Do your research

In two recent movies - "30 Days of Nights" and "Mystery, Alaska" part of the plot line was that people in the Sheriff's office were involved. There are no sheriffs or for that matter counties in Alaska. Alaska is broken up in boroughs - some organized (that is there is they have an actual government type organization) and some disorganized (no government.) The boroughs however do not have police powers and thus no police or sheriffs or anything. There are only city police, state troopers, and in many villages one or two Village Public Safety Officers (VSOPs). The VSOPs are mostly local people who have gone through some special training and who deal with small legal problems until the State troopers can fly or snow machine in and deal with the large problems.

The point is not how the Alaska police are organized but that the writers either did not bother to do their research or did not care. It is very discordant when an obvious mistake like this made. It is also lazy and unprofessional. Just one person's opinion but fact checking seems important to me and when people don't do it it makes suspending my disbelief a bit more difficult.

If anyone ever got it right I might not bristle so much but it seems that no one ever gets it right. It is something like when people in shoot-em-ups use wind up guns that never have to be reloaded. I'm sorry, I think it is laziness not dramatic license. You can write around problems.

In Barrow you could make them city police or make them state troopers. Either one would work just fine. If you wrote about New York City and the police there and said there was only one police precinct in the whole city you would be wrong. It might make it easier on the writer but it would also make the willing suspension of disbelief more difficult for your audience. Your job is not just to write and tell a story but to make it easy on your audience to be engaged in the story and to accept it.

I am sure I get things wrong all of the time. I am just as sure that I spend a huge amount of time fact checking and trying to be sure that the underlying facts in my work is as close as I can make it to the "real" world (if such a thing exists.) As an example, I recently wrote a screen play set in late 15th - early 16th century London. I made sure all of the buildings existed at the time. I made sure that no word spoken by any charecter had come into the lexicon after 1520. I checked to be sure that no food item or spice or utensel came into use after the time period. This despite the fact that food and eating were merely background. I checked with an expert on weapons of the era to make sure that I described and my charecters used only weapons that were period. Since I did a falconry scene, I checked with an expert on falconry to make sure not only that that i used proper terms but that I used the proper birds for the people's political and social stations. I checked into the legal system because there was a question of inheritence and I rewrote one entire section of my screen play because of a very obscure point in British law. It would have been easier to ignore it but it was a major flaw in the script.

This is not to say that I did not take some license with reality. I took out the "thee's" and "thou's" that were in use in the period to make it easier on a modern audience. I used the more modern you and me in an attempt to help broaden my audience and to make them more comfortable with the dialog. I also made some errors and had them pointed out me and made a decision to keep them in for the comfort of my audience. For instance, I cited to the bible and used the post 1550 citation format. i.e. John 12:16. According to a friend who is also a bible history scholar, that form of citation was not in use in 1525. It would have been just John 12 and you would have to dig out the proper line. I thought about it but left it in anyway to make it easier on the audience.

All of this research just about doubled the time it took to write the screen play. I could have slapped it down and said that it was good enough but there is a difference between slapping it down and saying that it was good enough or knowing that I have done as much as I could to make as realistic as I could while keeping it a good story.

I am not saying you cannot mess with reality nor am I saying I am perfect. What I am saying is that when the fix is really easy, and when it is not critical to the story, don't make plot points that are not close to the truth. If it was important to my plot that I understood what the police in your neck of the woods were up to, you can bet I would at least see how the system was organized. And if it was important to have an officer in the UK shoot at someone, I would not assume that the officer on the beat (if that is the term there) would be armed with a pistol or armed at all. You have different rules than we do here and it would be important for me to understand how it works.

Yea maybe. But I think somebody just didn't have a clue.

Again, or it could just be a lazy writer who couldn't be bothered to do their job. I agree that sometimes the director might make a decision to ignore the truth in favor making the audience more comfortable. Then again sometimes it is just a matter of being sloppy. I remember in the movie "The Vikings" there is one scene that if you look (and not very closely) you can see Tony Curtis is wearing his armor and a pair of black Converse All Stars. In another scene Kurt Douglas opens his mouth wide and you can see a bunch of silver fillings in his teeth. Not very realistic for a 10th or 11th century period piece. Thus, sometimes (like in the dance scene in Knight's tale where a clear decision was made to use modern music and dance steps) a choice is made, and other times it is just sloppy work by the director, producer, and/or the writer. A choice is one thing and an error is another. You can justify anything (even the horrible load of crap that you will see if you ever sit through Plan 9 From Outer Space.) I once saw someone try to justify Plan 9 as an absurdist tale and commentary on the science fiction genre. Horse manure. The lead actor (Bella Lagosi) died in the middle of shooting of a horrible piece of schlock and the director substituted his dentist who looked nothing like Lagosi because he didn't want to waste the film.

Oh I forgot my favorite one. In the movie "Krakatoa: East of Java" all seems fine except that Krakatoa is due west of Java. Check the map. It is to laugh.

The screen play I wrote that I doubled the time by research took me six weeks for the first draft. That six weeks included the research. I'm not sure how that is procrastination.

As to those that think I am woefully ignorant as to how writing by committe works, you should understand that other than when I am writing screen plays, I am a former attorney and do research and writing for other attorneys. I generally look at the evidence, do the research, and then write motions and appeals. I do not sign the motions, legal memoranda, or the appeals. Once I turn my work over to the attorneys I am done with them. Most times, after a month or so, I have pretty much wiped the arguments out of my memory. Many times, the attorney who has paid me changes what I wrote, adds arguments, deletes arguments, changes the wording, etc. Guess what, I could care less. What I do care about is that when I deliver it to the attorney it is accurate and that he or she can trust what I have written. That is my responsibility and I take it very seriously.

I feel the same way about screen writing. It may be that the director wanted to make audiences feel more comfortable by using sheriffs than by using city police, or state troopers and it may be that the director just trusted the writer to know what he or she was writing about and the writer didn't bother to do the research. My job is to make sure that I have done my research and if the director wants to go another way that's fine. If there is an inconvenient truth in the way of an idea, I change the idea not the truth. That's what I call writing my around a problem. I am responsible for my work and for providing the best script I can and beyond that other people will do what they want. My work is as solid as I can make it and if that makes me a fool, again, so be it.