People who watch new movies are looking for goofs; people who watch old movies are watching the movie.
How very true.
Also, people today get upset if the bottle says “Vichy Water” in English. It’s an irrelevant point, and it was done that way so people didn’t have to know French to get the point. People nowadays, as I often point out, would rather things be accurate and dull (and confusing) than “inaccurate,” but to the point and dramatic.
Yay! That was my favorite bit of random…just random for the year. Not “coffee on the keyboard” funny, but I sat giggling for a good five minutes. 
I say that continuity errors are almost always present, regardless of era. They are minutia.
I think that directors paid more attention to the film as a whole back in the day. Today’s directors leave continuity, lighting, cinematography, and scripting to dozens of people. Such things were often controlled by far fewer people, if not just the director, during the era of classic films.
IMDB goof-logging is subject to both movie popularity, as well as the popularity of the goof (the hanging man in The Wizard of Oz).
I’d say that older movies were scrutinized more, minor continuity errors were overlooked by the public, and they’ve been viewed less by current IMDB movie raters.
Yup. When people point out those type of errors it makes me wonder if they are watching the movie for fun or watching the movie to see how much more clever they are than everyone else.
I’m on the absolute opposite end of the scale. Something has to really be screaming in my face for it to bother me. Brad Pitt could have been wearing a wristwatch and sneakers for the whole of Troy and it probably wouldn’t have bothered me that much.
Oh, it’s definitely the latter: by pointing out a particular pointless nitpick, they get to show how smart they are.
It can be an entertaining game, but when people start talking about how terrible something is and how they couldn’t enjoy the movie because of some minor factual error, it’s pure ego all the way.
Ebert and fans got excited recently when during a scene-by-scene analysis of “Citizen Kane” he was doing someone noticed that a hat jiggled because the table it was on was being moved in order to let the camera pass thru. Apparently hadn’t been noticed before.
Can’t find the original article but here’s a followup to it.
So there is a list of “Citizen Kane” goofs and it’s still being added to.
I think it’s just that there’s not a huge number of people watching old movies over and over. With modern movies, it’s become a game. Be the first to post a goof and become immortal!
A couple of friends of mine try, whenever someone drinks coffee or tea in a black and white movie to guest if they are actually drinking anything at all. Most times, they ain’t! :eek:
I’d wager that to see some of the technical errors in older films you would need some specialized knowledge.
Example: while you could easily detect a car chase that leapt illogically from Aurora Avenue in north Seattle to 3rd Avenue in downtown Seattle, circa 1990, how easy would it be to detect the same error in a film from circa 1940? None of the landmarks would be familiar.
Example: while you can detect an erroneous email address or phone number (like the job email in Mission: Impossible), can you detect an erroneous trunk phone number like Cleveland 2-6549?
Example: while we can easily make observations on a point of law or procedure in modern times, how many can remember the pertinent rules and laws as shown in a fifty-year-old film?
Sorry, but as a professional cinematographer I gotta nitpick this one. I don’t know how far back you go to define “classic films era”, but The American Society of Cinematographers was chartered by the state of California in 1919, and is based on two clubs both founded in 1913.
- Ten years before the first talkie. It is entirely fair to say that by 1919, the jobs of lighting, grip, cinematographer and script supervisor were already clearly established. A film director was not, in fact, responsible for any of those tasks. ( The odd auteur aside, of course ). They hired professionals who specialized in script continuity, lighting/gaffer, grip work, cinematography and so on.
A Director directs.
Fish, continuity within a scene and world continuity are different things. It’s hardly reasonable to ask a production company to set a chase scene so that it takes place in a real 20 mile unbroken length of highway and streets. That kind of continuity leap is completely accepted, and few folks- UNLESS they are intimately familiar with the area- would have an continuity “error” involving real space leap out at them. My wife attended Indiana University, and in fact went for the summer session when Breaking Away was shot. She went to see the film and found it amusing that in some bicycling scenes, the riders magicaly turned of one path and traversed thousands of yards to another part of campus, all by virtue of an edit. That’s not a continuity error unless you know a shitload about I.U. Even then, it’s not unreasonable to make such edits.
Did anyone watching Bullitt honestly think that the infamous chase scene took place in real time, over exactly those city blocks? I would think not.
Cartooniverse
I’m not going to try to decide what is or is not an “error,” Cartooniverse. If one counts real-world continuity of space as an “error”, then I’m only pointing out that such errors are easier to point out when the city has a recognizeable modern context than when the city is 50+ years old.
Likewise, when a film makes an error regarding a piece of technology, the older it gets, the less likely this type of error is to be spotted. It isn’t any more or less wrong, but fewer people know enough to spot it.
For any given category of error, we’re more likely to notice the modern ones because we have the proper context.
What makes you think the shooting schedules were that much shorter? Or that they even had fewer takes for that matter?
Johnny Depp averages at least a couple films a year, as does Nicole Kidman and plenty of other big stars.
Even a film with a huge budget costs an astronomical amount of money per day of production, and producers are always trying to get the most bang for their buck as possible. A feature can be (and often is) shot in 4-6 weeks. (this being the production period, not including pre- and post-production) Cite being my own experience working on a few features.
To be fair though, I haven’t worked on any huge budget studio productions, and for a very big project it does take longer - but even still, 3 months of production is usually the max (the biggest I’ve heard of being the LOTR trilogy, where the commentary states they dedicated a year and a half to making the 3 films - but even that time period seems like it included some or all of the pre- and post- production)
So… as to the OP I side with the “it’s mostly the popularity” idea - but the content of the film also matters. A simpler, character-driven drama (such as Casablanca) just has less things to mess up than an enormous, computer-enhanced thrill ride in which everyone and everything is, at some point, blown up.
Casablanca has more than thirty goofs listed on the IMDb.
Waloon, your link took me to a discussion of ‘Banjo Milking’.
I don’t even remember any Banjos in Casablanca, let alone any that were milked improperly. 
Just how do you milk a banjo?
I guess by putting it near a microphone to get more sound out of it.
Milking, Miking, what’s a phantom ‘L’ between posters?
Appypollylodges for not bolding your name in that first post, Walloon
I guess I used the wrong example with Casablanca. However, in my defense I will say most of the 30 odd goofs per IMDB are of the very trivial sort that were commented on above. For example, a character leaves without his hat, then later has his hat? Um, maybe he has two hats? Maybe he doubled back to pick it up when he noticed he forgot it? A guy is rubbing his hands, then in the next scene he is folding his arms? Um, maybe he quit rubbing them, then folded them when he was offscreen? Glass changes postion on a table- maybe someone moved it? Yes, crappy nitpicks like that put the movie nitpick business in a bad light
Not the next scene. The next shot. No intervening scene or shot.
Actually, I saw Bullitt after hearing about it’s SF car chase scene for years.
Imagine my disappointment when it was plain as day to me that all the hilly scenes were filmed on the same two blocks, shot from about 14 different angles. There’s even the same damn extra car pulling out in every one of them! :mad:
You know I really liked the movie tje isia; sis[ects. I thought K v n Sp y was great.