Ok folks, name the movie which has, starring in a very minor roll, the recorded voice of a NS defect detector. It’s line in the movie is rather limited but it gets to say the following:
“NS detector mile post 79.81 no defects.”
I believe it was Blackhawk Down.
Hmmm…I don’t know that movie but the one I’m thinking of is the new version of The Manchurian Candidate - at 2 hours 57 seconds into the DVD - right near the end. I’d watched the movie a couple of weeks back and I heard what I thought was a familiar voice in the background but didn’t think anything of it at the time.
The week before last I did some railfanning along with a friend and we had the usual cameras and the radio tuned to RR freqs. Naturally, I heard the detector voice over and over during the two days we spent photographing trains. I was watching the movie again this evening when I heard that familiar voice only this time I knew where I’d heard it before. I had to re-run the DVD a few times before I caught the whole message.
I’m assuming the reason for the insertion has to do with the wrap up of the film since at that point in the movie Denzel Washington has had the Manchurian Global implants removed from his brain so now he has “no defects”. Of course it could be for another reason entirely. In any event - putting that train item in a movie like that has to be one of the more unusual choices in the world of Hollywood.
My guess is that it was in the remake of MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. Perhaps they had need to fake the Accela with a mock-up and special-angle photography. The establishing high-speed “swoosh” shot showing high-speed train, pantograph and catenary was impossible to fake, I’m guessing even with today’s CGI; BUT it was taken from a suburban station if I don’t mis-remember. This argues that the production team may not have had any ROW access. (Recall there’ s a LOT of security sensitivity among NEC-area railroads.)
How to compensate? Several possiblities, some more probable than others. For what it’s worth I think the defect-detector was deliberately dubbed in; Hollywood dislikes depending on the vagaries of ambient sound by and large. Perhaps they had use of a track parallel to Amtrak for static shots? Perhaps somewhere like New Jersey, as in a recent shot in TRAINS showing NS and CSX diesels under catenary? Of course, the inside of the Acela coach was almost certainly a studio-mockup with process photography to show the countryside whizzing by. The farthest possiblity I would guess, but not entirely impossible in this age of state-subsidized filmmaking, would be to use any old RR track to which a reasonable facsimile of the train could be shown–was it just enough to show people getting off and stepping onto a platform, say?
It was an okay film, but I like the original 1962 with Sinatra, Janet Leigh and Lawrence Harvey better. IT showed a GG-1 pulling what I believe were fluted heavyweights.
“EL-dorado 5, 9970”
Smalling - that’s what makes the voice so curious. The detector voice is at the very end of the movie - nowhere near the train sequence. The point of view of the camera is looking down at the ocean as the camera pans into the scene of the no deserted and destroyed facility somewhere out in the Middle East. Just as the island comes into view you can hear the train detector voice which is faint enough so at first viewing you could confuse it with radio traffic from the ground to the pilot.
As for the two versions I liked both of them. I found the efforts to incorporate lines from the original in the remake very entertaining.
Repost! hehe
Still haven’t gotten around to seeing it.
Discussion last summer here…
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=20067
Adrianspeeder
Thanks for the info adrianspeeder.
Hmmmm, can’t ignore the possiblity that the producer, sound engineer, writer, SFX or whomever knew about end-of-train announcements and deliberately put it in for the irony. Are these announcements ever included in RR CD’s or DVD’s? Cause waiting for one that isn’t an OK might take forever. You’re right: would one out of 50 Americans know what it is? Maybe for that reason it was put in even though the visual context was inappropriate.
This is exactly the kind of thing a really good DVD commentary provides but I sure don’t remember anything mentioned about the motion detector!!