Rock mistakes you’ve caught in movies

Done to death. They were ridiculous times. Anyway this thread is about micro-errors, not macro.

 

Hahahaha,I Apologize. Like I said,I just Had to say it.

 

The real Peter Grant was pretty awful.

 

My biggest Pet Peeve (not necessarily a "mistake", per say?) is when movies or certain TV series have protagonists who are apparently music lovers, and the "sacred analog" vinyl to be specific, and they invariably pull out the treasured Black Wax in question using their entire hand, gloving it like a dinner plate with their greasy, grimy fingers pasting and stamping prints all over the grooves like muddy boots tracking on Grandma's spotless kitchen floor. Then they place it on the turntable like they're a waiter in a greasy spoon serving up some cold, dead, corned beef hash. I believe Harvey did this in 'Suits' – with his super-expensive, first edition, rare jazz, soul and r&b record collection proudly displayed, taking up an entire wall in his office...and if any one of us ever saw him handling our records like this, he'd be unceremoniously booted out after some dressing down & a serious education in record handling protocols. Happens all the time! On TV & film, both! and generally blows the credibility for me – big mistake!

 

If you are indeed familiar with the ideas of, and distinction between, *realism* and *internal consistency* in fiction, you haven't demonstrated it very well in your comments.

 

That's something I never managed on a first date..........

 

The biggest rock mistake I can think of is that the Kryptonite in most Superman films is too dark of a green and glows too much.

 

A mistake by one of the characters, not the writers or producers.

In the Simpsons when The Ramones played at Mr. Burns birthday party to Burns' disapproval. His orders to Smithers "Have the Rolling Stones killed"

 

I actually created a compilation of my favorite Bette Midler tracks and called it ‘The Collected Works of Bette Midler’ (that is the title Jerry actually reads).

 

It could be just that Newman remembered the year wrong? 'Cause that would be totally realistic, in real life people mix years up all the time.

The IMDB is full of user-reported errors based on some character in a movie stating a non-correct fact. I don't get this, since movie characters are not supposed to be all-knowing, right? They portray regular people who make mistakes and whose memory occasionally fails them.

 

That is the kind of thing Seinfeld would have turned into a joke, if it were a character mistake. Especially if the character was Newman - Jerry would never miss a chance to tell him he was wrong about something. Since that didn't happen, I think it was probably careless writing.

 

That's probably true. I'd just like this kind of character mistakes to happen more in movies and TV because that would make them truer to reality. Like in a movie a character never falls over for no reason or has headache or dizziness for no reason, it always has to relate to the plot. If Jerry in the show is not a fan of Christopher Cross, it would be logical that he didn't remember the exact year either.

 

Uh... That's the joke!

 

Re the first paragraph, no, I wouldn't at all say that I'd do no research. But the reason you do research isn't because the film has to resemble the real world in any given way. You do research first and foremost as a means of generating material, ideas, a unique aesthetic for the film, a way of tying everything in the world you're creating together, and so on.

One thing it's important to remember is that even when George Lucas creates Star Wars, even when David Lynch creates Eraserhead, even when Lewis Carroll creates Alice in Wonderland, etc., those works may be (and probably are) based just as much on real people, real places, real events, real dialogue and so on as Oliver Stone's The Doors, Robert Zemeckis's I Wanna Hold Your Hand, or Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII. It's just that in the former cases, you're not going to know the people, the places, the events, the dialogue it's based on. In those cases, often only the author knows (and sometimes the relevant people who personally know the author know).

Writers are constantly mining their lives, their experiences, the people they know, the hearsay experiences they learn through the people they know, etc. for material. What they then do is transform that material into a story of their own creation, where the arbiter is how it works as a story, tailored to their tastes (and/or beliefs about the expected audience's tastes) re what's going to make a good story. What happened in the real world is never the trump card. What the creator thinks works artistically--for the story they're creating, as they're writing it, for the aesthetic they're creating, for the characters they and the actors are creating, etc. is always the trump card. Creators always think it's imperative to not be a slave to the real world for their creation. That means that the real world never dictates what they must do for any element. It only offers suggestions, ideas for what they could do. The decision on what to do is always dictated by what the creator feels works best for the story they're creating, for the aesthetic they're shooting for, for the artifice as they're setting it up. If that's different than something about the real world, it doesn't matter.

So fictions always have some resemblance to the real world, and they always have this in many different ways. But they're always fictions. You're always creating a fictional world when you create a (non-documentary) film, when you write a novel. And that's the case even when the world you're creating has features easily recognizable to many people, even when it's apparently set in Chicago and has Mayor Daley as a character. It's still a fictional Chicago no matter how much some features resemble real-world Chicago. It's still a fiction just like, say, Gotham is a fictional Chicago.

One way it's easy to know it's a fiction when you're watching something like The Doors is because it has actors. It's a fiction that Val Kilmer is Jim Morrison. There are countless difference between any actor and any real-world person they're portraying. Those are differences from real-world facts.

Likewise, one way to know that you're watching a fiction is to see a car chase cut from 59th and Fifth Avenue in New York City to Battery Park, as if Battery Park were right around the corner. The filmmakers obviously know that Battery Park isn't right around the corner from 59th and Fifth--they had to move all of their gear, plus themselves, from one place to another, and make the effort to shoot footage so that they could edit it to make it appear that the cars in question are simply turning a corner. What they want for the story, for aesthetic purposes, for a particular look/feel, etc. is dictating those decisions (well, and sometimes practical stuff dictates this, too--where can they shoot? Where can they afford to shoot? Can they afford to build sets, etc.)

It's not that nothing in films can resemble the actual world. Any arbitrary thing can. And tons of stuff, often that you don't know about, is based on factual data. It's rather that no arbitrary thing in a film has to resemble the real world in any particular way. It can always depart from real-world facts. And all films are set in fictional worlds, even when the real-world correlates are obvious to you.

 

That's all well and good but if as a film maker you are going to ride on the coast tails of history then its not fiction really is it - more faction.

Lets use the Doors movie as our example

Oliver stone didnt make a move called ah lets see - The Windows

No, because that would have led to no interest in it outside of Oliver Stone movies fans

Instead he used factual names, places, dates, locations, events, etc etc all relating directly to a real factual band called the Doors

Knowing full well that the Doors fan base would go to see it - a built in guaranteed audience as the Doors fan base in 1991 was not small

Quite rightly when word got out it was a load of baloney the rest was obvious - bad reviews = box office failure

Being a relative bomb - ie costing more than it made - perhaps if Stone had have made a more accurate and honest film then it may have been a success

Stating that movies are fiction and documentary's are factual is disingenuous

You cant just take liberties with the facts when it suits if that is what the premise of the film is

God knows Morrisons life was bizarre/interesting enough without having to make stuff up and the added parts are merely salacious or licentious presumably to make the move more raunchy

Most likely a refection of Oliver Stones "rock star" persona than anything else

The others like 'Rock Star' - that's just half assed efforts from the props people and the writers and it is in the directors ambit to either care or not care about those errors

If they do care they do something about it - like Affleck did (but then again it was only cos Page made him but he did do it)

I think it is also a reflection of how they feel about their audience - "who cares no-one will notice" or worse "who cares just go see the movie and stop griping"

Well they do, as we can see here, notice and care.

 

Just recently, in The Post:
In the Vietnam scene set in 1966 at the beginning of the film, "Green River" by Creedence Clearwater Revival is playing. This song was not released until 1969. You'd think Spielberg would have been more careful.

 

The Pacino film Carlito's Way takes place in 1975, yet we hear "Got to Be Real," "You Should Be Dancing," "I'm Your Boogie Man," "Disco Inferno."

The 2014 film A Most Violent Year takes place in New York City in 1981, but opens with a song that had absolutely nothing to do with that year: "Inner City Blues." The whole movie bothered me with its sloppiness regarding the soundtrack and how NYC looked. It looked more like 2011 than 1981 (take it from someone very familiar with how NYC looked in 1981). And the soundtrack was crazy. Opening with Inner City Blues (a great song but out of place in the film) instead of a hit from 1981 (Bette Davis Eyes, Rapture, Morning Train, any Hall and Oates song...you could not escape these songs in 1981)?

 

I don't know if you read the post I was referring to, but if so, you sure didn't understand it. You also apparently do not know many filmmakers, fiction authors, visual artists who do fantastical work, etc.

 

But he didn't get lucky that night, and that's why, wrong album!

 

Ya think maybe his post was also a joke?

 

Did you read and understand my post?

Perhaps it is you you doesn't understand or grasp the differences

 

I knew it! I knew it!

 

So did you read the long post of mine above right above your first post to me? Was I explaining in that that Wonderland, for example, is literally a real place?

 

I agree. Man I grab cds by the edges as often as I can. Greasy fingerprints kill physical media.

 

It's not a mistake to have an older song in a movie - unless the characters claim the song is brand-new or whatever.

Just because the songs you mentioned weren't from 1967 doesn't mean they couldn't still be played - a movie set in 1967 doesn't have to include only songs from 1967...