Shown Their Work/Film: Difference between revisions

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* Before making ''[[Dr. Strangelove]]'', [[Stanley Kubrick]] and several of his collaborators read dozens of reports made by the Air Force and the RAND Corporation. Dr. Strangelove himself is caricature of Wernher von Braun, Edward Teller and Herman Kahn. Interestingly it was Kahn who suggested the Doomsday Machine, which was exactly the kind of defense that Herman Kahn fought against in his work. This attention to the smallest technical and military details is where the film gets its infamous [[Black Comedy|nervous humor]]. Additionally, at the time of the filming, the interior of a B-52 was highly classified. The film crew made up the layout and look by extrapolation from the older B-29, and laid out the floor plan based on the external measurements of the 52. They did such a good job, the Air Force was concerned briefly that they had an insider source.

* The makers of ''[[Aubrey-Maturin|Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World]]'' extended Patrick O'Brian's already-extensive [[Shown Their Work|shown work]] by digging deep into history for minute costume and hairstyle details (subsequently rendered in period-appropriate materials with period-appropriate techniques), the inner and outer workings of period-specific tall ships (they fired actual cannons to get the sound effect right), and cultural miscellany to illustrate the backdrop of the film. All extras and actors filmed aboard the ship were put through a "boot camp" to prepare them for their shipboard duties, and most of the filming actually took place at sea aboard a replica of an 18th-century tall ship.

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk&feature=PlayList&p=CDFEA6D52E5CC0EC&index=5 The Galaxy Song] in ''[[Monty Python's The Meaning of Life]]'' is pretty damn accurate for being a joke in a humour movie. Eric Idle has performed that song several times since it was in the movie, and where people have given him better approximations for the distances and speeds mentioned, he sometimes works them in. Remember, they were graduates of Cambridge.

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* The ''[[Apollo 13]]'' movie. There are a few [[wikipedia:Apollo 13 (film)#Technical accuracy|technical inaccuracies]] and [[Composite Character|blended characters]] and such, but these are primarily in service to the [[Artistic License]] and [[Rule of Drama]]. The director and Tom Hanks, in the "making of Apollo 13" documentary which was part of the collector's edition, were referred to as the "accuracy police" by someone who worked on it. The actor who played the flight director compared working on the film to cramming for finals - getting all this information in their heads and focusing on it the night before they did it. They even had Dave Scott, commander of Apollo 15, there every day to make sure that they flipped the right switches and everything.

** The misquote of Lovell saying "Houston, we have a problem" rather than "Houston, we've had a problem" has been stated to have been intentional, with the reasoning being that they didn't like the use of past tense, for whatever reason (perhaps [[Rule of Drama]], to keep the audience's tension in the moment).

** The set for Mission Control was so faithful to the original that at least one real-life Mission Control tech from NASA, who was brought in to evaluate the set, caught himself ''expecting the elevator'' from the NASA building when he left through the side door.