FILM GOOFS

    Everyone loves them but most of the time they slip by sight unseen. However, with the prevalence of videotapes, directors and editors are more likely to be reminded of their mistakes. One of the best known is Spartacus where one of the extras is wearing a wristwatch in the Roman era epic. Also famous is the film, Krahatoa, East of Java. It wasn’t a memorable movie except for the fact that Krahatoa is west of Java, not east.

Here’s some others....

• In the classic film starring Claude Rains as The Invisible Man, he must strip naked to become unseen as clothes would show. The police track him down by following his footprints...yet they appear as shoe prints instead of bare feet prints.
  
  
• In the film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, from Kevin Costner, a new character was introduced into the Robin Hood mythos. It was Azeem, a Moor played by Morgan Freeman. Apparently, Freeman was a man of the future for he used gunpowder nearly 100 years before it was known outside of China. And, he used a telescope...nearly 400 years before Galileo did.
  
  
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade featured Jones asking Adolf Hitler for an autograph. Hitler misspells his own name in the signing, writing Adolph instead of Adolf.`
  
  
• In Halloween, the classic horror film from John Carpenter, the setting is in a small town in Illinois. But look at the cars, they all have California license plates.

Details count!

You’ve probably heard of some directors who are adamant about details in their films. There are numerous cases of specific flowers being flown in for a shoot, or furnishings, or the correct number of steps on a landing. Often times, audiences would have never known the difference. But in some cases, the details matter. A prime example is the film, Pride of the Yankees. Gary Cooper, one of the hottest actors around at the time was pegged to play Lou Gehrig. Cooper, deemed to have an uncanny resemblance to Gehrig in terms of presence, was right handed. Gehrig was a lefty, in fact, he was well known for being left handed. Director Sam Wood attempted to have Cooper try batting left handed but it came off as too awkward. The solution? Run the film flipped. Cooper batted right handed and then when he hit the ball, ran to third base. Even the numbers on the jerseys were flipped so they would read correctly on the inverted film. Just a warning, don’t try it in a real game or you’ll be out.