Among the many things I’m not good at, I’ve discovered, is stealing money from cash machines.
A few months ago, I wrote a script about three young friends who discovered how to do that. It was a pretty simple trick: they just built a lot of fake free-standing cash machines and put them into shopping centres. People put in their cash cards, typed in their passwords, the machines flashed “Out of Service” messages, and that was that.
A few days later the thieves collected the machines – each of which had recorded hundreds of account numbers and their passwords – and they went to town.
“Wow,” a writer friend told me after he read the script. “This is really cool! That’s exactly how I’d do it.”
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read,” a friend in law enforcement told me after he read the script. “There are about 16 zillion ways this could never happen.”
He then began to rethink and rework the entire premise of the script. In essence, he was trying to figure out a realistic way to rob people. The trouble was, each method he proposed – and, to be honest, none was foolproof – lacked the style and the elegance of my made-up unrealistic method. And he could not understand why I did not care that my way of committing cash-machine robbery was utterly unrealistic.
“But that couldn’t happen!” he shouted. “It’s totally impossible!”
Well, Sandra Bullock is never going to fly around in space either, but that did not stop Gravity from being one of the biggest movies of the year.
There is an old saying in Hollywood: when someone brings up some tiny little logic point or picks a story apart, if the audience notices that kind of thing, the project is doomed anyway. People sit in cinemas or in front of televisions to be transported to another world, not confronted with events that conform to the laws of physics.
In editing, we call this continuity. If an actor is holding a gun in one hand, he cannot suddenly appear to be holding it in another – something a lot of actors forget when they are doing multiple takes of the same scene. Even tiny details – the angle of a lapel, the position of the sun, the amount of food left on a plate – are sweated over and monitored by the script supervisor on a set. But the truth is, no matter how hard we try to get the continuity perfect, there are always mistakes.
The most famous example occurs in one of the Roger Moore-era James Bond films. In the middle of a car chase, Bond manages to tilt his car on the two wheels on the left side and shimmy through a narrow opening. But when his car emerges on the other side of the opening, it is tilting on the opposite two wheels. Somehow, when filming that stunt, they lost track of which side was up and which side was down. It was a terrific stunt, and they did not want to cut it, so they left it in. No one noticed.
If they had, the picture would have already been a failure. Who goes to a James Bond picture and monitors it for continuity or logic? Audiences only do that when they’re bored.
New Yorkers are always complaining that any film set in their town lacks the proper authenticity when characters manage to get all over the city – first a romantic walk in Central Park, then moments later an espresso in a hip place in the East Village – without slogging through traffic or fighting through a crowded subway. But who wants to watch that? You set the romantic scenes in romantic places and you don’t worry about realism.
The worst complainers are studio executives. “I don’t think a Martian would say that,” is one of the more famous script notes a writer received years ago when he turned in his draft of a sci-fi movie. “It’s not logical.”
People from Mars, apparently, have a specific way of expressing themselves.
I explained all this to my law-enforcement friend, but he was not having any of it.
“When people see that in the movie,” he said, “they’re going to roll their eyes and snigger.”
“No they won’t,” I said. “Because they’re never going to see it. The studio passed. It’ll never get made.”
My friend smiled triumphantly. “Because it was so unbelievable?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Because it was so expensive. I had a whole sequence in it where they land a helicopter on an airplane wing in flight.”
He scoffed. “That would never happen!”
“Well, it won’t now,” I said.
The only logic Hollywood cares about is the economic kind.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Los Angeles
On Twitter: @rcbl
