Typecasting: The Use (and Misuse) of Period Typography in Movies
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.
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.
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.
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"
So you noticed the supposedly wrong typeface, but did not notice that the sign was in the incorrect language.
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.
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.
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?