5 Hollywood myths that should stay on the cutting room floor

You have just arrived from another country. You’ve never been here, but you’ve seen every Hollywood movie made in the last 30 years. Therefore, you might think you are an expert on American culture.

You’re sure everyone is either financially well off or totally broke and living in misery. You think Americans can’t have sex for the first time without tearing down an apartment, and the favorite sex position is standing up after all, why take the time to lay down when there’s a nice fair wall? the ?

Oh, and you think the first thing people here do when they get home is pull a beer out of the fridge.

Here are some other fake things you might believe, thanks to myth-making and Hollywood movie cliches:

It is very difficult to make a good cup of coffee

It may be a holdover from the days of percolators, but today, if you have a decent coffee and any kind of decent pot, you almost can’t mess it up. It is not a precision science. Coffee is very forgiving and people tend to appreciate it when someone else takes the time to brew it.

Still, the scriptwriters, short on dialogue, often throw snazzy jokes about how good someone’s coffee is. In fact, until Harvey Keitel endorsed Quentin Tarantino’s coffee in Pulp Fiction (1994), it’s possible that no character in a film had ever commented on having a good Cup of coffee.

Another coffee cliché: serious people only drink black coffee. You can’t win a case or catch a murder suspect if you put milk in your coffee. And if you have anything other than a half-eaten carton of Chinese food in your fridge, you’re a frivolous epicurean.

If you are pregnant, you will have a girl

Lucille Ball was pregnant while playing pregnant Lucy Ricardo in “I Love Lucy.” In real life, she had a boy, but if she had had a girl, she probably would have had a boy on the show anyway. For about 50 years, until around 1975, almost every time a female protagonist was pregnant, she gave birth to what Luca Brasi in “The Godfather” called “a male child.” It was a movie staple at the time for women and men to talk about how they preferred boys.

In the years that followed, that changed, and in movies and TV, baby girls far outnumbered baby boys. No one has done a study on this so there is no data, but keep an eye out for it. You can not miss it.

If you have sex for the first time, you leave your clothes

I had to ask other people about this just to make sure I wasn’t wrong on this but apparently the majority of people really prefer to have their clothes on stopped when engaging in acts of physical intimacy. Specifically, they really prefer the other person not wearing clothes too. But for some strange reason, the people in the movies clearly don’t feel that way.

Are they afraid of catching cold? Did they just forget? Or is it just another example of what sociologists call “Knocked Up” syndrome: In this classic R-rated 2007 film, lead actress Katherine Heigl just didn’t want to be naked onscreen. And who would?

But in such cases, just cut out the sex scene or suggest nudity, but don’t insult our intelligence or make Americans look so busy and result-oriented that they won’t stop to enjoy simple pleasures of life. Basically, “Knocked Up” depicted two people who were so intimate they had a baby together and yet never saw each other naked.

If a bartender asks you what you’d like to drink, to be cool, say: I’ll have a single malt.

Jonathan Pryce says it in All the Old Knives (2022), but as anyone who drinks Scotch can tell you, it’s like walking into a deli and saying, I’m going to have a sandwich.

There are all kinds of single malts from all kinds of distilleries, and they’re as different from each other as turkey is from sausage. I prefer Islay scotches and enjoy Highland scotches. I’m not crazy about Lowland scotches and I find Speyside scotches repulsive, even the most expensive Speyside scotches.

The thing is, everyone who drinks Scotch is different, and every bartender knows that, so stepping aside and saying, I’ll have a single malt is the opposite of cool. It’s like saying, I heard that in a movie.

A common American greeting is You look like s.

Hollywood really needs to pull this one off. In The Offer, Paramount+’s recent fictional miniseries about the making of The Godfather, the line is uttered three times in 10 episodes. And earlier this season, someone said that to Ryan Gosling in The Gray Man.

A few weird things about it: The first is that almost every time someone is told that, they look great and the line surprises the audience. Apparently, had to to understand that the character looks like s. But why?

Basically, the line is just an excuse from the writers to allow the main character to announce what they’ve been up to since we last saw them. It’s an easy and now a clichéd, lazy way to set up an exhibit.

The second quirk is that no one in real life says that. No one ever told me, even when it was true, and I never told anyone.

Just a wild guess, but I have a feeling if you try that line on someone they won’t let you know about their recent activities. They will be insulted.