Bloopers, flubs, gaffes, goofs, zany mistakes . . . they're in movies all the time.
And, let's face it, we all enjoy them. Even the blunders in the movies we love.
There's something about finding a mistake in a multimillion-dollar motion picture that makes us feel just a little bit superior to all those rich and powerful Hollywood hotshots. And we also love sharing them with our friends . . . which is all the easier to do with the advent of home video.
Of course, sometimes, a blooper is nothing more than a muffed line. And those can get pretty tedious when they are strung together. But often it's more than that. In fact, it's kind of a guilty pleasure to notice a water glass that is full or empty, depending on the camera angle, or a collar that buttons and unbuttons in close-ups or medium shots.
These illustrate the most common problems — continuity errors. It's difficult to ensure the actor is wearing the same shirt the same way walking both in and out of a door, when the shots may be separated by weeks on a shooting schedule. Period movies — whether set in the past or the future — have their own special problems. "Gladiator" and "The Matrix," for example, are filled with continuity errors.
And factual or historical errors in period films are also common, among the most famous being a shot of a car in "The Godfather" that clearly shows an inspection sticker in an era when there was no such thing.
These days, movies almost revel in their own mistakes, often tagging the film with blooper outtakes. I can remember when Burt Reynolds' redneck "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Cannonball Run" comedies started the trend by showing bloopers alongside end credits. A prestige picture during the same period, Peter Sellers' "Being There," did the same thing, and then Jackie Chan's Asian imports.
Even animated films got into the act, spoofing the outtakes trend, with "Toy Story" leading the way.
The latest forum for displaying outtakes is the DVD home-video format, which often includes outtakes among its "extras."
For me, though, it takes a little of the steam out of enjoying bloopers to have movie professionals find them for you. It's more fun to spot a mistake yourself — to be so surprised that you go back and look at it again, to be sure you saw what you thought you saw.
For example:
— I recently enjoyed the DVD of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," which includes the theatrical trailer — but I was surprised to see that the trailer misidentifies two of the characters! Clint Eastwood is labeled "The Good" in both the trailer and the movie itself, but the trailer says Eli Wallach is "The Bad" and Lee Van Cleef is "The Ugly," while the movie identifies Wallach as "the ugly" and Van Cleef as "the bad."
— A weird variation on this is "Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy," which came out on DVD this week. Throughout the film, the comics are referred to by their real names, "Bud Abbott and Lou Costello." But the end credits list them as playing, respectively, "Peter Patterson and Freddie Franklin"!
— I also recently watched the documentaries on the "Special Edition" DVD of "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," one of which points out that the film's credits contain a typo. It's a spelling error in the screenwriting credit — "Base on the book Red Alert by Peter George." It should, of course, read "based."
— "Dr. Strangelove" isn't the only movie with a misspelling in the credits. And it's even worse when a name is misspelled. Take Frank Capra's 1948 film "State of the Union," which stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The opening credits spell Hepburn's first name as "Katherine." If that's not enough, there are also misspellings of character-actor Adolphe Menjou (as "Adolph") and cinematographer George Folsey (as "Falsey"). (Hepburn and Menjou's names are correct in the closing credits, however.)
— Other wrong name spellings in movie credits I've noticed over the years: Alec Guinness, whose his last name is spelled "Guiness" in the end scrawl on "The Bridge On the River Kwai" (1957). Robert De Niro's first film, the 1969 comedy-drama "The Wedding Party," lists him as "DeNero." And the 1989 TV disaster flick "Fire and Rain" bills Angie Dickinson as "Dickenson."
There are many more, of course; whole books have been written about movie mistakes.
And while purists may view the celebration of bloopers as some sort of sacrilege, I think movie buffs should relax a bit and recognize them as simply one more extended bit of entertainment to be gleaned from the cinematic experience.
E-mail: hicks@desnews.com