring of the ICBM silos, which is strange, since you would think that would have been the most controversial claim in the book. They all do mention Rhodes’s other claims about LeMay: First, he was training the Strategic Air Command in what could only have been practice runs for a first-strike nuclear war. Second, he was having the SAC do reconnaissance runs on the Soviet Union that were deliberately designed to provoke the Soviets into attacking, allowing the battle to escalate into World War III.
It says that the only people who claim to have found proof of the second claim are Rhodes and a documentary producer named Paul Lashmar. Everybody agrees that LeMay wanted a first-strike World War III. I think that everybody agrees that the SAC practiced for a first strike, although it’s not clear how high up that was authorized. There’s controvery about whether LeMay was using the SAC to provoke the Soviets. I haven’t seen any mentions of hot-wiring the ICBM silos.
Incidentally, microphones hanging down into the screen and the tops of sets being visible are generally not cases of bad editing, but of bad projection in the theater. The projectionist sometimes doesn’t center the picture on the screen right, so parts of the image that aren’t supposed to be visible are, and those parts contains microphones and such.
The LOTR trailer is only shown with certain prints of “Thirteen Days”. Not the print I saw, but I enjoyed the movie very much anyways. BTW, the print I saw had no microphones, tops of sets, etc.
Back in October 1962 I was in elementary school in Jacksonville, FLA. - which had (has) a huge Navy presence, guess at least some of Fidel’s missles had our address on 'em. We had “duck-and-cover” drills in school, I guess so the school desks could protect us from the nukes. Also, we had to wear dog tags. Found out later that was so they could ID our glowing remains. Also remember, during the “13 Days” seeing long convoys of military vehicles heading south.
Ahh… the early sixties! But then the Beatles came, and everything was OK.
And to think this generation thinks it has it tough. True, we have many scary things to contend with, but I think duck and cover drills and bomb shelters in the backyard are SCARY!
Really? Is this true? What about movies that are transferred to TV in letterbox format, wouldn’t they still be in the shot?
You have to see it (Thirteen days) to believe it. Some blatant bloopers. It was, almost, fun keeping track of them. One of the better ones was watching the close-up of photographers taking pictures of the president. The bulbs never flash on a few of the cameras, but they keep changing them the bulbs.
However, honestly, back to the microphone thingie, the projectionist would have had to raise that screen very high to keep them out of the shot. Hell, it almost bonked poor JFK on the nose twice, and gave Bobby a noogie (sp?).
Transferring movies to TV in letterbox format is the easy part, since then the image on TV is exactly the same as the image that appears on the screen. The part on the top that falls off the movie screen when it’s projected is the same as that sliced off by the letterbox. The real problem is when a movie is shown in standard TV format. The image taken from the film goes all the way to the top of the film but chops off some on each side. A good director shoots his film in a TV-friendly manner so that microphones are visible nowhere in the picture no matter what format it’s shown in.
Today’s Florida Times-Union has an interesting article with reminisances (sp?) of folks who were living here in October 1962. The link is http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/012001/met_5179431.html
I don’t remember our elementary school walking to the nearest RR line (about a mile) but maybe some of the teachers practiced.
Of course, in retrospect, all of the duck-and-cover and evacuation drills were a waste, becuase it is likely that Jacksonville would have been a prime target for Cuban nukes - 3 Navy bases, including an aircraft carrier (2 of them then) home port, with escort vessels; a base out of which sub-hunter aircraft flew, and a (now closed) master jet base. So, to borrow a line from Pat Frank’s “Alas, Babylon,” - ‘Jacksonville’s not there anymore.’
The piece in the article about the malfunctioning warning siren reminds me that, since the City tested the sirens at noon every Friday, my friends and I wondered why the “Commies” wouldn’t just attack then?
I grew up in central South Carolina and remember doing duck-and-cover drills in school. We even had seperate alarm sounds for fire, tornado and nuclear attack. Where I was we were probably safe, but the Charleston naval/submarine base was probably close enough that the flash should have been impressive.
As for seeing the mikes and things in the movie, I found this on the DVD Review site (www.dvdreview.com).
This sounds like what Wendell Wagner is talking about. Other parts of the site imply that fairly often directors shoot in open matte assuming that the top and bottom of the image will be cropped off and imply that they have become somewhat lax about letting mikes, cables and so on be visible in those areas of the image.
