Adventures in Fake Journalism: Criminal Minds 807

Fake Journalism - Criminal Minds 807

So we finally saw a bit of one of Joe's books on the show! And here it is!

-blow to the head. During the most recent round of killings, Mullens and his son would force the victim to read from a script in order to recreate the past killings as accurately as possible.

In 1994, Mullens - aware of the media attention surrounding his crimes - went dormant. He settled into his life as an electrician before retiring. Colby idolized his father and eventually became an electrician as well. But as the years drifted on, Mullens became more forgetful and agitated. He was later diagnosed with Alzheimer's Syndrome. Afraid of losing his father as well, Colby began aiding the older Mullens in a new string of murders. This was a contained effort to help Mullens remember his past murders and the victims.

Chapter 5: The Piano Man Sings

Hamilton Bartholomew - The Piano Man - is an anger-excitation rapist who wants to traumatize his victims and make them suffer. After a brief period of-

Okay, that wasn't great. Especially because chapter four apparently ends just as the story of the copycat father/son serial killing team was just getting started. Is that all the book is? Brief outlines of the crimes written in super-dry prose? Or is that just a function of the prop having been written up in a rush before the insert was shot?

Still, I'm really happy they went to the trouble of doing this, rather than just inserting generic text, but this doesn't read like a true crime book. The first section, about the father/son serial killing team, is disjointed and feels like a bad recap of the episode. Kind of horning in on my territory there, guys. Also, what did you mean by the word contained? I feel like you were using the wrong word there.

In any event, I restate my belief that there would absolutely be a market for a book of Joe's reminiscences about the show's cases written in the style of one of John Douglas' books.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Terminator 3

While not journalism per se, or in any way, really, I wanted to feature some incredibly half-assed work on the part of some graphic artists working on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

Midway through the film the Terminatrix finds that its main weapon, some kind of plasma blast cannon, has been damaged, and she has to select a replacement from a surprisingly large number of options.

Here's the first-

There's little picture of the weapon's arm configuration on the left side, then the name of the weapon in the middle, and some description about it below.

Let's zoom in on that part, shall we?

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Magic Man

The film Magic Man concerns a woman's half-hearted investigation into the mysterious death of her mother some twenty years earlier. At one point we get a look at an article concerning that crime - and here it is!

Now, for the text!

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Seven Psychopaths

Late in wonderful film Seven Psychopaths, there's a fake newspaper - so let's take a look at it!

Actor Sought in Fifth 'Jack of Diamonds' Slaying
By James Ulberg
Staff Writer

HOLLYWOOD HILLS, CA - Authorities are searching for Billy Bickle, 39, as the primary suspect in the "Jack of Diamonds" killings that have plagued the Los Angeles Area in the past ten days.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Community 503

So Community's gone, it seems. I'm sad to see it go, since that fifth season was just incredible from beginning to end. A true return to form, which suffered only from a truncated length that robbed the creative staff of the time necessary to build touching character arcs. Still, it had some amazing sequences, including Vince Gilligan's VCR game host, Chang's ghost story, and of course, the bear dance. It also had the subject of today's post, a series-high episode about a certain "Ass-Crack Bandit", who went from one-time joke back in season 2 to the subject of an extended David Fincher riff.

Which, naturally, brings me to the fake journalism about that character, which - spoiler alert - is some of the best fake journalism I've ever encountered.

So let's get started!

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet

Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet is not a movie about Lizzie Borden. I can't stress that enough. Is it a movie about a young girl who murders her parents with a pair of scissors and a hatchet? Yes. Is her name Mary Hatchet? No. That's just something people call her because of the involvement of a hatchet in her murder spree. She's actually named Mary Mattock, which proves happily coincidental because her daughter later uses a mattock (sometimes called a pickaxe) in a tangentially-related murder spree some years later.

Why have I spent all of this time establishing that this is not a film about Lizzie Borden, despite being clearly inspired by that famous case? The answer follows, in the fake headlines that appear during the film's opening credit sequence:

Adventures in Fake Journalism: The Simpsons 717

In the Season 7 episode 'Homer the Smithers', Burns is presented with a Junior Jumble-

Amazingly, it's a fully-constructed far-too-easy jumble. The clue involves a woman calling her husband a 'fat slob', while the riddle is 'What did the man need?' So let's solve it!

Dog
thE
iT
He

Which gives us the letters DETH. Which can't be turned into anything at all - so the Jumble is a failure. Strangely, though - it's simply a case of the circles being misplaced. If they were slightly rearranged, the selected letters would be DTIE.

This, of course, can be rearranged into what the fat man needs. A 'DIET'.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night

Okay, for a film never intended for release in North America (because of the - I assume - serious legal blocks to doing so), PA2:TN has some stunningly detailed fake journalism on display. Let's start with their fake search engine, shall we?

Ah, Go Search - is it any wonder you became the world's number one web search service? You have a button that says 'happy' on it!

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

T&DvE is a fascinating example of Fake Journalism, in that it actually features all three types of text. First off, there's the plot-related text written specifically for the prop:

Left Article:

Memorial Day Massacre: One Survivor

Police found one woman
clinging to life after the Memor-
rial Day Massacre. The yet un-
identified victim was taken to
hospital early this morning.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Criminal Minds Suspect Behaviour 106

You know, I give a lot of crap to the writing on Criminal Minds because of its general terribleness, but now that the season is over, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on the decent writing being done somewhere along the line in the production.

Take a look at the letter that I'd assumed was the corpse's suicide note from episode 106: Devotion.

So someone actually sat down and wrote something - that alone is worthy of applause. What's even better is that the letter actually reads well:

Dear Dad,

Can you say goodbye to somebody when you've never really gotten to know them? I wonder because this feels a lot like a goodbye to me.

Lucky Number Ten. It's always been my lucky number but it almost feels like the universe laughing at me . Poor Tami. She sends another letter and it comes back with that angry RETURN TO SENDER finger pointing right in her face.

I won't write after this unless you write back. I don't want money or anything, I just want you to acknowledge that you know I'm out here. I'm out here and I'm part of you and I'm writing and writing and writing-

(cut off) write back.

Love,

Tami

See? While certainly not Valerie or anything I'll remember in a week or two, it's certainly a perfectly good example of in-character writing, and far more competent than I've come to expect from Criminal Minds.

So great work, whoever made that prop! You deserve a raise! Or to get hired on a better show, if Suspect Behavior was cancelled between me writing this and now.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Path of Evil

Like Harvest of Fear, its direct predecessor, Path of Evil features some fairly bizarre examples of fake newspaper headlines. Most of them use the bizarre Latin filler text that appears in HoF's stories, along with a variety of little errors-

'An 5-year old'? Other than minor nitpicky things, though, the papers are generally competent enough at filling in backstory during their flashes onscreen - although it's not always vital information. A new viewer needs to know, for example, that Jake was stabbed-

Carpenter was jailed for the Harvest killings-

And that Billy is credited as the hero who helped save the day-

Before Jake was arrested for beating him up!

Those are all perfectly helpful articles, which makes me wonder why all the other ones that just restated the opening sequence-

Were featured. We know full well that his parents were killed, filmmakers. You showed it happening.

Two of this movie's fake articles are worth singling out for a little more attention, however - one because the text of it is so bad that it has to have been a Simpsons-style joke meant for anyone willing to freeze-frame it-

Amazing, huh? Then, right at the end, there's an article which, unlike everything else in the montage of fake news, actually features a fake story, as opposed to filler text.

So here's the story, since it's not really legible in that size-

Retired Sheriff William Newton proves he still has the law in his blood.

Devil's Lake M.E. Carpenter arraigned on 24 counts of murder.

(left column)

If you asked former Devil's Lake Sheriff William Newton what he though his plans were for this spring, it certainly wasn't going to be chasing former colleague medical examiner James Carpenter through the streets of Devil's Lake and then eventually firing the shot that ended 24 unsolved murders in a span of over 20 (cut off)

That's a pretty heroic run-on sentence, huh? Notice the other error, beyond general lack of attention to how a newspaper should read? That's right - the previous movie was set during a 'Harvest Festival', while all the leaves were turning. So all that chasing Newton was doing probably wasn't happening during the spring...

Okay, so now onto the-

(right column)

Devil's Lake Medical Examiner James Peter Carpenter was shot by Newton in the chest and miraculously survived and is now in critical but stable condition at (illegible) County Medical Center in (illegible)

“Bring in the next 100 people shot in the chest with that size slug tearing through them and they'd all be dead,”. Said E.R. attending Dr. Michael D. Jones. “It's amazing. I guess the man up stairs had a (illegible)”.

I find this article more fascinating than most, largely because it demonstrates something key about the development of the film. Even though large departures were made from the plot of the previous movie, the filmmakers went out of their way to ensure that the events of this film jibed with the ending of Harvest of Fear.

So if, in their minds, it had to be made absolutely clear that this film was a follow-up to HoF, then aren't I forced to once again ask what happened to the bloody knife and the missing siblings?

Damn you, Path of Evil, pulling me right back in again!

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Harvest of Fear

After all the simple cut-and-paste jobs of Chain Letter, it's nice to finally get a look at a piece of fake news that a little effort was put into.

Bigify these to your heart's content, and you may just barely be able to make out the text. What's so special about it that it's worth covering?

Yup, it's all in Latin!

While these papers may not feature actual fake article written about the case, the fact that it's in an ancient language is an interesting enough quirk to deserve a little attention and applause, I think.

Sadly, however, a failure of either the prop designer's latin or Intertran's algorithm has left me unable to translate the text into English, but even despite that frustration, I'm still impressed by the extra mile they went for this insert.

My unbelievably uneducated latin has picked out the words for 'pain' and 'trouble' (I think) in there, so who knows - maybe this is even more clever than I thought, and the latin actually does reflect the plot!

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Chain Letter (Part 2)

While researching two further articles on the subject of Chain Letter I happened to notice that when compiling my first article concerning its endeavors into the field of fake journalism I'd missed a number of examples of same featured in the stage-setting opening credits montage.

This article, while purporting to be about an elite special ops team being ambushed is, upon closer inspection, just a wikipedia article about POWs during the invasion of Iraq. There are a few puzzling notes, however - first off, the correct date of the invasion that appeared in the wikipedia piece (2003), has been replaced in the fake newspaper with the year 1998 - when there profoundly wasn't an invasion of Iraq. Also, what does 'North National' mean? Is that supposed to be a city? An area of the country?

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Chain Letter

Regular visitors to the Castle will be familiar with my love of the fake books, newspapers, and websites that the crew has to throw together - often on short notice - to add a sense of verisimilitude to a film. Generally it's a morbid kind of love, where I gleefully chronicle the various misspellings and terrible sentence structure that are the hallmarks of hastily-written filler text. Every now and then, though, I encounter legitimately well-written sections of text, where someone has gone out of their way to make an article look and read like something that might appear in the real world - even though they know full well the results of that work will only ever appear onscreen for a maximum of 2.5 seconds, tops.

Which I guess is the real reason I write these things - for those rare occasions where I get to shower some appreciation on the people whose work is almost never recognized by the filmgoing public.

Although mocking typos is fun, too.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Thankskilling

It seems almost like kicking a dead horse to complain about a lack of verisimilitude in the movie Thankskilling, which featured a long sequence in which a killer turkey wore a dead man's face, and a number of people were convinced they were talking to that man. Despite the fact that he was three feet shorter, and a turkey.

Still, I want to point out the film's one attempt at building a prop book because, within the annals of weird/awful prop production, it stands out from the crowd, both because it was entirely unnecessary, and because the filmmakers solution was so utterly bizarre.

Mid-way through the film, the nerd character pauses to flip through a book about the history of thanksgiving, in the hopes that it might offer some clues as to how to defeat the evil turkey that's chasing them. It does, but the 'prop department' was unable (or unwilling) to write a few paragraphs about an evil magic turkey so that the book would look good during the quick insert shot when he's reading. So the product was this:

Overlook the fact that it's clearly a computer printout and focus on the text with me. The left side is largely illegible, but I was able to spot the name 'Bill O'Neal' and reference to his book 'The First Thanksgiving: It was in Texas!' (it wasn't, BTW). The right side is where the real action goes down, however - the bulk of the text comes straight from the most reliable source possible: the Thanksgiving Wikipedia page, but then the text following it is supposed to be in code. But rather than actually write a code, the 'prop department' did this:

A series of algebraic equations cut and pasted in sequence. I'll give the producers this: what they lacked in authenticity they certainly made up for in sheer 'never-seen-that-beforitude'.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Harper's Island 108

Bit of a departure this time around, as I'm not looking at a fake news article, but rather a character's fake journal. From Harper's Island, Episode 8, here's John Wakefield's prison diary.

I've left all the punctuation and spelling as is. Words that were unclear to me, forcing me to guess are marked with a (~), while words I full-on couldn't read are replaced with a (?).

Also, in the original broadcast the sheriff flips through the journal backwards, looking at visible page 3&4, then flipping to 1&2. I'm displaying them here in the order they appear in the journal, rather than the order shown in the episode.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Harper's Island 104

Another week, and another set of fake newspapers! Somebody up there likes me!

The first newspaper is a little blurred, so I’ll just type out the legible parts.

---

Saturday Semptember 23 , 2006

CHOPPING DOWN THE PAST

BY JJ WHISPERS
NEWS REPORTER

Last night’s town hall meeting played host to the Island’s most heated debate since Wendell’s Pharmacy started filling orders for Medical Marijuana. At the heart of the (unclear) is the ‘Tree of Woe’, the tree that stands alone on the (unclear) bluff, and was the (unclear) where Wakefield hanged three of his victims.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Harper's Island 103

There have actually been two episodes of fake newspaper clippings on Harper’s Island so far – but I couldn’t cover the first, the article about her mother’s murder that Abby found in her room the first night, because the camera never got close enough to let us read the text. Last week’s episode was a different matter entirely, as we were offered a lingering close-up of the newspaper article that the Sheriff found in Kelly’s jewelry box. I’ll print the text here, along with a note of where the text started to repeat. The repeating text was actually a huge help this time around, as it allowed me to get the complete text of the fake article, despite the fact that a few corners of it were left off camera.

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Boogeyman 3

I can't believe this hasn't come up yet in this blog, but one of my favorite things to do is read the text in fake prop newspapers used in film and television. It's a relatively recent hobby, since only the advent of digital video disc players have enabled me to pause and zoom with the clarity to make out the text.

It's amazing what wide variations there are in the kinds of things that wind up in the fake newspaper texts. Sometimes the production staff writes up entire fake news articles, sometimes it's just a single sentence over and over again, like the Onion's "onlookers were surprised by the amount of blood". The first time I ever noticed readable text was when I paused my VHS recording of an episode of Buffy. It was the one where Clea DuVall became an invisible girl, and was recruited by the government at the end. She opens her book on assassination, and the text is just song lyrics. Actually, you know what? I've got the DVD right here on the shelf, let me go grab an image.

Yup, you're not reading things, those are the lyrics to "Happiness is a Warm Gun"