“I started paying special attention to this particular botch when my wife and I were invited to a dinner decades ago at the home of a woman who worked for me. Prominently displayed in the couple’s living room was a fancy chess board and pieces. It was set up incorrectly. That was signature significance: my staffer’s husband didn’t play chess, he just wanted people to think he did. I knew then that he was a fake. Sure enough, the husband proved to be an insecure, posturing jerk, desperate to impress without the goods to do so legitimately….”
I wrote about it again last year in “Confronting My Biases, Episode 20: The Chessboard Tell,” which concluded in part,
“It tells me that the people responsible for any of these are careless and untrustworthy. The gaffe symbolizes all the laziness, ignorance, carelessness and lack of integrity in the world. It should never happen, ever; if it does, it means that nobody involved in the project cared enough to make sure the project was done right.“
They have the chess board set up properly in “My Cousin Vinnie.” The black square isn’t on the right in “Silverado,” or “Independence Day,” or in the sexy chess game Faye Dunaway plays with Steve McQueen in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Mel Brooks even has the giant chess board set up correctly in 1981’s “The History of the World, Part I], where he plays King Louis XVI of France using real people as the chess pieces, and clearly doesn’t know the rules [“Jump the queen!”] It isn’t hard if film makers give a damn, and have the modicum of literacy to know the bare minimum about the most important and influential game in world history, yes, even more than baseball.
There is one line in that movie that sticks in my head and it came to mind today when I read your post, “Peak Lindsay Clancy Ethics Train Wreck Insanity! “The View’s” Sara Haines Can’t Understand Why Clancy’s Husband Divorced Her”
“Haines really and truly asks, “How did the marital love end so quickly?””
Andy: How can you be so obtuse?
Warden Norton: What did you call me?
Andy: Obtuse. Is it deliberate?
Replace Warden Norton with Sara Haines.
Jack: I get your point”Signature Significance” when it comes to chess board orientation.
how does that apply to The Shawshank Redemption?
the “in-world” explanation (you see these a lot in the analyses of issues in Star Wars) is simply: felons of the time had no idea where the white square went. The fire or may have intentionally put the white Square in the wrong place, thinking “if nothing else, Hack Marshall will know these guys are rubes.”
shawshank Redemption is a great movie. I am not sure it could beat Pulp Fiction (a great film in other ways).
Shawshank Redemption was great as a “thinking man’s” film.
If you compare The Shawshank Redemption with the Redemption of Jules Winnfield (Pulp Fiction), Pulp Fiction is immediately gratifying. You get the resolution right away; the Shawshank Redemption drags out for years. To appreciate Shawshank Redemption, you have to imagine decades; pulp Fiction occurs over the course of a few days
I am not going to tout Shawshank Redemption as greatest of all time, but it was a great movie that, understandably, did not get acknowledged in the general culture
-Jut
I hate being called Hack Marshall…
It doesn’t work. If you don’t know how to play chess, then you don’t play chess, and don’t know how to set up the board at all. The pieces were set up right, just the board was wrong. As the earlier post indicated, this turns up a lot, in movies, on TV shows, in ads. You really think the set dressers decided, “Let’s show the board set up wrong because chess-playing prisoners might not know the white square in on the right”? Occam’s Razor rules: the board was wrong because nobody checked.
My props designer, when we did “Stage Door,” checked to make sure none of the candy bars in the bowl of candy the script called for postdated the script (1936). That’s called professionalism. I expect movies to be made by professionals equal to those who worked in my small professional regionals theater.
By way of contrast, there is a scene in the queue for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World featuring a pair of skeletons playing chess. Not only is the board properly set and oriented, but the arrangement of the pieces has the game in a stalemate of endless move/countermove pairs.
As the tour guide tells us, the joke is that a true chess enthusiast would rather die than admit they can’t win the game, thus these players remain as skeletons implying that they did exactly that.
I, too, appreciate when people pay attention to the details.
–Dwayne