Movies by definition are a form of escape, and require a form of social contract called “Suspension of Disbelief.” Basically it means that I am willing to overlook the fact that these are actors on sets in order to believe that I am somehow watching an actual story unfold before my eyes. Suspension of disbelief can easily be shattered, however, by something like the presence of a low hanging boom mike or a continuity error. When this happens, you mentally leave the story and are forced back into the reality that this is just a movie.
Hollywood is particularly guilty of violating suspension of disbelief when it comes to cars, whether it is the Charger in Bullitt that loses no fewer than eight hubcaps, or in the case of my personal cinematic pet peeve, the car that is being driven while the transmission is in Park. The screengrab from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the title image above illustrates this quite succinctly.
I was binge-watching the latest season of Atypical on Netflix over the weekend (a great show you should check out, BTW), and I noticed that this show is also guilty of this offense, with Doug Gardner (one of the lead characters) shown in several episodes driving his truck while it is in Park, as shown above.
I realize it is difficult for actors to get into character, emote for the camera, and remember their lines for multiple takes while simultaneously trying to drive a car with cameras and lights blocking their vision. So it is no surprise that filmmakers employ what is called a Process Trailer to film these scenes, like the one shown above. Obviously, since the car is not actually moving under its own power, it can be left in Park while being towed.
Free tip for aspiring (or experienced) moviemakers: If you are filming a vehicle with a column shift, either remove the shifter lever or tie the car down and put it in Drive before filming.
So what is your automotive cinematic pet peeve?
My observation is in contemporary TV shows if a scene features a car about 10-20 years old in it that car WILL be destroyed during that show or scene.
One of the more famous examples of a different car being destroyed was at the climactic end of the cult-classic Vanishing Point when what is supposed to be a white 1970 Dodge Challenger running at high speed into a bulldozer blade was obviously a white 1967 Camaro carcass being slowly towed into the bulldozer.
I was about to comment on this
It’s actually fairly convincing and well done until they showed the firefighters, police and onlookers scavenging through wreck during the end credits, there you spot glaringly obvious things like the 67 vent windows and silver painted steel wheels.
Up too the credits though you can only clearly tell it’s a Camaro in one frame and it’ll take a few pause attempts to catch it, the flat plain hood flipping through the air over the bulldozers after the explosion is the most obvious part, otherwise it’s a white blur in real time or obscured by flames. Other than the end credits close ups I’d rank Vanishing Point as one of the best examples of model substitution, E bodies look like first gen F bodies when squinting, and that’s exactly how they filmed it.
This trick was also done in the Australian film Running on Empty, one of the star cars was a Dodge Challenger, the film ends with it being driven flat out into a concrete wall, the actual car destroyed was a 70s fuselage 4 door Valiant with the B pillars cut out, haven’t seen the film for years but I think it was fairly convincing when playing the film at actual speed, but obvious when you play it at slow speed.
Someone may have mentioned the instances when the interior and exterior of a car in a scene that cuts back and forth are not the same car.
When a car in a period movie is supposed to be nearly new yet has wrong hubcaps, or is painted some modern color or has some other unusual “classic car” mod done to it. I recall back in the 70s there was a miniseries called The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman. There was a reporter driving a rented 1963 Ford Galaxie hardtop. It was wearing those cool flat Ford hubcaps that were used in the early 70s.
One specific example – the show Burn Notice that prominently featured the 73/74 Charger, black with white interior. It had a white steering wheel. Aaaaagggh. Lots of 1970s cars offered white interiors. None of them had a white dash or steering wheel. The wheel/dash/carpet was always black or some other normal color.
Kollyfornya Highway Patrol specified white steering wheels.
The missing windscreen in Al Bundy’s Dodge. If memory serves the Fox Mustang he won had the same problem. And speedo and tacho needles not moving when the car is supposed to be.
Windshields were regularly removed from vehicles used in interior film stages to avoid light reflections on the glass.
If you look carefully at the 1955 Pontiac convertible used for several episodes of I Love Lucy, you can see that the wraparound windshield has been removed.
1 – Convertibles with tops down when it’s obviously cold.
2- Never shutting car doors. Just leaving them hanging open.
3 – Squealing tires on dirt roads doing 40 mph.
4 – Actors who consciously try to act like they’re driving the car by constantly working the steering wheel while the projection screen shows they’re on a straight road.
My favourite ever was the Charlie’s Angels episode where Jaclyn Smith’s character discovers a bomb’s been planted in her Mustang II. To save blowing up the more “valuable” new Mustang, it’s replaced for the explosion shot with a ’65 (or so) model, tarted up to make it look like it’s a ’74. Talk about irony.
Too bad the new Charlie’s Angels couldn’t get their hands on a Mustang Mach-E, they could have duplicated this scene using an older Infiniti FX SUV or a RAV4 as a stand in!
Or maybe they did, like everyone else I didn’t see it. Ba dum tss.
Cars are ubiquitous in our world today, and hence have become ubiquitous in movies that take place on Earth in the 20th or 21st centuries. But many people don’t really notice, know about or even care about cars, and I think that extends to film makers. What bugs us is not something they even notice, like the folks who think their non-GM-powered XJ Cherokee has a 4.0 V6 or put snow chains on the front wheels of their rental Mustang. My personal pet peeves:
– Random use of seat belts, even now, even with kids in the back of minivans in sitcoms. Though maybe this is more realistic than I think. Also, scenes where the driver and passenger seem to have put their seat belts on and off as the camera cuts between them.
– Ease of breaking into and hot wiring a late model car. Or, if it fits the pacing better, the frequency of finding an unlocked car with the keys in it, just when the hero (or bad guy) needs to escape. Or, similarly, the ability of the escaping hero to extract their keys from their pocket while running at top speed, putting them in the ignition and starting up while under a hail of bullets. Though modern keyless/push button starting will make this easier.
Don’t forget – grab two wires from under the steering wheel/dashboard, with insulation conveniently stripped away, touch together = sparks, engine starts & runs.
Not automotive per se, but the principle holds. In the Marx Brothers’ Go West, the train that Groucho, Chico and Harpo are chopping up to provide fuel is drawn by a locomotive of a 2-8-0 wheel arrangement. When the train careers off the track, the loco has a 0-4-4-0 arrangement. (One assumes it’s a dummy loco with a truck hidden beneath the bodywork.) Once it returns to the track, it reverts to the 2-8-0. .
While verisimilitude and the Marx Bros aren’t always close bedfellows, the jump here is particularly egregious!
That they went through the effort to build window frames ( to be used in the stunts for grabbing ), and added them onto this challenger Vs simply using a car that just natively had them in Death Proof.
Top pic makes it look like the driver’s about to shift that three-on-the-tree from second to high with a flourish…
It all started with the earliest Westerns, when the stage coach would pull out of Gopher Gulch at a full gallop, and then arrived at Possum Plantation, 24 miles away still under a full gallop. It makes driving a car in park seem realistic.
In addition to always galloping, riders jump onto an untied horse, gallop away, arrive at their destination and jump off without tying it, later to return to the horse standing in EXACTLY the same spot where it was left.
In most cases the rider would be walking if he did that. Horses don’t have a gear selector with a “park” position.
And then there’s constantly allowing the horse to rear, horses that magically change their markings from scene to scene, and whinnying all the time to “talk” to humans.
Hero jumps off of second story balcony without looking. Lands in saddle of horse in perfect position, rides away. Nice the horse was in that particular place. Feel free to make “Ow! My Balls!” reference.
My biggest automotive movie pet peeves?
– The Thermoquad/17-speed automatic transmission always kicking down and upshifting sound effect as used on cars with less than 8 cylinders (see a typical episode of ‘CHiPs: nothing like a woodgrain-equipped Pinto wagon going ‘whoOOOOOOM!! when puttering along at 35 mph)
– no matter what make, every car has a Chrysler starter.
– You-can’t-get-there-from-here car chases (just ask any Seattle-ite watching the John Wayne movie ‘McQ’)
-Sirens blaring and engine on full boil, yet every police officer in a pursuit can actually hear the radio (and calmly pick up the microphone and use it while pursing someone down Mulholland Drive…)
– The Magical Self-Healing Bodywork….plow into a phone pole, fender is wadded up. Next scene? Magically healed.
-Every Jeep, no matter how new, always gets the WWII Army jeep engine sounds dubbed in.
-Downshifting 2 gears to pass someone at Daytona……
Mannix always amused me; appearing at the last possible moment to rescue the damsel in distress; the more hurry he was in; the further away he would park the mopar; then run in!
The Movie ” Mud” was a good example of a two stroke dirt bike sounding like a four stroke, marring a otherwise great movie.
Maximum Overdrive has a scene where a Beetle had ran into a tree and there was steam coming from the front of the car.
Other than that, it seems like every time a character is in a classic car, it gets destroyed. Does Hollywood have some vendetta against old cars? I always cringe when I see a main character in something old.
Check out movies from 1950s, 1960s, quite a few Jaguars run off of cliffs. This includes English movies. Clutch, head gasket issues?
The implication that cars — regular, non-Bondian vehicles — are a whole lot more bulletproof than they actually are. Movies routinely imply that ducking behind a car door will stop bullets, which is as dubious as the “car-related damage always causes flames and explosions” trope. I could buy that something in the door might conceivably stop A handgun bullet (it got lodged in the window motor or something), but not that car bodies would provide any reliable protection otherwise.
Mythbusters did a segment about this. True, not a good place to hide from bullets.
Weirdest part is in the same movies the characters hide behind their door shield, there’s a high probability they’ll manage to shoot through panels to blow up the gas tank or damage the engine in another scene.
Screeching tires on perennially WET streets, with no sign of the “rain” on car bodies or windshields, car pulls up at night, driver shuts off engine and gets out leaving headlights on and/or doors left open, cars involved in MAJOR accidents and the characters jumping out with no discernible injuries!!
“driver shuts off engine and gets out leaving headlights on”
This. You see it all the time. They leave the car, often in the middle of nowhere, do their business elsewhere and do not worry about the lights. In such surroundings you might worry that the battery is full enough to restart the engine.
Someone said it before – hot-wiring a car. Even in fairly new cars. A grab under the dash, three seconds with some wires and hey presto.
When they twist those two wires to start a car I always wonder how that magically unlocked the steering column.
At one time my job required for me to travel overnight occasionally. I think it was 1986 or 87 when I was staying in a Holiday Inn in Crawfordsville, Indiana with several coworkers. One evening one of the women told me at dinner that the other coworker at our table was afraid to drive her ’83 Olds 88 because she was afraid that it would explode. Someone had backed into it in the parking lot and slightly bent the rear bumper and quarter panel. I told her that she had been watching too much TV and that if life was like those shows the countryside would be littered with burned out cars. Then I told her I was not afraid to drive it and proved so by doing several laps around the lot. To make her happy I also made a big show of getting down and checking the gas tank for damage of which there was none.
Don’t get me started on all the wrong ideas people have about fire sprinklers thanks to Hollywood.
In “White Lightning” Gator McCluskey drives that 71 or 72 big Ford with the interceptor engine and 4-speed, but when he pulls up and stops anywhere he puts the column shifter in park. I noticed this when the movie came out in 1973 when I was 16. Never understood this till I understood it was movie-making magic.
If you pay really close attention you’ll notice that the Interior 4-speed shifting shots as well as the shot of the engine are both from a 1971 Mustang. Note the shock towers a BOF Ford Custom wouldn’t have when they pop the hood.
Can’t believe I’m the only one to mention this but it’s bugged me for years – headlights left on! How many times do cars get parked, turned off, and exited in the movies and on TV with the headlights left on? So odd and annoying!