Went to see Ghost Rider last night with Brian and while there was plenty to complain about, the books they chose for Johnny Blaze’s esoterica library really got on my nerves.
It happens a lot in film, you’ll see a shelf full of books that are
supposed to add interest and ambiance to the backdrop, or at least make you think a character is clever enough to have a couple hundred leather bindings in his or her house. Sometimes they get it right, more often they’re off a little, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen as abysmal a choice of books as in Ghost Rider. The books were scattered around his apartment (he was supposedly using them to figure out what one does after accidentally selling ones soul to the devil) so you got a really good look at them, which should have made the director more careful rather than less.
There was an “ancient” tome – presumably meant to be 16th or 17th century – except that it was in a very typical turn of the century (the 20th century) binding used for encyclopedias and religious reference works. A large ornate binding was panned past that I would swear was from about 1950. I’d like to get another look at that one.
Also, what appeared to be a 19th century copy of Faust rebound in blue leather to which Brian remarked “it would have been easier to get a nice penguin paperback”. In fact, there were a number of books rebound in colored leather which was fairly common with fiction in the 19th century and though I guess they wanted it to look pretty, no good Satanism library is going to look like that. Ever. Not one book appeared to be from the 17th century – the golden age of witchcraft and satanism – and the engravings that they showed all looked to reprinted on 20th century paper.
How does a film with a 100 million dollar budget choose to skimp on a pile of books that would have cost 10k at most to get right? It’s not just that I sell books for a living – anyone who frequents the antiquarian room at used bookstores even occasionally is going to be at least sub-consciously bothered by it – it’s just asinine to mail in verisimilitude on something this easy. Anyone at The Strand or Heritage in L.A. could have given them a great pile of the proper books if they’d just asked.
