I’m watching this movie Chappaquiddick on the flight and one thing I don’t understand is why the Ted Kennedy character speaks with an accent. Everybody else in the movie speaks normally. It’s quite jarring. Does anybody know?
I never heard of this story before, so I’m fascinated. There are many good movies out there. I wonder why I never watch movies.
“Does anybody know?”
Because it’s just a movie, and movies often overlook minor real-life details like regional accents, and most viewers don’t notice.
Did you notice that in “Gone with the Wind,” Clark Gable was the only “Southern gentleman” with no accent at all? His three co-stars — who were all British actors — sounded convincingly Southern.
Look at any movie scene that shows glasses of water on a table. As the characters talk, the water level in the glasses will change mysteriously during a long conversation, and the characters’ ties will magically move around.
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I thought maybe he was supposed to have an accent. I don’t know anything about this fellow.
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What causes this with the water and the ties?
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I’m so glad you asked! 🙂
Directors film multiple “takes” of every movie scene. In the final version of the movie, the director takes short snips from various “takes,” and then stitches them together to show the entire scene.
Between the multiple takes, table props get removed and replaced, water glasses get refilled, and articles of clothing move as bit, or are readjusted, as the actors leave the set and then return. In an outdoor scene, shadows lengthen and shorten and change position as the sun moves with repeated filming.
The changes are usually so subtle that only obsessive-compulsive types notice them. Sometimes they’re embarrassingly blatant. In the 1997 film “As Good as It Gets,”
there’s a scene where Jack Nicholson is talking with Helen Hunt, and his tie keeps disappearing completely and then reappearing.
Well, thank you for sharing because now I will fixate on every water glass in every movie and won’t be able to watch. :-)))))
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All of the Kennedy brothers had a distinct “Boston accent.” But in real life, many of Kennedy’s handlers also did.
During the Cuban missile crisis when everybody thought that Word War III was about to start, President John Kennedy pronounced Cuba “Cuber” in every speech that he gave.
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Oh, it’s supposed to be the Boston accent. Damn ugly, I got to say. I prefer the southern accent.
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I was raised with the idea that there was a “Harvard accent” and was shocked later in life to discover so many people had it. There are people in Connecticut who have it. My first impression was that they were not native speakers of English, it sounded so foreign.
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Exactly. It sounded foreign. That’s what was so weird.
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I haven’t seen this movie (don’t plan to), but I hope it does an accurate job of depicting how Ted Kennedy was obviously guilty of manslaughter and got away with it purely because of his privilege as a Kennedy.
In the trial after the incident, the judge knew that Kennedy was lying in court, so he lectured Kennedy about committing perjury, then took away his driver’s license and gave him a two-month suspended sentence for “leaving the scene of an accident.”
Some reviewers of this movie are comparing Trump’s womanizing behavior to Kennedy’s. So far, Trump hasn’t drowned anybody.
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Well, it did wreck his chances at the presidency, about which a present-day snowflake Republican would whine that his “life was ruined” by “false suspicions” or something! And we got Nixon in 1972 instead.
My mother was convinced he had done this on purpose to kill Kopechne, because she was pregnant. Unrealistic, it seemed to me, since he was risking death himself as well. Now there is a study, I see, saying Kopechne was asleep in the back seat and there was another woman in the front, and they didn’t realize Kopechne was there. Supposedly he lied to keep her identity under wraps. Curiouser and curiouser. http://www.mvtimes.com/2016/08/03/donald-nelson-pitches-new-theory-chappaquiddick-tragedy/
Concerning Nixon, nobody drowned in Watergate, either.
After the accident, Ted Kennedy reportedly was callous enough to enjoy “Chappaquiddick jokes” like this one:
Kopechne: “But Ted, what if I’m pregnant?”
Kennedy: “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
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Dreidel, you Britta’d the joke:
Kopechne: “But Ted, what if I’m pregnant?”
Kennedy: “I’ll drive off that bridge when we come to it.”
There was also the infamous National Lampoon Volkswagen parody ad:
Some people mistook it for a real ad and the fine folks at Volkswagen were not amused.
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Yes, different crimes.
Enjoy those jokes, I doubt it. They were told a lot though, and a certain type of man took great pleasure in them.
NYT says this film is recent and is “fake history.” I wonder. The third passenger theory makes a lot of sense. I hadn’t heard it before. http://www.ncsociology.org/torchmagazine/v903/Nelson.pdf
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Oh wow. This is fascinating. I knew nothing of it until now.
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I’ve seen part of the movie now. It’s not good enough to really watch unless you are somewhere like a plane. And it does make Teddy K. look like a complete ass. And he may have been — we always thought so — although if it’s true he did not realize she was in the car, it’s slightly different. STILL, everybody, NEVER leave the scene of an accident / never don’t call immediately. I once had a minor, victimless accident (dented my car on a tree branch I had not seen) and didn’t have a phone on me. Called when I got to a phone to report, largely because I knew I’d need a police report for insurance. STILL was grilled by police, why did you leave? and they were only satisfied upon confirming that a/ I had in fact called at first opportunity, within 30 minutes and b/ the dent showed no evidence of having hurt anyone / anything. It’s really suspicious he didn’t know you have to call, although I guess he was less worried about insurance than I and although he felt at home where he was, almost as if on private property. STILL.
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The movie is no masterpiece, that’s for sure. But movies on an airplane are like airplane food. You eat it because nothing else is available. Of course, I’d so much rather they showed Michael Moore’s new movie. :-)))
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Oh yeah, in the movie he’s clearly guilty. The forensic guy in the movie says she could have easily been saved if Kennedy called for help. There was a large time lapse where she could have been saved.
This movie is no apology for him. He’s depicted as a cowardly bastard.
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