Typecasting: The Use (and Misuse) of Period Typography in Movies | Hacker News Reader

Typecasting: The Use (and Misuse) of Period Typography in Movies

ms-studio.com

89 pointsssp30 comments

While movies for sure attempt to 'get it all right' they rarely if ever do so (German soldiers speaking English and so on), I highly doubt that the use of the wrong lettering in a movie is going to raise many eyebrows in light of the liberties that the movie industry normally takes when they portray some scene from the past.

Obviously a plane flying through a middle ages scene is going to stand out, maybe some car buff will realise that that model car wasn't out yet when the movie supposedly played and so on. But there are limits to how much research can be done to get a movie 'right' and I think that this is firmly across the 'don't care' line if only because not enough people would ever notice.

Most movies are made to be profitable, not to be 100% correct.

..maybe some car buff will realise that that model car wasn't out yet when the movie supposedly played..

This is pretty much the same scenario. The author even says as much in the article: Noticing little slips like this in movies can happen to anyone with knowledge in any specialized field.

This reminds me of the time I sat through six hours of the HBO miniseries "Angels in America" (set in the 1980's) and spent the whole time vaguely unsettled that almost nothing in the movie looked like the 1980's at all, including blatantly 2003-era Coca-Cola cans.

Also, a lot of movies are intended to be the realisation of an artistic vision, and getting small details 100% correct generally is not part of that vision.

I don't think the German soldiers speaking English is a research problem, so it seems to be a rather contrived illustration of your point.

Whereas I can see your point, I don't particularly agree with it. When it comes to domains where I do have special knowledge of a subject, I see the errors on my own. When it comes to domains I don't have that special knowledge, I always find it fascinating to learn that Hollywood are just as incompetent across those fields as well. As well as finding out how those domains differ from the Hollywood rendition of them.

In other countries it is fairly customary for movies to be spoken in the original language of the locality where they were filmed. I didn't mean it as a research issue, I meant to use it as an illustration of it being a marketing decision.

Movies in German subtitled in English are not going to be very popular in the United States.

This is hardly specialized knowledge but in 24 after every commercial break we were treated to a digital clock displaying the current time. They were using some digital clock number font that was not monospaced so the numbers spread and shrink right in front of you as the clock "ticks", which of course would never happen on a real clock face.

This is the only implausible part of '24' I noticed too.

Also, if you noted the time on the show before and after the commercials, less time passed in the show than in real life.

I can understand how something like that jumps out for a person who really knows his typography. But still, the newspapers says things newspapers would say, etc. IT people has sat through two decades (if not more) of computers being fully magical devices, both in appearance and function, with filmmakers not taking the slightest step towards caring if what they put in the film is realistic.

OK, I just sounded like a bitter parent that had to walk uphill through the snow to get to school, but these are really minor points.

Typesetters aren't the ones that concern themselves with the content of the newspaper.

This reminds of astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson's quip with the Titanic, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAD25s53wmE#t=26m12s

The best part, Cameron: "Last I checked, Titanic grossed world-wide $1.2B. Imagine how much more it could have grossed if we got the sky right"

At least that story has a happy ending.

I didn't know if you were referring to Titanic and being sarcastic.

It depends on your perspective. The Titanic's sinking was a reminder that nothing is perfect, and that you should never avoid reasonable precautions (like having enough life boats).

In the end, more lives were probably saved in the years since than were lost on the Titanic due to more planners and decision makers being careful.

So you noticed the supposedly wrong typeface, but did not notice that the sign was in the incorrect language.

Well, it means, that the viewer can read the sign, which is quite practical. For example, in Czech dubbed TV series (like The Simpsons), a narrator has to read every sign that has any meaning to the plot, which would be quite weird, if you weren't used to it, and then even surprised that this is not the case in the original version. (As a bonus, it makes the video even more redundant, so you can take the whole episode, rip the audio track, and just listen to it :-))

Nitpicking on their review of "Dead Again":

>Technically, it was possible to kern wood type by physically cutting away parts of the type, but it would be a rather impractical practice at a newspaper. [referring to the "LT" kerning in a newspaper]

True. But it would be in their interest to make it into a single glyph for printing purposes, as it would save space. (not sure if that'd fall into the "ligature" category or not, as they're not visually joined)

Mark wrote a similarly interesting article about the typography in Mad Men a couple of years ago too.

http://www.marksimonson.com/article/236/mad-men-mad-props

I've also noticed a couple of glitches on _Mad Men_. In the first season, the glass doors of the upscale-wanna-be department store the agency is working with has machine cut film lettering, a poorly spaced script, rather than hand painted letters. It's not impossible there was some kind of manual, stencil based system in use in the 60's, but I'm not aware of it.

Also, a lot of the hand drawn layouts and designs pinned up on the wall in Sal's office are actually pages from Andrew Loomis's excellent book _Creative Illustration_. And most of the designs would have been more at home in the late 30's to mid 40's. But hey, in this case it's just wallpaper...

Still a great series, and as a child of the late 50's, early 60's I can say they get an amazing amount of details right.

There was a hullabaloo last week with the premiere of Season 4. Arial was suspected as a culprit, thankfully someone tracked down the new SCDP logo and sure enough it's accurate:

(If you aren't spoiler free on seasons 1 through 3, don't look)

http://burndownblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/mad-men-font-fa...

Unless the film is supposed to be a faithful historical reproduction of a specific period in time; I don't think it matters.

Postmodernism is very difficult to achieve without liberal use of anachronisms. I think many of the films referenced have postmodern traits.

Not to mention "Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid" he explicitly says it's a parody, and silly anachronism and poor design choices are pretty standard for parody.

If I were doing that film today, I could see using Comic Sans for the newspaper.

Indeed. Hollywood spends too damned much time trying to get period details right & omitting what matters. Steven Spielberg puts enormous effort into the visual details of films that are hollow at the center (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List).

That's the first time I've ever heard somebody say that Schindler's List is hollow. I find it to be very moving and an excellent portrayal of the horrors of the Holocaust.

What don't you like about it?

The story itself is moving, as heroism in a good cause will be. But making art requires more than such a story as its point of departure.

The movie has what I regard as Spielberg's usual flaws: a taste for cheap trick, the quick laugh, the tremendous visual sense without much behind it. I'm sure that anyone in occupied Poland who could afford to look like that, did. I gain no particular insights into what anyone in particular might have felt or thought. Watch Europa, Europa or The Pianist, and I think you will see much superior movies--though these are even more on the periphery of the true horrors than Schindler's List.

For "the true" read "worst of the".

The novel _Cane River_, inflicted on us by a neighborhood book club, had what purported to be facsimiles of backwoods Louisiana newspapers of the late 1800s, with typography that looked to me like 1970s phototype. I was pretty well inured to anachronisms of the novel, of fact and of language both, but that did annoy me.

"Chocolat (2000, Mirimax) wasn’t a bad movie." Actually, it was pretty dumb.

My favorite example is in "The Good Shepherd," when the list of members of the on-campus Nazi-sympathizing organization is typeset in Times New Roman and printed on an ink-jet printer...in about 1935.

Wait, do you really care about THIS?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com