the list of 9 for november 14, 1998:
NINE HOLLYWOOD SECRETS REVEALED!
Most every rational person understands that there is a lot of fakery in filmmaking: that's not blood, it's corn syrup; Tom Cruise isn't driving that car into a wall, a stuntman is. Still, there are certain little secrets that a lot of people don't know or never picked up on.
- Movie stills are NOT actual footage from the movie. Whenever you see a "still" from a film in a magazine or on a website, it's likely the work of a still photographer, and you will never find that exact frame or that exact angle in the movie itself. Why is this done? Better picture quality for prints. Less hassle. And often it's the only time you can see the film's stars looking in the same direction (usually at the director, talking to them off camera).
- Characters in a film always find excellent parking. No matter where the character is driving his car, be it in downtown Manhattan, Paris, or San Francisco, he always seems to find a free parking spot exactly in front of the place he wants to be. Now why is that?
- Even poor characters wear the finest clothes. Costume designer Caroline Marx tipped me off to this: the finer the fabric, the better its texture reads on film. She said the ratty undershirt Bruce Willis ran around in during Die Hard was actually a $300 shirt from Barney's.
- Corollary: Every character has a billion clothes. Check out Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting: how many windbreakers does his working class character own, anyway? 500? He never wears the same jacket twice. I find this kind of costume design unrealistic. We all wear the same shirts and pants several times each month. Why shouldn't movie characters? We were good about this on my film Foreign Correspondents - Melanie Lynskey wears a lot of clothes, but we did a lot of mixing-and-matching, like her character would do.
- Day for night. You may have heard this term before. It means shooting outside during the day, then lowering the light levels on the film print so that a bright sunny day is darkened into a moonlit night. This trick is used a lot more often than you think, especially in black and white films. Basically, if a scene in a movie takes place at night but the sky is not pitch black, you know they shot "day for night."
- Stars in the night sky: fake! Okay, so you see a movie where the night sky is pitch black. You even see lots of twinkly stars. Guess what? Unless it is a science documentary, you can bet that those stars are all fake. The light from them is too faint for most film stocks and digital cameras. So there are lots of artificial "starry skies" in Hollywood.
- No rear-view mirrors in cars. I only learned this while shooting a scene in Foreign Correspondents in which Melanie Lynskey and Wil Wheaton are sitting in an actual car with an actual rear-view mirror. Somebody told me that most films have the rear-view mirrors removed (except for those Silkwood-style headlights-in-mirror shots). Why? Because filmmakers feel it looks too alien and distracting, even though every car has one.
- Group photos on movie posters are rarely groups. Actors have wild schedules and wild egos, so it's often difficult to get them to all pose together for a movie poster. More importantly, studios' marketing departments prefer to have all the actors shot separately, so they can move each one around at will in Photoshop.
- Oscar winners don't take home those Oscars in their hands. You see Dustin Hoffman kissing his Oscar. How sweet. But he has to give itback after the press conference backstage. That may not even be the Oscar that winds up on hisshelf. It takes several weeks to engrave each Oscar winner's name on each trophy, because ofcourse nobody is supposed to know who's going to get that Oscar until the last minute. Now youknow everything.
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