An amusing article about LA-based “24” producers, and tales set in DC. I find this kind of attitude among producers infuriating:
Howard Gordon, “24’s” executive producer, concedes that the show’s writing staff isn’t exactly all that knowledgeable about the lay of our land. “We’ve all been to Washington,” he says from “24’s” production offices in Los Angeles, “but none of us are Washington residents. I’m the closest thing. I’m from New York.”
The show’s chief research tool on Washington geography: “We have a big map in our office.”
If so, how to explain the crash of a passenger jet in the alleged Washington suburb of “Edgeboro, Md.”? Or that Jack is able to maintain his tail on a suspect on “New York Avenue” by driving across a very large (and utterly imaginary) park?
Gordon says the names and locales need only to be plausible, if not literally accurate, since almost all of the 11 million who watch “24” each week have no idea what’s where in the nation’s capital. “The only people who really care about this are people with too much time on their hands,” he says.
Yes, just like the only people who care about getting the science right are people “with too much time on their hands.” I guess they don’t mind being a laughingstock as long as they get laughed at all the way to the bank. And does this guy really believe that scuba diving into the White House basement from the Potomac is “plausible”?
[Update in the afternoon]
I have the same thought about this as I do about directors and producers of SF. Would it kill you, would it break the bank, to hire a consultant to review a script and say, “guys, that doesn’t make any sense, because…” They wouldn’t have to take his/her advice if they thought fixing it would really screw up the dramatic story line, but it would spare them from completely needless stupidity and cluelessness.
[Evening update]
There’s a pertinent link in comments, explaining Hollywood and verisimilitude.
Well, the scuba divers might have been able to swim underground from the Potomac to Capitol Hill. 😉
“By combining both, one project built a huge underground tunnel from the Potomac River to the Capitol Building. The tunnel, reportedly large enough for a modern bay bus to drive in, carried sewage and rain run off. The project also filled, buried and paved the existing canal.”
http://www.thedctraveler.com/lock-keepers-house-on-constitution-ave/
Hmm. That WOULD explain the wet footprints on the bowling alley lanes.
Or perhaps it is some of the President’s “Special Olympics” drool.
You know, Rand, it’s a tad inconsistent for Hollywood types to think so highly of the “idea” of government, but so poorly of the people living here that have to try to implement it.
I know, I know… you’re shocked.
“24” is no fun if you stop to think about questions of plausibility. While the White House was under siege this season an ex-Secret Service agent and the First Daughter tried to signal people outside using a flashlight and Morse Code; they apparently forgot that they had cellphones (which were shown in other scenes).
As an aside, thrillers have long relied on situations where a character has information that they can’t get to the right person in a timely way. The existence of cellphones has made this sort of storyline harder to write in a believable way. In one “24” episode this year they made a point of having a cellphone fall into water to explain why an FBI agent could not contact anyone. Twenty years ago they wouldn’t have had to add that sort of narrative band-aid. For the White House episode they evidently decided to go without an explanation and hope no one noticed.
Jim says: Twenty years ago they wouldn’t have had to add that sort of narrative band-aid
No, but they had other things they had to watch for. As a writer myself, I run into the traps all the time. It comes down to attention to detail. An old instructor of mine had a beautiful quote. “It’s not what you don’t know in your writing that hurts you, its what you THINK you know.”
Someone should have caught the cellphone loophole and closed it. The original writer, the editor, director, or the host of others it went through didn’t give it the attention it needed, because they THOUGHT they knew what they had.
I have to disagree here. If I were writing the show, I would deliberately use plausible but wrong geography for the same reason I would use a 555 telephone number. It’s completely different from getting the science right in SF.
“I guess they don’t mind being a laughingstock as long as they get laughed at all the way to the bank.”
Rand,
This has been the attitude of Hollyweird since I was old enough to realize they didn’t know anything in L.A. Science, geography, history, it’s all subjective, and malleable, in L.A.
But given the fact that most adults don’t know the difference in Washington state, and Washington D.C., I’d say Jack Bauer is safe for now, from being outted for geography errors.
Another thing that the makers of TV and movies get wrong, or do intentionally, that drives me mad.
Translations.
I “hear” several different languages pretty well. I can get by with Spanish, German and a few others. My French is passable enough to spend time in Quebec working. My Spanish is passable too. I HATE it when the speaker says something, and the translation on the screen is close, but not quite dead on what was said. Often it’s minor, but sometimes it actually changes the character, or his motives or actions, with the translation.
Hollywood has technical advisers. They also have J.P. Morgan’s attitude. J.P. told his lawyers, “I don’t pay you to tell me whether I can do what I want to do. I pay you to tell me how I can do what I want to do.”
“24” lost me when they had terrorists cause a Chernobyl-style meltdown in a (fictional) California nuclear power plant, as part of a plot to do the same to dozens of plants via a soooper-secret remote control system that no plant owner in their right mind would have installed (what for?). Gah.
If you know anything about LA geography and watch 24, you’ll know there’s far too many scenes where Jack travels about 20 miles in five minutes. Even with a helicopter, that’s quite a trick.
I wouldn’t ding them for inventing a town called “Edgeboro, Md.” — that’s no different from inventing “Sunnydale, Calif.” Now, if they put Edgeboro on the south side of the Potomac, they’d deserve abuse.
Hollywood doesn’t get local geography correct?!!! Who woulda thunk it!
Nothing new. I lived in the Bay Area when Bullitt came out. Anyone familiar with SF geography was jolted out of their “suspension of disbelief” every 20 seconds or so during the seminal car chase.
Some comments on this sort of topic: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3a.html#todd
Regarding the link to “the facts of life about media SF” …
Sometimes you’ll find people who are willing to do it right.
I’m thinking in particular of the TV series Babylon 5. J. Michael Straczynski, the creator/head writer, and a number of other people involved in the show — including the SFX group — used to hang out on Usenet and take part in the discussions … and on a number of occasions they asked for advice. And on a number of occasions, they actually made use of the advice.
Examples include: information about the star epsilon Eridani, orbital geometry and illumination effects (on the order of “can you have a crescent moon rising at midnight?”), and how the conservation of angular momentum affects the behavior of objects in zero gravity. One particularly nice touch: on B5, the spaceships did not make banking turns as aircraft would.
Sure, they got some things wrong … but they tried.w
I’m more concerned about the writers of ’24’
believing that torture always works as a
script tool, rather then, their poor geographical
knowledge.
I’d like to see one episode where Bauer tortures
some guy who turns out to be utterly irrelevant
and sends him off on a wild goose chase for a day
because the victim just told him something to
get him to stop drowning him.
Of course if you want to see that, just look at
the Cheney administration.
“… and a terrorist, boys and girls, is just a friend we haven’t met yet.”
t
just look at the Cheney administration.
From what alternate reality are you typing this latest idiocy?
…a terrorist, boys and girls, is just a friend we haven’t met yet.
A future Facebook Friend!
I’m more concerned about the writers of ‘24′
believing that torture always works as a
script tool, rather then, their poor geographical
knowledge.
Yes, the only thing stupider (much so) is thinking that torture never works.
Jack Lee says: I’m more concerned about the writers of ‘24′
believing that torture always works as a
script tool
That’s exactly what it is to a writer. Its a tool to create drama in a script. Keep in mind that the writers probably never have been tortured, so they don’t display it correctly, allowing idiots like you to get the wrong idea.
I’m more concerned with people like you jack, that seem to get their facts from TV shows that are notoriously wrong on factual data.
I’m more concerned with people like you jack, that seem to get their facts from TV shows that are notoriously wrong on factual data.
Yes, like Keith Olbermann.
To summarize, there’s no penalty for getting things wrong. So nobody bothers.
Torture works. On one set of explicit conditions.
1) You know the person has the information you need.
2) You know what you want.
3) That the information can be explicitly tested quickly.
Take Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. You know he
knows a lot about Bin Laden. Torture him until
he tells you what Bin Laden’s cell phone number is.
That’s testable, it’s something you know he knows.
15 minutes with a bucket of water, and you get it.
Take 15 guys, some of who you think are al qaeda.
Torture them for bin laden’s cell number.
What are you going to get? Bupkis.
That’s why we don’t use torture. Not because it
won’t ever work, but, because it works under such
a limited set of circumstances, and that people
don’t want to do the ground work you need to do
before you can apply it correctly. If you use torture
without having done that work, then it leads
you in circles.
I agree with Annoying Old Guy in plausible but wrong to avoid issues of fans stalking locales. However this is I find foolish:
The show’s chief research tool on Washington geography: “We have a big map in our office.”
I guess downloading Google Earth or using Mapquest requires a budget they can’t afford.
Leland, the big map would be great for group discussion.
I’ll just be ignoring jack lee’s attempt to derail this discussion to one of his own obsessions.
Anyway, to business: I’m not sure why fictional tv shows have to be completely truthful to real life when it comes to setting. After all, fiction is about made-up people doing made-up things; there is no “Jack Bauer,” as such. And it didn’t used to be that way — back when we were more secure (imho) with the differences between fiction and non-fiction, dramas and adventure shows and novels regularly used made-up towns, cities, and countries, going back at least to The Prisoner of Zenda, if not all the way back to “The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.” And shows like Mission:Impossible and others regularly made up fictional European countries and the like. It can be annoying to someone who lives in a real city used as a setting for some story to see them refer to streets and buildings and so on that don’t actually exist there (my friends and I made something of a game of the fake street names and “that isn’t there” and “there’s no such house in that neighborhood” stuff in Miami Vice, and CSI: Miami (and the other CSI’s too I imagine) almost always uses fake street names and puts clubs where I know there’s a vacant lot, and that snazzy police headquarters where Horatio and the gang hang out? isn’t.
But we knew how to suspend belief, and that this stuff wasn’t supposed to dovetail with reality. People seem to have forgotten how to do that, or for some reason want tv fiction to conform perfectly to real life. I wonder why. Florence King wrote an essay a while back about how people are demanding more and more geographic and historical facts in their fiction, and her take on it was that this is because people no longer feel secure in their world, the way, for example, Victorians who wrote stories with sentences like this: “In the year 18__, Lord Henry of M_____ took leave of his wife on a year-long voyage, which in due time brought him to the estate of Count Z_____ of Upper Slovaria, in the Carpathians.” Now if I were to write a novel of historical fiction with something like that in it (which I made up off the top of my head) and it somehow became a best-seller I’d get scores of finicky letters from people asking me where I got my documentation from, whose “real name and history” am I protecting, and that I must have made a typo as there was never any place in the Carpathians called “Upper Slovaria.”
> Take 15 guys, some of who you think are al qaeda.
Torture them for bin laden’s cell number.
> What are you going to get? Bupkis.
Really? Suppose that you get 10 different numbers and 1 number 5 times.
Is that number more interesting?
Note that even if it isn’t “correct”, you may have learned that the folks who gave it are connected. You don’t know what that connection is, but ….
The problem Andrea, is that every sloppy detail, plothole, or wrong fact means I have to work harder to suspend disbelief. At some point, it’s just not worth the effort. For example, in the first season of 24, there’s some scene where Jack almost drives up to a police roadblock (they were looking for him as a suspect in some crime, murder I think), parks in full view of them, gets on the phone and chats for a few seconds, then makes a crazy u-turn. Police would be all over you, if you did that in real life.
Further, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that readers back in the Victorian era were just as much sticklers for historical and geographical fact as they are now. Florence King’s observation is rendered irrelevant since she doesn’t compare like to like. There are plenty of modern stories with similar sloppiness to those old Victorian tales. And where’s the remotely accurate comparison between reading audiences?
” Take 15 guys, some of who you think are al qaeda.
Torture them for bin laden’s cell number.
> What are you going to get? Bupkis.
Really? Suppose that you get 10 different numbers and 1 number 5 times.
Is that number more interesting?
========
So Andy, now what.
15 guys, 5 give you one number, all the same.
what about the other 10? Have you tortured 10
innocent people? What if your brother was
one of the people in the group of 15 getting
tortured?
what price are you willing to pay in the hunt for
information?