21st February, 1999 We'll just edit that out later

Well, turns out my first column was a bigger hit than I expected.

From the moment I wrote it almost, people have been asking me "So what IS with the octopus?". Well, considering that it's just killing you to wait any longer, I decided I better get off my butt and write my next column.

"Don't worry about it ...we'll just edit that out later" is no doubt what William Wyler, Director of the famous Charlton Heston film Ben Hur said when during the chariot scene he spotted that one of the trumpeters is wearing a watch. But unfortunatly he must have forgot, or maybe he thought "who's going to notice that?". Either way, that watch is still there, and is a part of movie mistake history.

Interesting as that may be, your sitting there thinking, "Whats that got to do with an octopus?". Well, similar to William Wyler, Steven Spielberg while making the Goonies, no doubt thought "We'll edit that out later". but the difference being he actually did, a little too well. Due to the movies length etc etc, Spielberg was forces to cut several scenes from the movie.

In one of these cut scenes the Goonies encounter an octopus, while swimming to the Spanish boat. The octopus is supposedly driven away when Data throws his radio into its mouth. Though Spielberg obviously didn't think the consequences of this through, because that very scene is refered to at the end, the octopus is mentioned to the reporters on the beach in the finished film, even though the scene was cut.

So it looks as thought even the great man himself can make a mistake, hey we're all only human *smiles*.

I will give him some credit in saying, that was a while back, things surely have improved, it would nearly be impossible to have a mistake in a movie now days, especially with all the technology they use in the latest block buster productions. We'll you would be wrong.

In the most recsent of films The Mask of Zorro Director Martian Campbell failed to recall that his movie is set around the year 1841, because a scene that involved a boiler room shows a pressure guage that measures in metric units, which to Campbells dismay I'm sure, did not become adopted in Mexico till the 1860s. The credit for spoting that one goes to MadDog *smiles*.

Heres another good one, in Anaconda, the film involving giant snakes, a boat goes into a water fall and reverses out again. Maybe director Luis Llose ran out of time or just decided to take a short cut, because in order to make the the boat back out of the waterfall, the peice of film that shows the boat going INTO the waterfall was just reversed, this is obvious becuase the water can be seen.. falling...UP.

So next time you watch a movie and you spot something that makes you go "huh?", just think to your self, some director is sitting somewhere going "If only I had edited that out".

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