Details, Details

By Jim Tuohy

The current movie “Hitchcock” points out that during the making of “Psycho,” director Alfred Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, caught a mistake that had gone undetected in the editing process.

Janet Leigh, whose character lay eyes-open dead on the bathroom floor of a room at the Bates Motel, swallowed.  Just a frame, but enough that a cut was required, according to the story.

I don’t know how anyone watching a movie at regulation speed can catch a mistake of one frame’s length–there are 24 of them, I believe, per second–but that is not what interests me as much as what the result would have been if “Psycho” had been released to the general public with an easier-to-spot swallow (say, one that lasted half a second).  If I had seen it, I might have assumed the swallow was intentionally left in for those of us with exceptional powers of observation to catch. I would have assumed that Marion, Janet Leigh’s character, was too big a star to kill off so early and that she would somehow reappear as the plot advanced. Therefore, when she didn’t reappear I would have been confused and disgusted about the sloppy editing. Of course, I am often confused and disgusted, so I would have survived that particular disappointment without major damage to my psyche.

Tiny mistakes can often change the entire meaning of a piece of art, songs providing frequent examples. We are all familiar with the way we, as children and even as adults, have heard lyrics wrong and tried to make our own sense of them. I always thought the words to one of those Christmas songs, “Winter Wonderland,” included the passage: “In the meadow we can build a snowman, and pretend that he is parched and brown/He’ll say ‘Are you married?’  We’ll say ‘No, man, but you can do the job when you’re in town.’”

Now, as everyone knows who is acquainted with the lyrics of stupid Christmas songs, the protagonists in “Winter Wonderland” said “Parson Brown,” not “parched and brown.”  Parched and brown makes no sense whatsoever, and  I guess I just dismissed its nonsensicalness to the generally low standards of the holiday song genre. But substituting “ Parson Brown “ isn’t too much of an improvement: what one ends up with are a couple of grown people, old enough to consider marriage, entertaining questions from an inanimate blob in a snow-strewn field. One of the questions concerns their matrimonial status, Are you married?  And they answer this representation of an Anglican cleric–who under ecclesiastical law is the authorized leader of an entire parish–by calling him not Parson, not Reverend, but “man.”

Actually, I kind of like that part–the absence of obsequiousness before authority. Even better would have been if they decided the figure in white was the pope and called him “Pops.”

Apparently you don’t have to be a thick-headed amateur like me to hear things wrong . Sometimes the pros do too.

Arthur Prysock, the basso jazz and blues singer who had a sensitive touch with ballads, recorded the standard “My Funny Valentine” back in the 1960s. It was an excellent piece of work except for one word. He said “your” instead of “a.” Part of  the Lorenz Hart lyric is “don’t change a hair for me, not if you care for me,” an expression of love for every intangible aspect of  his odd lover in spite of  her not possessing, to say the least, conventional attributes (“Your looks are laughable, unphotographable”). But Prysock sings “Don’t change your hair for me,” switching a touching expression of ethereal devotion to a mundane, “I like your hairdo.”

The singer Buddy Greco recorded Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” a few years after Frank Sinatra recorded it with a Nelson Riddle arrangement. After listing experiences many find exciting but the narrator finds boring, Porter’s final line is “Yet I get a kick out of you.” Sinatra and Riddle added  a hip little riff on the final line by throwing in “…I get a kick—you give me a boot—I get a kick out of you.”

Greco, strongly influenced by Sinatra, ended his version with the line “…I get a kick—you give me a boost—I get a kick out of you.” Greco stole, but he stole ineptly. The word  boot, of course, has a direct and clever relationship to the word kick; boost does not. If Greco used boost as an intentional change, it was a fruitless exercise in improvisation; the imprecise word just pointed out the passage’s imitativeness and made you yearn for the Sinatra-Riddle version.

I’m always curious how easy-to-spot mistakes make it through various editing processes. In movies if a phone is off the hook in a room, say, where a body has been discovered, the phone is always emitting that irritating bee-bee-bee-bee sound that indicates the phone is off the hook. In real life that sounds goes only for 45 seconds before the receiver falls silent. Could it be that no one in Hollywood has ever let a phone off the hook more than 45 seconds?

In television, too, a wrong word or fact can be distracting. There is a popular, well written and well acted television series called “The Good Wife” currently running on CBS. It’s about the romantic and professional adventures of a fictional Cook County State’s Attorney and his wife and her law firm associates. Besides having sets that look nothing like courtrooms anywhere in Cook County, there is a sub-plot about the living arrangements for the state’s attorney’s family. When the state’s attorney was new to the job they lived in a big house in the upscale North Shore suburb of Highland Park, but after he cheated on her they separated and the house was sold. Now, however, there are discussions about the wife buying it again because the children like it there.

There are plenty of smart suburbs the producers could have selected as the place a Cook County state’s attorney might live if he chose not to live in Chicago—Evanston, Wilmette, Winnetka, Kenilworth and Glencoe on the North Shore alone, and dozens of others  northwest, west and southwest (Barrington Hills, Forest Park , Palos Hills, for example, if you wanted to use a town with a two-word name). The writers chose instead Highland Park, which is in Lake County, a place where by law the Cook County State’s attorney cannot live. You would think someone involved in the development of an expensive TV production like “The Good Wife” would have done enough research to suggest an easy one-word edit: replace “Highland”  with “Forest.”

One Saturday in 1992 I was in the real Criminal Courts building at 26th and California, a much grittier place than the Toronto-modern sets in “The Good Wife.” I was in the chambers of Judge Mike Toomin. It was the day they were shooting the opening scene of the movie “The Fugitive.” Spread around were Harrison Ford ,wearing a beard, and his wife sitting on a couch; the film’s producer sitting in a chair in front of Toomin’s desk; Toomin behind the desk; the actor Andy Romano, who played the judge in the opening scene, sitting next to Toomin; and a couple of lawyers standing with  a couple of actors who would play lawyers in the scene. The director Andy Davis was in and out.

What Davis was doing was trying to avoid little mistakes. He had the actors who were playing defense and prosecuting attorneys going over their scripts with a real prosecutor and a real defense lawyer. Romano was doing the same thing with Toomin. Davis was keeping the dialog loose. If the words as written rang false, the real officers of the court could suggest changes. At one point Davis noticed the nameplate on Toomin’s desk. It usually sat on his bench in the courtroom, but had been replaced there by a generic black laminated sign that said  “Judge Bennett” in white lettering. It was the kind of desk sign seen on office desks everywhere. Toomin’s nameplate, on the other hand, was a handsome solid oak block fronted by a square brass plate with “Judge Toomin” engraved on it, the standard style for Cook County judges. Davis admired the piece and picked it up.

“Boy, it’s heavy,” he said.

“I know,” said Toomin.

“So does Urso,” said Mike Boland, another Criminal Court judge, who had stopped by to catch the action. Boland was referring to Judge Joseph Urso and an incident that occurred after he had sentenced a defendant to 20 years.

“The guy grabbed the plaque off Urso’s bench and threw it at his lawyer. Nearly knocked his head off. Urso tacked on five more years,” said Boland.

Davis decided Toomin’s nameplate would look better than the one the prop department had provided. An assistant pointed out that the name of the judge in the movie script was Bennett.

“Change it to Toomin,” said Davis.

Meanwhile, the producer was most worried about whether or not Ford’s character in the movie, Dr. Richard Kimble, would have received the death penalty for the murder he was convicted of. Toomin felt the facts fell short of warranting death. Ford wanted the death penalty kept in the story because it added dramatic tension.

“Scott Turow told me death could be given for a crime like that,” he said.

“Not in this jurisdiction,” Toomin said.

“Have you ever given a death sentence?” the producer asked.

“Yes, I have,” answered Toomin.

“What do you think the penalty for this would be?”

“Fifty years, probably. You might be able to go to 75,” Toomin said.

Harrison Ford had the most theatrical clout, however, and Andy Romano gave him the death penalty a few hours later. And in spite Davis’s efforts to get details right, I noticed when I saw the movie that a detached telephone headset  was going bee-bee-bee-bee at the scene of a crime.

Coincidently, when “The Fugitive” came out in 1993, a former photographic assistant of my pal Jack Lane was nearly involved in a fatal traffic accident on the way home from watching the movie at a suburban theater. This assistant had a masterful way of misplacing words. In recounting her close call with death she said:

“It was one of those moments when your whole life passes between your eyes.”