Have you ever watched a movie and noticed something strangely out of place, maybe some kind of factual error or mistake in editing? My girls have noted several faux pas in You've Got Mail. In the scene when Joe (Tom Hanks) sits down with Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) at the cafe, Joe takes his overcoat off twice. And in the scene on the yacht when Joe is mixing drinks with his dad, he's seen putting an olive in the martini, the camera angle changes to his dad, then when the camera returns to Joe, the olive is gone and he places another one in the drink.
Or in the movie Schindler's List there's a shot of a train arriving at a station in Czechoslovakia and electric cables are visible above the train tracks. Czechoslovakia didn't have electric trains before World War II.
I recently finished reading The Help, a southern novel if there ever was one. Set in the early 1960's in Alabama, one of the main characters lives on her daddy's cotton plantation. For whatever reason, from the moment the first scene flashed in my mind, that portion of the book was unfolding at the farmhouse where a childhood friend of mine grew up IN OHIO. Now I've lived in the south a LONG time. Over twenty years. And I've never seen a traditional mid-western farm house down south. I unsuccessfully tried to "switch" locations, change the house, knowing this character should be living in something more akin to Tara than the timeless farmhouse that I so clearly pictured in my mind. And the Ohio house doesn't remotely fit the descriptions. Scenes from the book took place on the porch, and the farmhouse doesn't HAVE a porch. No problem for my imagination. I simply changed the front foyer into an expanded porch. Seems like it would have been simpler to just imagine the common southern mansion with wrap-around porches. But no...the farmhouse stuck.Have you ever pictured a scene or place in a book inaccurately, but somehow couldn't make your mind play it any other way? Strange, I know...but I just couldn't help myself.
