B Smith posted:I'm not offended by this stuff about getting the trains wrong, I'm just observing that even though movies are clearly not documentaries, the producers usually spend some time, effort, and money to get the cars, clothes, airplanes, and architecture more or less right, but consistently give zero attention to the trains.
That's because the average person has no clue what a 'real' train looks like as they only see them at grade crossings, while checking their Facebook status.
Military movies were often consistently awful for the details (and I don't even mean the 'infinity' ammo magazines, Mach 1-speed choppers or things like that) until it became clear to Hollywood that people really do know the stuff they're looking at. So soon after the current global conflict on terror, war movies have become way more accurate than ever before.
Such a shift for trains in movies will never happen, though, as there won't be a huge shift in the population who'll know that the Pennsy never ran in CA state.
I won't name the film, but a not-exactly-large-budget movie could have had me as a historical advisor. But once I talked with the people involved, I realized quickly on that the film wasn't going to be any more historically or militarily accurate than the "Captain America" movie (I know a guy who worked on that, he walked away early on, not wanting his name associated with such a travesty of the 40s). Most advisors' advice gets thrown out the window once the director says, "yeah, but I want it that way anyway". The only example I know of is from the filming of the well-done HBO series, "Generation Kill." the advisor to that series balked at a bad version of the USMC LAV vehicles and demanded the director allow them to be digitally rendered, or he'd walk from the set (or so I'm told). the end result was a good call as I've seen the LAVs they were going to use, and they looked awful.
