You Just Ruined the Shot

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Frank Drebin: Yes, well. When I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in plain view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy.

Mayor Barkley: That was a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, you moron! You killed five actors! Good ones!
—The Naked Gun

The Hero (often a Lord Error-Prone or Comedic Hero) hears a cry for help, or sees a crime taking place. Rushing in to save the Damsel in Distress, he knocks the villain to the ground and—A cameraman appears from hiding and upbraids him for ruining the shot. The damsel may start flicking through the script, or the crook complaining that the director is taking Enforced Method Acting too far. Either way, the hero is left to slink away apologetically, feeling like The Ditz he is.

Equally, a character may overhear actors practicing a script or a TV show being played too loud, think he's stumbled on a conspiracy, and try to save the day. Either way, he's going to end up looking foolish and annoying a hell of a lot of people along the way.

In a more optimistic outcome, the director or producer applauds the intervener for their bravery and expressiveness and offers to hire them, or at least keep their unexpected appearance in the final cut of the film.

Sometimes they're a Fish Out of Water who doesn't understand the medium at hand, and tries to raid a theatre stage.

In a variant, the hero could be charging in to stop a crime, only to be supremely embarrassed when they learn the hard way it was actually a police sting and they just fouled it up.

The key here is that it's a Show Within a Show; the titular "shot" and its disruption happened within the story's continuity. If the characters ruin the shot of the show you are watching, that means there is No Fourth Wall.

Compare Abuse Mistake, Proscenium Reveal. Contrast with All Part of the Show. Often implies You Fail Film School Forever.

Examples of You Just Ruined the Shot include:

Anime and Manga

  • One episode of Cardcaptor Sakura had Sakura encounter her brother accusing his best friend of some foul deed. She rushes in to intervene, only to discover that it was all a student movie filming for his class's School Festival. The director didn't seem to mind, and decides to include Sakura in the movie.
  • In Planetes, Hachimaki burst into a compartment on a spaceship and punched out a guy who was attacking a woman, only to discover they were both actors making a horror movie. The director conscripted Hachimaki to replace the now-unconscious actor. The exact same thing promptly happened again when Tanabe found them.
    • Notably, they were making an amateur flick and filming illegally, since they couldn't afford proper licenses. Hachimaki's mistake was understandable, considering that the camera was hidden.
  • Played straight in Dragon Ball Z when Gohan in his Saiyaman guise interrupts a movie chase and is promptly cast as Saiyaman in the movie, as no one believes he's the real thing.
    • He's then fired because his dialogue is too over-the-top cheesy, despite it being the way he always talks as Saiyaman.
  • This happens in the Virtua Fighter anime. Pai interrupts a movie by "saving" the actress. The actress gets upset and leaves, and the directer then hires Pai.
  • Subverted in Inuyasha: The titular half-demon time traveler followed his love interest, Kagome, to her high school festival in the modern age trying to find demons that had accidentally slipped through. When he overhears an emotional exchange between Kagome and a boy in her class, he interrupts and challenges the boy to a duel out of jealousy, completely oblivious to the fact that they were acting out a (terrible) play on stage in front of a packed auditorium. Kagome immediately panics, but when she realizes the audience doesn't see anything unusual about the dog-eared half-human hybrid jumping on stage with a huge sword, she convinces the male lead to play along, but instead of running away, he agrees to the duel. Then the watermelon demon shows up...
  • Detective Conan does this in the episode where Ayumi is apparently accidentally kidnapped by the men behind the rash of kidnappings in the area and travels all over the city in their trunk with a dismembered child's corpse, and hears them discussing the pointlessness of returning a victim once they've got the ransom. With Conan and the rest of the Shonen Tantei in radio contact and in hot pursuit on a solar skateboard. Turns out they were just showing incredibly bad taste and timing in their school-festival play.
    • But not until after Conan has concussed one of them. The actor who was driving then demands compensation from a bunch of eight-year-olds (by Totem Pole Trench), one of whom he has just inadvertently traumatized to the point of fainting.
    • This was actually considerate of the creators. Conan winds up exposing the other kids (and Ran, for that matter) to all kinds of nastiness over the course of the series, but kid episodes (like Kid episodes) tend to be Lighter and Softer, and putting Ayumi through something that bad so early would have been pretty horrible.

Asian Animation

  • One TV episode of Pucca starts with this scene. Despite it, Pucca and Garu continue their usual antics amidst the filming of the movie, and the director eventually decides he likes it better than what he was trying to shoot.

Comic Books

  • Tintin does this in Cigars of the Pharaoh. Oddly, the boss of the film company, Roberto Rastopopoulos, turns out to be the Big Bad.
  • In the Spider-Man Annual #4, Spidey disrupted a movie starring the Human Torch, believing his rival hero has gone mad, and is attacking Innocent Bystanders.
    • In a bit of an inversion, in the Ultimate series, Doc Ock attacks the Spider-Man movie set, and footage of the real Spidey fighting the real Doc Ock is put into the finished movie.
    • Naturally, this happens to Spidey at least once in the cartoons. It parallels a deception by Doctor Doom, leading to an effective Aesop about things not always being as they immediately appear.
    • And a third time in another comic, where sure enough, Spidey gets to 'help'. Pity Shocker found out about the movie.
    • Another early issue of Amazing Spider-Man had Spidey ruining a movie shoot under the belief that aliens were invading. One of the stuntmen would eventually turn to a life of crime since it ruined his career. This trope follows web-head around a lot for some reason.
    • Inverted in the first issue featuring the Green Goblin. The Goblin gets a movie studio to hire Spidey in hopes that he would have an opportunity to kill Peter and gain power in the criminal underworld. Spider-Man agrees. They start filming a "fight scene" and he begins to slowly come to the realization that Green Goblin isn't a stuntman but is rather an Ax Crazy villain trying to kill him.
  • Shade the Changing Man introduces Author Avatar Miles Laimling bellowing death threats behind a closed door. When Shade bursts in, he's yelling at an empty chair, testing out lines for a scene in the novel he's writing.
  • The Doctor Who Adventures comic strip "Creature Feature" has the Doctor rescue a woman from an alien, only to learn it's just a movie. In a bit of a subversion, though, he then discovers the alien is real, and imprisoned by the director, so he and the actress work together to save it.
  • An early episode of the Polish comic Orient Men involved the main character stopping a giant rampaging gorilla, only to find out it was a movie prop.
  • This happens to the hero of Lars Of Mars when he first arrives on Earth. Lars "saves" a woman from two robots only to realize they are actors in suits and she is a television producer. On the plus side, he ends up getting a job as an actor due to the misunderstanding.
  • This happened to Impulse in an issue of Young Justice.
  • In the new Green Lantern #1 (circa Sept. 2011) had Hal jump from his apartment into the building next door in an attempt to stop what he believed to be a case of domestic abuse. Only after he starts pounding the snot out of the guy does he (and the reader) see the film crew.

Film

  • The people shooting Aliens were confused at times by Paul Reiser's presence - since all the other actors were in military gear, they took him for a member of the film crew who didn't know enough to get out of the camera's way.
    • Given that Reiser's civvie clothes didn't look particularly futuristic, it was an easy mistake to make.
  • Used in Lethal Weapon 3 when Riggs interrupts what he thinks is a hostage situation, with Murtagh's daughter Rianne as the hostage, only to find out it was part of the film she was in (the reason he and Murtagh were there in the first place.) When he takes action - tackling the guy to the ground and getting his (rubber) gun away from him - it very nearly gets her fired, even when Riggs admits that it was his fault.
  • In Meet the Feebles, Robert finds a cockroach whipping a cow in the basement. He slaps the cockroach and asks if the cow's OK, only to find out that Trevor was shooting a porn movie.
  • Once. When filming the opening scene where someone runs off with the Guy's money, several bystanders didn't see the cameras and tackled the "thief".
  • Mr. Bean wanders into a film shoot in Mr. Bean's Holiday, "saving" the leading lady from an army of Nazis. The director puts him in as an extra, but Bean ruins the shot again by carrying an anachronistic camcorder. (By the way, the shoot was not for a war epic, but a yogurt commercial.)
  • This is essentially the basis for the entire plot of Galaxy Quest. Aliens see a Star Trek-like television series and abduct the actors, believing them to be space-faring heroes and wanting their help.
  • In Twice Upon a Time, Rod Rescueman saves Flora Fauna from what he thinks is an actual giant gorilla, but is just a King Kong-themed nightmare being filmed at the Murkworks.
  • Inverted in Jumanji. When Carl breaks into the old Parrish Manor, he tells the aunt not to worry, since the screams are probably just the television on too loud.
  • Played with in the feature-length version of The Wizard of Speed and Time when an attempt to steal Mike's footage spills over onto a scene being filmed. The camera keeps running until the action moves elsewhere, at which point the director emits a very lethargic "Cut."

Literature

  • In one of the Babysitters Club mysteries, the jewel thieves turn out to be actors reading a script... which the amateur detectives don't realize until they hear the "thieves" repeating almost verbatim the same argument they had had before, then joking about it when one of them messes up his line.
  • Don Quixote attacking a puppet show makes this Older Than Steam.
  • One Choose Your Own Adventure book has a lot of fun with this, placing the reader in a position where they can either blow up a spaceship or infiltrate it like an action hero. The former results in the destruction of a massively expensive prop, while the latter impresses the director so much you wind up a film star.
  • In Wyrd Sisters, Granny Weatherwax's initial inability to understand the concept of theatre leads to this trope. "He did it! We all seen him! He'd done it with a dagger!"
  • Crunch Ogre does this in the backstory of one of the Xanth novels. The curse fiends are not amused.

Live-Action TV

  • In the Blackadder the Third episode "Sense and Senility," Baldrick mistakes a pair of actors rehearsing as conspirators and tells it to the prince. Blackadder goes by to check in on them, fully expecting it to be a rehersal, but ends up turning them in as anarchist conspirators anyway because they were rude to him.
    • Earlier in the episode, George goes to the theatre with Edmund. After seeing the murder scene at the end of the play, he calls for the "perpetrator" to be arrested, not realising that it was made up. Immediately after, a genuine Bomb Throwing Anarchist storms the stage and threatens Prince George, who responds by applauding wildly and chiding his butler for "Not realising when something's made-up", thus managing to invoke both this trope, and All Part of the Show within a single scene.
  • Law and Order Special Victims Unit: The cops who respond to a 911 call at a hotel follow the sounds of screams to a room where some students are shooting a slasher film. The real body was in another room.
  • In one episode of LazyTown, Sportacus hears Stephanie crying out for help, and swoops in for the rescue, only to be told off by the kids for interrupting their game of pirates.
  • An episode of Quantum Leap begins with Sam starting surgery, only to learn that he leapt into an actor doing a medical scene on a TV show.
  • Subverted in the NCIS episode "Bloodbath". Team Gibbs arrive at a company in the business of cleaning up crime scenes, and sees people slumped in the foyer with bullet holes in them. They burst in with guns drawn, only to have their picture taken as the owner was staging the shot for an advertisement. He's annoyed at first, until he looks at the photo and realises that the addition of gun-toting feds actually improves the shot.
  • The Lonely Island trio were shooting a scene where an old lady gets mugged when Kiefer Sutherland attempted to come to the rescue. Rather than being angry, Andy Samberg et al. tried to get him to be on the show.
  • In a Code Red episode, the young firefighters, having come to an old movie studio for a fire code inspection, see an explosion in the lot and charge in to help. When they arrive to see a burning man flailing about, they don't do anything as the Title Sequence starts. Afterward, the reason for that inaction is revealed in a reverse shot: the firefighters saw the camera crew and realized to their chagrin that they unnecessarily interrupted a scene because they didn't ask if a crew was filming there.
  • An episode of Sanford and Son has Fred mistake a rehearsal of Desdemona's death in Othello for a murder. Hilarity Ensues. (That happened in Real Life too. See below.)
  • Star Trek: Voyager. In "Bride of Chaotica" photonic aliens enter the holodeck program "The Adventures of Captain Proton!" and mistake it for reality, starting a war with meglomaniac Mad Scientist Dr Chaotica. Voyager's crew try to tell them it's not real, but as the aliens can only detect lifeforms similar to themselves they believe Voyager is some kind of illusion. In the end the crew have to enter the game and help the aliens defeat Dr Chaotica—both hilarity and awesomeness ensue.
    • Considering many of their people had actually died in the war, you can understand their reluctance to believe it's an illusion.
  • One Monty Python's Flying Circus skit features a police officer who is also an accomplished actor, who (according to one review he received) utterly ruined one play he co-starred in by spoiling a rape scene "with his unscheduled appearance on stage and loud cry of 'What's all this, then?'"
  • One British satire series had a gangster interrupting a crime show by complaining that the reaction of the hostage wasn't realistic enough. When the director started shouting at him, he sticks a very real gun in his face and asks the makeup people to note the way the blood is draining from the director's face.
  • A recent episode of Castle has Castle mistakenly come to the conclusion that one of his mother's acting partners from when they were young, with whom who she had recently reconnected, was the murderer of the week. Rushing back, he discovers him holding a knife to his mother's neck; Beckett pulls out a gun and tells him to drop the weapon... it was a prop knife. They were rehearsing a scene, by way of reminiscing of old times.
  • On Batman, the Caped Crusader interrupts the Penguin filming a bank robbery scene for his movie. It's all part of the Penguin's plan, forcing Batman to star in the Penguin's movie to avoid a lawsuit.
  • The belgian Trigger Happy (a hidden camera show) did a subversion: a random passer-by turns down a corner and is confronted with a film crew, who starting acting like they're the actor.

Music

Video Games

  • In Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven (and its Xbox port, Return from Darkness,) Ayame's cutscene before fighting Tajima in Mission 1 has her hearing what sounds like a rape in progress. When she enters the room, however, it turns out it's just Tajima playing cards with one of the kidnapped villagers, but Ayame's intrusion angers him enough that the boss battle occurs anyway.

Western Animation

  • In The Simpsons episode "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge", Marge suspects that a houseguest (Becky) is trying to usurp her as the mom in the family. Marge later comes home to find Homer tied up in what looks like an S & M tableau, Lisa's arm's and legs stuck to the wall, Maggie stuck in a cage, and Becky holding a knife in her hands. When she is about to "kill" Homer, Marge snatches the knife from her and strangles her. It turns out that Bart is filming a scene in his movie. The twist is that Becky really did want to kill Marge (for reasons that are never explained), but decided not to because she didn't have a shovel to bury the corpse.
    • In another episode, Krusty's act involves him jumping into a tub of water, with hundreds of worms floating in the water. Bart gets the idea that the worms were a prank that Krusty didn't know about, and that Krusty would be really disgusted and his act disrupted if he dived into the worms. So Bart tries to interrupt Krusty and keep him from making his dive.
  • In Avatar: The Last Airbender, it was actually a magic trick, and everyone knew it in advance, but the "Oh noes, I can't control it!" part got a little too realistic for Aang.
  • In an episode of Kim Possible, Señor Senior, Jr. assembles a gang of thugs to rob the Tower of London. Unfortunately for Junior, who was never the brightest bulb in the box, he attacks a set for a movie about the Tower of London, which is being filmed in Australia. When Kim and Ron thwart his attack, and wonder how he did not even realize he was on the wrong continent, the director decided to make a movie about Kim and Ron instead. Do not expect this outcome unless you are already an international teen crimefighter.
  • Happened in Jackie Chan Adventures, where Jackie mistook an actor in costume for a new demonic monster. The stuntman thought it was still part of the script though and started to use wire-fu, with actual wires, before getting tangled in them and the director yelled "CUT!"
  • In Batman Beyond, Terry McGinnis fouls up two police traps in as many episodes, which annoys Police Commissioner Barbara Gordon to no end.
  • Hoist saved a supposedly out-of-control car in an episode of Transformers Generation 1; the director was initially annoyed, but then realized that Autobots would make good stunt vehicles.
  • In one episode of Sushi Pack, Ikura accidentally invades a scene being filmed for a primetime cable superhero show, believing it to be a real emergency. The actors adlib around him, and the director even hires him on for a few more episodes.
  • Zee naturally falls for this in The Zeta Project. It is actually returned to later in the episode, when he disguises himself and blends in among the actors.
  • Played with in an episode of The Replacements. Agent K disturbs the shot a few times on a visit to Hollywood. Ironically, she tries not to "fall for it again" when someone actually is in danger.
  • One episode of Captain Planet involving bats had a scene where a horror movie with bats as the antagonist was apparently being filmed. The first time Captain Planet saw it, he swooped in and saved the girl that was doing all the screaming, and then got chewed out by the director.
  • One episode of Alvin and The Chipmunks had Alvin hit his head, changing his personality so that he went around doing good deeds. He sees a black knight holding a princess captive, then snatches his sword and snaps it over his knee, causing the director to Face Palm.
  • The 1923 Felix the Cat short Felix in Hollywood uses this trope, making it at least as old as The Silent Age of Animation. Though in a twist, the directer enjoys Felix's interruption and offers him a contract.
  • Happens to June in The Life and Times of Juniper Lee episode "Star Quality". After she ruins their shot, the producers of The Wonderful World of Magic get the idea of making a reality TV show about Juniper... without her knowledge or permission.
  • A Running Gag in the Lego Star Wars special. Darth Vader will barge into scenes (theoretically taking place when he was still Anakin Skywalker) at random, forcing George to try and rein him in and point out that he's not in this scene.
  • Bugs Bunny does this to Elmer Fudd a couple of times; once in "Stage Door Cartoon" he tricks Elmer into doing a high-dive act on-stage, and in "Rabbit of Seville" he pushes Elmer onto the stage, forcing him to become part of the opera.


Real Life

  • In 2007, a man heard a woman screaming for help in a flat upstairs. He grabbed an antique sword, charged up, and busted down the man's door to find him watching a porno. That had to have been the worst day ever for everyone involved.
  • A petty criminal from Baltimore surrendered himself to the cast of Homicide: Life on the Street (on a location shoot), believing them to be actual cops called as backup by officers chasing him. This was used as the basis of a scene in the Documentary episode, with the twist that it was the characters chasing a criminal, who surrenders to the actual Homicide crew.
  • A community drama group in Wavertree on Merseyside left their theatre's windows and doors open due to the heat during a performance of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The neighbours mistook the screams they heard for a real murder and called the police, as described in this article.
  • One of the winners of the annual American Girl magazine story contest featured this at the climax of the story—the heroine was chasing a dog on her bike, and accidentally rode onto a film set in the middle of shooting. Of course, the director wasn't upset, but pleased with the new addition to the story, and she was added into the final cut of the film.
  • In Finland: the police were filming a staged car theft, but helpful bystanders rushed to stop the thief...three times in a row.
  • Often, when testing myths involving explosives, MythBusters will feature a shot where the neighbors have come around to complain because somewhere along the line, the crucial step of warning them about the explosives was notably missed.
  • Supposedly this happened while filming the 1960's Australian TV series Homicide. As Australian TV was a rather low budget affair at the time, a police officer didn't see the small film crew across the street from the 'robber' and arrested him.
  • There's a scene in the Doctor Who episode "Planet of Fire" where Peri starts drowning while swimming and Turlough rescues her in Lanzarote. The first take was interrupted when a German nudist thought Nicola Bryant was actually drowning and swam out to save her. The same guy later ruined another shot on the beach as he ran through it.
  • In an early production of Othello, the audience swarmed the stage in an attempt to intervene at the climax.
  • This didn't end well.
  • The Late Show with David Letterman filmed a bit where a ne'er-do-well stole something from announcer Alan Kalter during the show and ran out of the theater down the street. Kalter ran after him yelling "stop, thief!" Someone actually stopped the "thief."
  • This sort of situation may be why New York City requires that when a project shooting at an exterior location has a scene with prop firearms, weapons or actors in police uniforms, the producers must request that the NYPD Movie and TV Unit be assigned to the location.
  • During a Lonely Island production in which an old woman was beaten up, one man got out of his car to help her. That man was Kiefer Sutherland.
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