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TV and Movies vs. Reality
I often watch videos from a site called “Fire Department Chronicles.” The host is a firefighter/paramedic and some of his funniest videos are picking apart TV show scenes. “911 Lone Star” seems to bear the brunt of many of his videos, but after watching them he is definitely not unfair. What fascinates me is that they must have technical advisers but don’t appear to listen to them.
Honestly, EMS and firefighting are often dramatic enough without making stuff up. In general, I find the abandonment of any attempt to be technically authentic very strange.
Since the Mrs was a pilot, watching movies with aviation themes can be funny as she gets so annoyed. Die Hard 2 probably comes in for the most derision. Yet she thought the aviation stuff in Castaway was very good. So it can be done; Hollywood just doesn’t care.
That reminds me — there was a very good UK mystery series called “The Fall” with Gillian Anderson. There is a 15-minute sequence where they pick up a gunshot victim and transport him to the ER for treatment. It’s probably the most realistic EMS scene I’ve ever watched (I’ll post it below).
I guess my general question is why do they do it? As demonstrated, producers could create technically correct yet still compelling drama, yet they routinely abandon the attempt. And if you are knowledgeable about firearms Hollywood makes you want to scream at the stupidity.
Please describe how your area of expertise gets thrashed in the movies.
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Published in General
To be fair, I’ve also seen plenty of discussions of films and filmmaking on conservative websites that is ill-informed and just flat-out factually wrong. Why do they do it? Because most of us live in separate worlds from each other.
Hollywood is no monolith. There are good and bad writers. Usually, if something can be photographed or recorded, it’ll be handled right. It’s the human stuff, the underlying relationships that are often the screwed-up part. For example, in the movie Flight, the airline pilot jargon is pretty accurate, and the control panels look real enough. The problem with Flight is the bizarre, uninformed misunderstanding that an FO, First Officer, what we used to call a co-pilot, is some kind of timid underling trying not to piss off the Sky God in the left seat. This might have been true, 50 years ago, in some airlines. Now it gets hoots of derision from pilots.
So I’ll give a big like to the Bosch series, especially for filming in the actual Hollywood Division Station. Caution language.
Crate and Barrell interview homicide scene was well done.
It’s a given that the attorneys in the movies and on the tube are considerably more capable than the real life ones. They get hotter women too.
I had a doctor Friend tell Me Scrubs was pretty dang accurate to Her area of expertise.
Not quite the same thing; but, I have a hard time with movies about sports in which the players are obviously not very good at whatever sport they’re supposed to be elite at. They don’t necessarily have to use major leaguers if they’re doing a movie about pro baseball, but they should at least look somewhat competent at it.
When it comes to the big screen The French Connection is at the top of my list, Bullitt is a close second. I thought that Gene Hackman, and Steve McQueen did an outstanding job playing tough no nonsense detectives. It wasn’t so much the chase scenes, it was how they delivered their lines that make these great movies. The gritty look portrayed by the camera work is excellent in these movies.
There a lot of police procedurals that I don’t like. I avoid them.
IMO, the worst are the cop “buddy” movies that try to wrap a plot around some humor. Maybe with the exception of “48 Hours,” because . . . Nick Nolte.
Or the station house that looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece.
When editing your post prior to publishing it, always rearrange it so that the question precedes the answer.
Someone wants an accurate depiction of cop movies?
Everyone knows that “Can you hold?” is not appropriate when speaking to someone with that particular special need.
If they didn’t before, they do now. :-)
(P.S. I’ve had ulcerative colitis for 30+ years, so even if some want to claim that nobody is allowed to find that funny, it doesn’t apply to me.)
Thanks.
Yeah, I worried about the tastefulness of it but I went with it. Like you, I’ve had life experiences that allow me to see the attempted humor from the viewpoint of the victim. Details not available on request. I was ok with me, and after all, this is Ricochet. We aren’t snowflakes, right?
This prompts the image of Obama throwing that first pitch to begin the baseball season. Someone who had never held a baseball.
The Last Action Hero made very good fun of those only-in-the-movies cliches.
Any political drama where the Democrats do things that no Democrat would do. I’ve seen them reform social security, take the Constitution seriously and admit to atheism.
He pretended to be a big White Sox fan. When asked, he couldn’t name a single WS player when he was growing up.
I hate documentaries which are poorly researched. One about GPS had all 5 star reviews on Amazon. I gave it 2 stars.
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3596/1
And in a one hour show they spend more time in a courtroom than most attorneys spend in many years. I guess my daughter isn’t the only person who found my attorney job of reading, researching, and writing on a computer at a desk to be less than thrilling drama-wise.
I find the ethical violations that many screen lawyers do annoying, though I am usually able quickly to tell myself this is a show (or movie) people watch for drama, not for legal lessons.
My guess is that they only list having techincal advisors to make the audience think their shows are an accurate portrayal. Personally, if I were a technical consultant and they never listened to me, I’d quit and demand they take my name off the credits . . .
That is an amazing and under appreciated movie.
I went to see Pawn Sacrifice (Fisher Spassky) but it was sold out. I recently watched a clip on You Tube and groaned. There’s the famous game 6 where Fisher surprised Spassky by transposing into the Queen’s Gambit. He was known for opening with the King’s pawn (P-K4 or E4 in modern notation). He said it was best by test. The alternative D4 is slower. He knew his openings very well but the limited repertoire made it easy to prepare for them. But in the match he transposed into the D4 lines.
In the movie they say he’s abandoned the Sicilian. Sigh. All chess players who know the match wondered why the moviemakers made this unnecessary mistake.
https://youtu.be/IfXFpQTrPuY
Here’s the famous Chess Life and Review cover which was censored in the Soviet Union.
I generally assume the writers and directors do listen to the technical advisers, and that things would be much worse but for that input (even if the input is not fully followed).
@andrewklavan has noted that once he has sold a script, he generally does not get involved in the production because he gets too frustrated at the changes or interpretations made by the director and the actors.
Here is a recent video with a mix of fire and EMS blunders.
YES! This really bugs me too. It takes you right out of the story when an obvious non-athlete pitches a baseball or catches a football. This is why I don’t really like A League of Their Own, which should be a fun and entertaining movie. All of the main characters are totally unconvincing as ballplayers. And they are always made up to have dirt smudges on their faces! Is that supposed to be a substitute for actually knowing how to play? I’ve played a lot of softball in my 47 years and basically never ended up with dirt smudges on my face.
A few years ago, ABC (IIRC) had an ill-fated new show called Pitch, the saga of the first woman in Major League Baseball. This was a fine example of what we’re talking about here. Supposedly she’s a shining heroine against sexist prejudice, but she does stuff like have an affair with another player, and running in off the mound to ask the manager to send in someone else. In the real MLB, no pitcher, male or female, would ever work again if they did that. Another idiotic scene is her first arrival at the stadium, where the only locker room they can set up for her is a dusty broom closet–despite the fact that this signing is the biggest news story in the nation, that media focus will be intense, nobody on the team thinks about how to make this work until she steps out of the limo.
And yet, the baseball terminology is correct, the rules are accurate, the physical training facilities are probably the most realistic ever put on film. Anything you could simply see or photograph they got right. It wasn’t the fault of the advisors, but of the writers.
I seem to recall Rob Long saying on a podcast that the majority of viewers don’t care, so why should the producer. But my memory is not solid on it. @roblong?
I was a cop in Albuquerque, so Breaking Bad was not fun to watch with me. After several comments such as “he wouldn’t do that,” “where’s his backup?,” and “why aren’t the police there?,” my kids wouldn’t let me watch it with them. We did see the finale together, where my nursing skills came in. “That’s not a fatal wound,” I said at the end.
My wife once asked, *Can’t you just watch and enjoy it?”
Silly question.