{"id":41000,"date":"2017-11-12T06:00:23","date_gmt":"2017-11-12T11:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=41000"},"modified":"2017-11-12T06:07:59","modified_gmt":"2017-11-12T11:07:59","slug":"tv-im-watching-mindhunter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=41000","title":{"rendered":"TV I’m Watching: Mindhunter"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just discovered this show last week. It’s a Netflix original series very loosely based on a true story of how the FBI formed a special unit focused on using personality profiling to understand and catch serial killers. It’s set in 1977, and is careful about maintaining the look and feel of the time periodIncluding having the actors smoke. I love the attention to detail, but I often worry about actor safety. You don’t want your cast getting hooked on cigarettes just so you can make a TV show.<\/span>. This is a true story in the sense that this unit really existed and this is why it formed, but all of our main characters are fictional. I assume this was done so that we can have personality flaws and interpersonal conflict among the team without slandering anyone in the name of drama. <\/p>\n

The show is produced by David FincherAnd also Charlize Theron.<\/span>, who is most famous for directing the thrillers Seven (1995), The Game (1997), Fight Club (1999), and Gone Girl (2014), Zodiac (2007) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). He’s only a producer and not a director here, but it feels<\/em> like he directed it. It has all the hallmarks of his style<\/a>. It’s a slow-burn thriller TV series with Hollywood-style cinematography. <\/p>\n

I started watching the show because I know parts of it were shot here in my hometown of Butler Pennsylvania. I don’t know that this has ever happened before. I watched closely, but I didn’t see many places that were recognizably Butler. A lot of establishing shots are pretty tight on a single house or parking lot, probably because it’s really hard to construct a long shot that isn’t going to contain a bunch of modern anachronisms. <\/p>\n

But there was one particular bit that caught my eye. Halfway through the final episode of the first season, we get this shot:<\/p>\n

Main Street of Butler, PA... OR IS IT?<\/div>
Main Street of Butler, PA... OR IS IT?<\/div><\/p>\n

This shot is looking directly down main street. It pans right, over to the courthouse (the location of the next scene) which you can see in the header image of this post<\/a>. The blue building you see in the distance is Butler County Ford, which you can see in the the post A Walk Downtown<\/a> from earlier this year. It’s an impressive shot because they managed to find this location where (nearly) all the buildings can pass for 1977. This Google Streetview location<\/a> is a pretty close match to the camera position and will let you scout the site yourself. It’s not easy to find angles like this that won’t contain at least one<\/em> obviously out-of-place element that will ruin the whole thing. <\/p>\n

The punchline is that this shot of downtown Butler Pennsylvania pans to the right before bringing up the location title:<\/p>\n

WRONG!<\/div>
WRONG!<\/div><\/p>\n

You can’t see it in the above image, but they actually had a confederate flag flying over the courthouse, which feels really strange this far north of the Mason-Dixon line.<\/p>\n

Just for fun, I want to nitpick this opening shot a bit.<\/p>\n

I realize this probably feels a little Cinema Sins-ish, but I'm not really complaining about this shot. I'm just observing.<\/div>
I realize this probably feels a little Cinema Sins-ish, but I'm not really complaining about this shot. I'm just observing.<\/div><\/p>\n

A:<\/strong> This is a really big hill. It’s steep even by the standards of Western Pennsylvania. The real Rome Georgia is actually quite flat. Personal trivia: There’s a graveyard halfway up the hill, and my father<\/a> is buried there.<\/p>\n

B:<\/strong> Here’s the big naughty element in the shot. It’s a digital price display on a gas station sign. There’s no way you’d see something like that in 1977. I suppose the technology existed and you could theoretically build one, but it would probably be a display in a science museum. You certainly wouldn’t put it in front of a silly gas station.<\/p>\n

C:<\/strong> I didn’t even think of it until I saw this image and started studying it, but street lines were different back then. I don’t remember what they used to look like or when they changed, and I don’t know how to look it up. Now it’s bugging me. The only thing I can say for sure is that the parking spaces would have been different in order to accommodate the much larger and less nimble cars of the day.<\/p>\n

D:<\/strong> One thing that always stands out to me in period pieces is how all the cars look pristine and new. In the real 1977, there were still leftovers from the 60s and even the 50s running around. Cars weren’t as well-maintained as they were today, and so it wasn’t uncommon for cars to have dings, dents, rust spots, putty marks, mismatched fenders, cracked windows, and other signs of wear. Then again, this shot is supposedly from Georgia where it’s warm all year, and cars in that climate always look better. Freezing, slush, road salt, and ash are brutal to a car’s body. Obviously the real<\/em> reason these cars look so good is because these are all classic and restored cars. <\/p>\n

None of this should be taken as a criticism of the show. These are trivial inconsistencies in a minor shot, and “fixing” them would cost a fortune for almost no benefit. Even once technology gets good enough that we can seamlessly create the exact locations we need, we’ll probably still be using shots like this because it’s cheaper than researching and modeling a city in 3D. The only reason I noticed these issues was because I was watching a TV show and I suddenly saw some buildings that are visible out of my window, and that’s a real attention-getter. <\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

I really like the show. Highly recommended, provided you can stomach stories about a few real serial killers and their crimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just discovered this show last week. It’s a Netflix original series very loosely based on a true story of how the FBI formed a special unit focused on using personality profiling to understand and catch serial killers. It’s set in 1977, and is careful about maintaining the look and feel of the time periodIncluding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[608],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41000\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}