Montgomery’s Law #7

This note about “accuracy” in fiction was posted by David Montgomery on DorothyL… it gave me a smile, so I thought I’d share it with you:

Something to remember when it comes to truth in fiction…

Montgomery’s Law # 7:
“Everyone is dissatisfied when the subject is their own area of expertise. But no one else cares.”

Lawyers get upset about legal inaccuracies on Law & Order.

Nurses & doctors get peeved by ER.

Cops laugh at NYPD Blue.

As for the rest of the audience, they neither know, nor do they care. Writers should be slaves to the plot, not to the “facts.”

You can find an expanded version of Montgomery’s Rule #7 on his blog… http://crimefiction.blogspot.com/2004/09/truth-in-fiction.html

5 thoughts on “Montgomery’s Law #7”

  1. Reminds me of the day I went to see the first Mission:Impossible movie.
    Already an overbudgeted turkey, the movie arrived at the scene where Tom Cruise is tempting Ving Rhames with a shot at hacking the CIA mainframe. “You mean the one with the 686 RISC processor? With artificial intelligence?”
    I actually yelled at the screen, “THAT’S NOT EVEN POSSIBLE!!!! THEY’RE THREE DIFFERENT THINGS!!!! WHOSE THE IDIOT WHO WROTE THIS!?!?!”
    I heard snickering coming from the projector room and realized I was the only person in the room who probably knew that.
    Then I realized, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon in a movie theatre, I was the only person in the room.
    I went for popcorn, came back, and kept my mouth shut through the rest of the film.
    The moral is: No one in a movie theatre cares how much you know, least of all, the theatre employees.

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  2. I think it was in there somewhere. They pretended to have an excuse for all those big action sequences (which were fun, BTW).
    Of course, this is the guy who thought Borne Identity the movie was rather stupid because Borne kept doing things anyone who has watched one spy movie knew not to do so the bad guys could keep tracking him.

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