The below piece by Todd Everett is an perfect example of why the LA Times needs to hire someone who actually reads the entire paper - very day - before it gets published.
On Sunday, November 26, "Calendar" ran a piece, freelanced by Michael Ordoña, on the upcoming film "Turistas," and problems shooting in a remote location, on a low budget:
Roughing it set the right tone for a film that depicts a tourist's worst nightmare: Its photogenic young protagonists get lost in the jungle, where they are drugged and robbed. And then things get bad. [John] Stockwell, director of surf-and-sand movies "Blue Crush" and "Into the Blue," says a rattling experience on a Peruvian surfing trip motivated him to take on the project.
"I had been robbed by a group of 13-year-old, glue-sniffing kids and gotten shot at," he says in the safety of the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel. "I went to the cops, and they basically told us, 'If you give us $300, we'll let you kill these kids.' And I thought, if that kind of [stuff] is possible.... I came home and read the script and it resonated."
Today, November 29, Jay A. Fernandez, in his "Scriptland" columm, writes about the upcoming film "Turistas"...and, uh, problems shooting in a remote location, on a low budget. Well, it's not exactly the same:
Ross wrote "Turistas," which will launch the new youth-targeted genre division Fox Atomic, after hearing a public radio piece about a rampant myth in Central and South America that Americans and Europeans kidnap native kids to harvest their organs on an international black market. There have been several incidents of violence in this context, in which tourists have been beaten up, stabbed or set on fire by fearful locals. An early scene sets up this dynamic when one of the backpackers takes a photograph of a child and the villagers turn hostile.
As I've asked before: if Times editors don't read their own paper, why should they expect us to?
There must be one person with a wide range of general knowledge who can read the paper's stories as the get churned out all afternoon and evening to spot the obvious errors, typos and continuity problems such as the one above.
Now as for the irony of the day award. Perhaps if Mr. Everett read his own blog, he might have spotted the error in the satement that appears on the ide of his blog:
Have you ever been to City Hall? It's 37 stories tall, filled with people spending your money. -- Doug McIntyre
And City Hall, of course, is only 32 stories tall....even though a few sources over the years have mistakenly said 28 stories, which is the height of the tower on top of the 4 story base, and I have even seen it called 27 stories tall by sources saying that the observation room is on that floor.
But 37 stories? Nope, never heard that one before.
Thanks. I was, as noted, quoting McIntyre -- simply because I liked the joke.
ReplyDeleteI could have checked and corrected him, of course.
Keep up the good fight