Cut!!
Donna Tartt. Michael Dibdin. And now Colin Cotterill. (And others.) Excellent writers all. So how can they, and their editors, not know the difference between further and farther. Which is:
Farther means literal distance. Further everything else.
So when you read a sentence like: 'The step was further than he'd calculated; annoyingly further.' (Colin Cotterill; Thirty-three Teeth) he has no idea how right he is.
In film recurring typos are worse. If the misspelling of the possessive its has its equal (its by far the most misspelled word in the English language, ax, at two letters, percentage-wise its equal), it surely would be elevator doors. Every elevator has two doors: the carriage door, and the floor door. Yet in easily 90 percent of films made in Hollywood (to this day), they show elevators with one door, usually the floor door. So stand to the back of that elevator or it's going to be a bumpy night. I have seen Fred Astaire movies where the floor pattern doesn't even change -- it goes straight into the elevator.
Another annoying big screen typo: chessboards. A properly set up chessboard has a white square to the right of each player. If you were to rotate the board there would be a black square to the right of each player. And as often as not a Hollywood film makes this mistake -- twice at least in Searching for Bobby Fischer.
Savannah is a very picturesque town, which many a film producer has tried to take advantage of even though no good film has ever been shot there. (The Gingerbread Man and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil are the worst films of Robert Altman and Clint Eastwood.) Down by the river one day, near the cobblestones and catwalks, there was a serious production taking place -- crew standing around, boom, white screen, director's chair, script girl (which, you'll notice, is always in English in film credits, no matter how foreign the film; that's no typo) -- and the director was just about to yell 'Action!' on two geezers playing chess.
"Excuse me," I shouted from above, "but you have that chessboard set up wrong." I then explained to him about the white squares, which was followed by five seconds of total silence while the director decided whether to thank me or tell me to shut up. And unlike Alan Parker in another film production many years ago, this director said, "Thank you." And proceeded to rearrange the chessboard.
Gaining in annoyance awareness: the Hollywood suitcase. Always empty. I'm not talking about big musical numbers, I'm talking about a guy crossing the street. You can always tell when a suitcase is empty. Real scene-killer. It's like seeing on a cab in a Hollywood film a phone number with a 555 area code. You do know what a 555 area code means, right?
It means Hollywood film.
Farther means literal distance. Further everything else.
So when you read a sentence like: 'The step was further than he'd calculated; annoyingly further.' (Colin Cotterill; Thirty-three Teeth) he has no idea how right he is.
In film recurring typos are worse. If the misspelling of the possessive its has its equal (its by far the most misspelled word in the English language, ax, at two letters, percentage-wise its equal), it surely would be elevator doors. Every elevator has two doors: the carriage door, and the floor door. Yet in easily 90 percent of films made in Hollywood (to this day), they show elevators with one door, usually the floor door. So stand to the back of that elevator or it's going to be a bumpy night. I have seen Fred Astaire movies where the floor pattern doesn't even change -- it goes straight into the elevator.
Another annoying big screen typo: chessboards. A properly set up chessboard has a white square to the right of each player. If you were to rotate the board there would be a black square to the right of each player. And as often as not a Hollywood film makes this mistake -- twice at least in Searching for Bobby Fischer.
Savannah is a very picturesque town, which many a film producer has tried to take advantage of even though no good film has ever been shot there. (The Gingerbread Man and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil are the worst films of Robert Altman and Clint Eastwood.) Down by the river one day, near the cobblestones and catwalks, there was a serious production taking place -- crew standing around, boom, white screen, director's chair, script girl (which, you'll notice, is always in English in film credits, no matter how foreign the film; that's no typo) -- and the director was just about to yell 'Action!' on two geezers playing chess.
"Excuse me," I shouted from above, "but you have that chessboard set up wrong." I then explained to him about the white squares, which was followed by five seconds of total silence while the director decided whether to thank me or tell me to shut up. And unlike Alan Parker in another film production many years ago, this director said, "Thank you." And proceeded to rearrange the chessboard.
Gaining in annoyance awareness: the Hollywood suitcase. Always empty. I'm not talking about big musical numbers, I'm talking about a guy crossing the street. You can always tell when a suitcase is empty. Real scene-killer. It's like seeing on a cab in a Hollywood film a phone number with a 555 area code. You do know what a 555 area code means, right?
It means Hollywood film.
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