All the King’s Lorem Ipsum

September 24th, 2006 · No Comments

I spent much of my last semester at school looking at films from the 1940s and 1950s frame by frame, looking for damage and decomposition, but also checking out the content of the image, the style and design of rooms and clothes and signs and newspapers. I’ve always been fascinated by newspapers made up for movies; there’s the article you’re supposed to notice, and maybe the name of the paper and the date of the issue, but there’s also the rest of the page of filler material, articles about transit strikes and bond issues and society marriages, that has to be there, too, for the paper to look convincing.

Aimee and I watched All the King’s Men today, and besides the fact that the typefaces in the newspapers looked all wrong, an argument I’ll leave to Mark Simonson, who’s written entertainingly about the mistakes movie designers make here and here, I noticed something very strange in one of the articles. Three or four times in the film, we see an article about Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins) and the woman he marries, in a file gathered by Jack Burden (Jude Law). The last time it came on the screen, I tried to read a little more than just the headline and photo caption, which had caught my attention the previous few times. Out of the corner of my eye, in the second or third column, I clearly saw the words “Mark McGwire” and “Roger Maris’ 37 year-old home run record,” or something along those lines. Now I understand putting a joke in, as the art directors did when they awarded Jack Burden the “Jon Stewart Journalism Award” in an article that we see in a scrapbook later on in the film, but putting in a sentence about a real event, 40 years after the events of the film, just seems careless to me. If you see the film, keep your eye out for this moment; Aimee thinks I’m making it up.

Tags: Film