Passenger Trains > Another Hollywood blunder - Murder in Greenwich

Last night we watched the 2003 film MURDER IN GREENWICH. The rail station, which had four tracks and low level platforms and a Metro-North Greenwich, CT station sign, looked very unfamiliar. The trains that stopped there were DMU's with *corrugated sides that had Metro-North decals on them. What a feeble attempt to depict the true commuter train operation on Greenwich, CT, which has overhead catenary. It's been 15 yrs since I've been there, but I recall that Greenwich had recently been rebuilt into a large glass station. What a farce Hollywood is when it comes to depicting reality!

Andy

* - Were they trying to emulate the old NH Washboards?

Hollywood just doesn't get it -

I watch so many films where it is incredible what they pretend:

in "Source Code" a train obviously on the Rock Island commuter line is announced as ending at Union Station.
in "Far From Heaven," the action takes place around Hartford Connecticut, but the station shown is obviously Yonkers, NY.
in "Hairspray," TTC trolley are alleged as Baltimore
in "Silver Streak" (the Gene Wilder one), Toronto Union Station is called Chicago,

at least "Ice Storm" the rail sequences were filmed in New Canaan, CT, at the end of that line, with the proper equipment. All the ice on the eaves and train -- plastic icicles!

. . . and in my household I am asked not to comment on such things as it "ruins the movie."

Greenwich and the rest of the New Haven line stations got their high level platforms in the early seventies when the M2 Cosmopolitans were introduced. That was pre-MNRR, in the Penn Central/MTA era. I have a particular affinity for Greenwich as its the place I became a lifelong railfan as a toddler waiting for Dad to come home from work or my grandmother to arrive from New Haven.

Dave

So Hollywood screwed up again. Why are we surprised?

I like it i movies when the plane that takes of is a 747 but lands and has magically become a 777. Did they drop two engines in flight? A few weeks ago on a favorite TV show, the train they were on was at different times Amtrak Superliners, Amtrak Amfleet and....a French TGV under wires. All interior scenes were the same...obviously a set.

But take a good look at who watches this garbage! My pet peeve is calling tank cars tankers. And, I should add, the almost universal calling of timetables schedules. But then again, I always look for a lost SP steam locomotive somehow making its way over the hill...

This is always interesting but perhaps hardly important. My profession (archaeology) is handled equally badly by Hollywood. Every archaeologist I know (myself included) absolutely loved the Indiana Jones movies, but they had nothing to do with the real profession. Hollywood is fiction and fantasy, not a report on reality.

One of the very few movies that was accurate in its depiction of trains was Murder on the Orient Express, which was a detailed and precise depiction of the (now lost) Wagon-Lits culture, which I experienced in its last years in the 1960s and 1970s. As such, the movie will become a visual record, somewhat, of that era.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/12 08:42 by Ptolemy.

The movie 'Trains" with Bert Lancaster is very authentic. Filmed in Europe I think.

Hollywood "gets it" just fine.

Everything is now. driven by the accountants and the lawyers, not the producers. It all comes down to budgets and contract.

BobV Wrote:
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> The movie 'Trains" with Bert Lancaster is very
> authentic. Filmed in Europe I think.


It is one of the great movies.

BobV Wrote:
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> The movie 'Trains" with Bert Lancaster is very
> authentic. Filmed in Europe I think.

In the late 1990s I had the good fortune to attend a screening of the movie at the L.A. County Museum of Art, followed by a conversation with the director, John Frankenheimer.

As I recall, some of the filming took place in a rail yard that was going to be abandoned by SNCF and real buildings and equipment was blown up. He also noted that Burt Lancaster did all the stunts (he had been an acrobat) and even did a scene with a knee injury. In filming the sequence where the train is being strafed, Frankenheimer was nearly killed when the pilot of the plane turned in the wrong direction, narrowly missing the helicopter or plane Frankenheimer was in as the shot was filmed.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/12 14:50 by colehour.

korotaj Wrote:
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> ...
> My pet peeve is calling tank cars tankers...

I hope you haven't been reading about the Conrail Shared Assets derailment at Paulsboro a week-and-a-half ago where several tank cars of vinyl chloride went into Mantua Creek. Every media story calls them "tanker cars".

Oh, it goes on and on. How about using Los Angeles as a stand-in for New York (which refused to allow filming) for the re-make of the movie "Money Train"? But the earlier posts are right. It's just fantasy. Very little effort is made to get things right. The planes and airports are no better than the trains. In the movies, all planes are wide-bodies (at least on the inside).

This has soaked into the culture. I can't tell you how many times I've heard passengers walking onto a 737 or an A319 exclaim, "This is a really small plane!" They don't fly often, so they think all planes are wide-bodies. Oh, and of course everybody flies first class, right? Would that it were so. I spent 20 years flying about twice a month. You get awfully used to the 737s and 319-320-321s/

Hey folks....most of the public doesn't care or even notice. They do care about the plot, the actors, special effects, and of course, the ending. If a 1930's streamliner shows up with a loco and set of cars from the 1950's, do you really think the audience is going to remark..."oh gasp...look, that train is not authentic....I'm leaving"? Really.

Sound effects are pretty funny at times if you know what's going on. Any steam train pulling out of the station starts chuffing at the rate of about 10 chuffs per wheel revolution. Occasionally you'll see a telegraph operator and the telegraph is making a beeping sound. The old railroads had a sounder that only made clicks. Tones were used when radio communications came into existence. And speaking of code, they might send something like "L M N O P" and the operator will read it as "Have the sheriff meet the Texas Express. The outlaw is wearing a blue hat and has 2 six guns, a baseball bat, and is sucking face with some hooker he picked up yesterday in Chattanooga, Tennessee." I guess they had some real abbreviations they used back then.

John .--- --- .... -. (Yep, that's how you send it in "International Morse." Sorry, but I don't know the old American Code.)

RevRandy Wrote:
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>
>
> at least "Ice Storm" the rail sequences were
> filmed in New Canaan, CT, at the end of that line,
> with the proper equipment. All the ice on the
> eaves and train -- plastic icicles!
>

Well, it wasn't actually the proper equipment. Metro-North Metropolitan series cars (and scale models of them) were used in making "The Ice Storm," with Penn Central lettering applied. The period of the story would have called for ex-New Haven 4400-series Pullman-Standard "washboards." See photo below (taken at New Canaan) of a train of washboards in the Penn Central era.

My parents were residents of New Canaan when the original ice storm--which inspired the novel and subsequent film--took place in the early 1970s, and I was visiting them during the storm. I had returned to the old family home and was a resident of New Canaan when the filming of the movie was made there in the 1990s.

I had not heard or read about the film makers coming to New Canaan and one day happened to go down to the railroad station, finding it draped in icicles, with the temperatures in the 50s. Needless to say I was for a few moments thoroughly confused.

Art House
Gettysburg, Pa.
Formerly, New Canaan, Conn.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/12 13:00 by aehouse.

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I always remember the time in the 70's when my night shift job was switched to daytime. My daughters said, "Now you can see 'Happy Days' on TV and see who 'the Fonz' is." (This was long before home VCRs became common). It happened that the episode I saw had the Fonz talking enthusiastically about the 1955 Chevy he had fixed up after getting it very cheaply because it had been in a wreck. We don't see the car until well past the halfway point, when Fonzie opens a garage door to show off---a 1953 Chevy!! Not something only a railfan would catch, like air brakes on a Civil War era train, but something even my daughters knew about, since we had owned a '53 Chevy in the 60s. And a flashback scene, showing the car getting wrecked sometime in the 60's--has an Amtrak locomotive in it.

Now we just have to wait until next year to see how Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer did the train scenes in the "Lone Ranger" remake.

One of my favorites is an old Law and Order, where Chris Noth collars a guy wgho is about to take the train to Montreal....
and they are on a Comet 1 in Hoboken.

It's to be expected, though....Hoboken has plenty of space and is very accessible, and relatively quiet during the day.

At NYP or GCT, they'd have to shoot after 10pm, and imagine the trouble of moving film and sound equipment in and out of the station tracks at either of those stations.

They're blunders to us. To filmmakers, it's called "doubling" -- a locale or set piece doing service as something or someplace else.

To actually use a real location can be impossible. To gather an airport full of vintage 1950s aircraft, or a terminal full of steam-powered streamliners is absurd. And so on.

It's not about not caring, although many filmmakers and producers truly don't care, and in what seems to be a very callous way. It's about using the budget you've fought for in the most expedient way to "put the money on the screen" -- and that goes for TV shows and movies with seemingly infinite budgets.

Something like "Unstoppable", which theoretically should have had a budget that allowed for accuracy that would please railfans, didn't do so because pleasing railfans wouldn't have paid the bills for catering, let alone bring in audience. Is it carelessness? Not caring? No, it's caring about something else deemed more important to the production.

Very few TV shows or movies can jump locations if the story jumps. Logistics of location filming mean you try to get as much bang for your buck as possible. So you have a scene where the script calls for Grand Central Terminal at rush hour in 1940, and you actually manage to shoot in actual GCT with a cast of a thousand costumed extras. (Let's say.) But the script calls for the principals to step off the train in Chicago. Even if you've pulled off the first scene, the inclination of producers would be to have GCT "double" for CUS for the expedient of time and money. It's just how movies are made.

The level of disregard for authentic procedure, or for accuracy of dialog when it comes to process, is something that some do better than others. And using stock footage where aircraft or train types get mixed freely while theoretically being on the same flight is a function of the director or editor needing things to match visually and with screen direction, or match a mood or feeling. That drives the process much more significantly than canning a scene because there was a 1990 Chevy van in the far background of that 1952 cityscape.

The errors run from accidental to egregious, and no movie will ever "get it right" for every inside watcher. Some do a very good job. But we're going to be stuck with hearing Amtrak K5LA horns whenever there's a train anywhere in the last 50 years -- because sound editors have no knowledge and no catalog handy to tell them otherwise. To them, it sounds right.

And then... if you were a producer seeking accuracy, would you want to have a conversation with a verbose and overly-detail-conscious railroad consultant about anything? No one making movies has that kind of time or patience, or they'd never get their movies made.

Just saying... :-)

~ Bob Z.

RevRandy Wrote:
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> . . . and in my household I am asked not to
> comment on such things as it "ruins the movie."

same with me and any war movie!