Why can't the movie studios ever get it right?

My wife likes to watch ghost hunting shows on tv. Recently there was one revolving around spirits left wandering around town after a train crash in Georgia. In various cutaway scenes they too used images of an English locomotive and coaches. It was so glaringly wrong it made the rest of the program hard to watch.

On the other hand they also did a few scenes recorded in the cab of a Porter Locomotive on static display in the town. This was the very engine I used to operate in tourist service, so it was nice to see an old friend on tv. 

B Smith posted:

most people know nothing at all about American railroads and their history. These kinds of errors are repeated again and again in both Hollywood productions and so-called documentary productions.

Why can't the producers, directors, set designers, and consultants get it right, for once? It's not that hard.

They also do not know anything about non-American railways and their history; in the Hollywood movie Murder on the Orient Express that will be released in a few weeks a European Wagon-Lits car has got an American observation platform with the Wagon Lits emblem as drumhead. Horrible:

Regards

Fred

B Smith posted:

I suppose this kind of egregious historical error, or misrepresentation, in a film that is otherwise quite accurate in its visual depiction of the late 1920s - early 1930s simply shows that most people know nothing at all about American railroads and their history. These kinds of errors are repeated again and again in both Hollywood productions and so-called documentary productions.

Why can't the producers, directors, set designers, and consultants get it right, for once? It's not that hard.

I understand - but consider the difficulty casting a GG-1 to play this part...

They use what is available and most people don't care. This is Hollywood, enough said!

I watched "Sherlock Holmes goes to Washington" this weekend. They accurately had a GG-1 with pantograph  pulling the train.  The only disturbing part was the sound of the GG-1 puffing and chuffing down the tracks.

A lot is probably cost and using stock footage especially in TV. Hogans heroes blew up a civil war era train many times that was masquerading as a german muntions train

Roving Sign posted:

B Smith posted:

I suppose this kind of egregious historical error, or misrepresentation, in a film that is otherwise quite accurate in its visual depiction of the late 1920s - early 1930s simply shows that most people know nothing at all about American railroads and their history. These kinds of errors are repeated again and again in both Hollywood productions and so-called documentary productions.

Why can't the producers, directors, set designers, and consultants get it right, for once? It's not that hard.

I understand - but consider the difficulty casting a GG-1 to play this part...

That's what CGI is for.  Lemony Snikett's Series of Unfortunate Events had a very credible PRR T1 done in CGI.

There was also a credible CGI 2-6-0 (if not a tad too "modern") in Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Rusty

It's entertainment, not an historical documentary.  Evocative is more important than strictly accurate in all details.  Some care about trains, the vast majority of audiences could care less. It's not exactly the focus of the film and story. People also spoke quite differently in past eras.  Imagine if a drama about Henry II and Thomas Becket actually used, assuming we could recreate it, 12th century English.  No one in 2017 would understand a word in all likelihood.  

I think they just don't care. They are trying to show what they think the audience will like and are not really concerned with accuracy because the average movie watcher would never notice. There are hundreds of YouTube videos showing errors in movies that could have easily been fixed with a tiny bit of effort.

At least two current ads show an F7/9/3 locomotive pulling commuter trains into a station

Maybe because the movie was filmed in Manchester, England. They used what was available to produce the movie?

Charlie

Movie producers are limited to what they have or can make in a computer, and doubly so by what the director and crew thinks “looks cool.”

So often, they’ll go against what is correct, full well knowing, so, because they were looking for something different.

The WW1 movie, “Flyboys” had someone hopping a UP train which was clearly filmed at a British preservation line with Brit equipment, just marked UP.

I agree the lack of interest from the studios is primarily because the audience doesn't know anything about trains and doesn't care. If this move, which begins in 1929, had been populated by 1954 Buicks and Chevrolets, however, critics would have noticed. The film is actually set prior to the arrival of the GG-1s, but there's plenty of stock footage of earlier locomotives in and out of Penn station that could have been used or enhanced. 

There is also the fact that we know about trains, but not as much about other things. If we knew about other aspects, we might realize that there were mistakes there as well.

Anachronistic differences always bother me. One of my favorites is Foyle's war, but every time I watch, I see a few more Easter eggs, like the radial tire in the background when Sam is working in the motor pool, or the modern hand grips on the bicycles.

I always worried that movies and TV shows would teach would be crooks how to commit crimes. Then I saw them commit a crime using technology that I am familiar with. The technology/crime looked good to the great unwashed masses, but I could tell that it could not possibly work that way in real life, so I was no longer worried about it.

So the bottom line is, whatever looks good to the director, even if the director does not have any knowledge whatsoever of the accurate particulars, gets on film.

As someone else said: This isn't a documentary.    The feel of the movie is what matters.   I watched it.  I know trains.   It did not bother me.  

Just like "Unstoppable" with Denzel.    Regardless if you thought it was a silly movie; we all know that engine wasn't going to really do those things in real life.   Yet, this is an action movie and designed as such.   Again, it didn't bother me.

It's okay to not be offended about train things.

They have done this for decades. Back in the 50s, the Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye movie "White Christmas" had the principals travelling from Florida to Maine in a train pulled by warbonnet Santa Fe diesels.

Jagrick posted:

...using stock footage especially in TV.

winner winner chicken dinner!!!

jay jay posted:

They have done this for decades. Back in the 50s, the Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye movie "White Christmas" had the principals travelling from Florida to Maine in a train pulled by warbonnet Santa Fe diesels.

the funniest ever has to be the episode of "Dukes of Hazzard" that has the Duke boys beating Roscoe or Boss Hogg (don't remember which) to a grade crossing and getting away by the passing of a SP daylight train pulled by a GS, classic stock footage from the 40s or 50s, for a show taking place in the 80s!

My standard on this topic...

In an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, Andy and the gang went to meet somebody arriving in or around Mayberry on the train.

In pulled some beautiful looking UP passenger cars in the their yellow and gray glory.

Even the Three Stooges got it right.

One of the shorts features the boys being dragged out of a Pacific Electric B-50-14 boxcar coupled to a PFE wood reefer... under PE wires!

Anyway, they are movies not documentaries and the trains are only props so NBD when they are not PC (prototypically correct) 

johnstrains posted:

My standard on this topic...

In an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, Andy and the gang went to meet somebody arriving in or around Mayberry on the train.

In pulled some beautiful looking UP passenger cars in the their yellow and gray glory.

And who can forget Fonzie and the gang going from Milwaukee to California via the Pennsy.  Behind a GG1 no less...

Rusty

I'm not offended by this stuff about getting the trains wrong, I'm just observing that even though movies are clearly not documentaries, the producers usually spend some time, effort, and money to get the cars, clothes, airplanes, and architecture more or less right, but consistently give zero attention to the trains. 

B Smith posted:

I'm not offended by this stuff about getting the trains wrong, I'm just observing that even though movies are clearly not documentaries, the producers usually spend some time, effort, and money to get the cars, clothes, airplanes, and architecture more or less right, but consistently give zero attention to the trains. 

That's because the average person has no clue what a 'real' train looks like as they only see them at grade crossings, while checking their Facebook status.

Military movies were often consistently awful for the details (and I don't even mean the 'infinity' ammo magazines, Mach 1-speed choppers or things like that) until it became clear to Hollywood that people really do know the stuff they're looking at. So soon after the current global conflict on terror, war movies have become way more accurate than ever before.

Such a shift for trains in movies will never happen, though, as there won't be a huge shift in the population who'll know that the Pennsy never ran in CA state.

I won't name the film, but a not-exactly-large-budget movie could have had me as a historical advisor. But once I talked with the people involved, I realized quickly on that the film wasn't going to be any more historically or militarily accurate than the "Captain America" movie (I know a guy who worked on that, he walked away early on, not wanting his name associated with such a travesty of the 40s). Most advisors' advice gets thrown out the window once the director says, "yeah, but I want it that way anyway". The only example I know of is from the filming of the well-done HBO series, "Generation Kill." the advisor to that series balked at a bad version of the USMC LAV vehicles and demanded the director allow them to be digitally rendered, or he'd walk from the set (or so I'm told). the end result was a good call as I've seen the LAVs they were going to use, and they looked awful.

There is a movie called "The Commuter" coming out at Christmas. Its stars Liam Neison and it is big budget. The trailer is on you tube and it takes place in NY. The trains are all wrong, don't know where it was filmed but they are no Metro North. And last years "Girl on a Train was filmed on my street and the nearest tracks are the Harlem line in White Plains. They used the Hudson Line for the train scenes and her looking out of a train window at my neighbors house, it was a camera on tracks set up in the back yard. It starred Emily Blunt.

Oh, it's not just trains that they get wrong.  Watched an episode of the Incredible Hulk in which a character took a commercial airplane flight from Chicago to Gary, Indiana.  Duh, basic geography teleplay writers, basic geography.

A real live movie prop:

In 1977 a movie company needed some passenger cars for the made for TV movie "Mary White."  They approached the Kansas City Railroad Museum in the River Quay district and chose our ex CB&Q/BN power car and ex Frisco Business car #3.  We really had no other suitable cars.

We repainted the combine Pullman Green.  We debated where to place the Pullman lettering and decided it looked best over the coach section rather than centering it on the car.  I applied the adhesive lettering for the letterboard and car names.  The movie company painted a piece of Masonite to make a Pullman letterboard to cover the Frisco lettering on the business car.  

It's what was available locally and the cars were moved to KC Union Station and picked up by the Santa Fe to be moved to Wichita for filming.  They had about 10-15 seconds of screen time.  Stock footage was used to show a steam powered train approaching the station.

Rusty

If a recall correctly the Jackie Robinson movie, 42, had a scene where he boards a Southern passenger train despite   the cars blaintly had lease company markings on them. 

In the movie "Changling" they borrowed the 2-6-2 and a few heavyweights from the Orange Empire Railway Museum. They were in various road names, but were filmed in such a way that the letterboards weren't really visible. They filmed the station scene at San Bernardino Depot. It was a matter of what was around and of appropriate vintage. Unfortunately, most of your movie people aren't train people and don't know what's appropriate for the location and era. The 2-6-2 went from Perris to San Bernardino under its own power, by the way.

In the beginning of the Avengers movie with the Black Widow scene, the scene takes place in Russia with Norfolk Southern locomotives going by on the far right corner of the warehouse in Cleveland, Ohio where the scene was filmed. Of course the NS logos were blacked out and were replaced with some Russian letterings.

Also, in The Dark Knight Rises, the scene where Detective Blake goes to the cement factory, a CSX YN2 engine shows up pulling autoracks with their various logos on them. But when the locomotive comes out from behind one of the cement trucks, the scene gets cut and the CSX logo is only partially seen. The scene takes place in Gotham city but is filmed in Pittsburgh so that is probably the reason why Christopher Nolan did not want anyone to see CSX in the film. 

ES44AC posted:

If a recall correctly the Jackie Robinson movie, 42, had a scene where he boards a Southern passenger train despite   the cars blaintly had lease company markings on them. 

But in all fairness, they digitally put a steam loco in the scenes where he's going through spring training (no pun intended), behind the back wall. I was very pleasantly surprised to see they went through the effort.

Unfortunately, most of your movie people aren't train people and don't know what's appropriate for the location and era. The 2-6-2 went from Perris to San Bernardino under its own power, by the way.

Very true Matt

They only want to blow them up or crash them. 

On the flip side there are lots of good movies that are inaccurate with Trains and some even get it right. North by Northwest, Denver and Rio Grande, The General, Unstoppable, The Train, Von Ryan’s Express. Then again that’s why they call Fiction.

For Spike Lee's Malcolm X they hired the actual Pullman club car for the Valley Railroad in Essex CT and moved it to GCT for filming.

One railroad movie that got EVERYTHING RIGHT was this one...

Story line.  Visual appeal.  Camera angles.  Set restrictions.  Money.

I just watched "Emperor of the North" with Lee Marvin and "The Train" with Burt Lancaster. Both excellent railroad themed movies.

Doees anybody remember the nuclear powered train from the 70's?

"Supertrain" has yet to be mentioned..lol. I remember the models used for filming were the subject of a Model Railroader or Model Railroad Craftsman article back then...

Tom

Roving Sign posted:

B Smith posted:

I suppose this kind of egregious historical error, or misrepresentation, in a film that is otherwise quite accurate in its visual depiction of the late 1920s - early 1930s simply shows that most people know nothing at all about American railroads and their history. These kinds of errors are repeated again and again in both Hollywood productions and so-called documentary productions.

Why can't the producers, directors, set designers, and consultants get it right, for once? It's not that hard.

I understand - but consider the difficulty casting a GG-1 to play this part...

Better not be a GG1 in or out of GCT.

And so perpetuates the issue...

The same thing was done, British steam train in GCT NYC, in a movie made years ago. I think the title was something like "Once Upon A Time In America". Maybe both movies used the same "stock footage".

Most of my book reading is "historical fiction" (a made-up story with true time period settings). I've read many that has a steam locomotive puffing in Grand Central or Penn station in NYC. As you know, electric engines were the only ones allowed. The other thing is frequent mentions of a caboose on the rear of a passenger train.

They don't have to get it right. It only has to look good for the scene.