Posted by Gayle on August 17, 2000 at 20:32:18:
In Reply to: Movie Mumblings posted by Lou Varricchio on August 17, 2000 at 11:57:16:
: I liked LOTM, but I think it is flawed. Aside from plot changes, I also think filming in North Carolina was a mistake.
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: Movie making has nothing to do with authenticity, but then Cooper's book is fiction. Still MOHICANS was a good film but for many of us here in the North Country, it was a dud in the topography dept. set incorrectly in a temperate Appalachian woods NOT an Adirondack boreal woods--afterall, the Adirondacks are a distinct ecosystem and not even geologically related to the Adirondacks. The rock outcrops in the movie were sedimentary not metamorphic and igenous as in the Dacks! Plus the Dacks are younger, steeper mountains with totally different forest cover. The rhododendrons in the film were an obvious visual clue that this movie got the setting WRONG!
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: Also, why be a moviemaker who gets the costumes right then be so dumb as to set the drama in the WRONG forest! Like TV's MASH--supposed to be set in Korea but filmed in the San Gabriel Mts. of California. Ugh? Might as well have filmed MOHICANS in the Sierra Nevada like Spencer Tracy's NORTHWEST PASSAGE. At least Lake Tahoe today looks more like Lake George did in 1755 than a Carolina lake--the feel of the movie is just all wrong. Someday, moviemakers will not be allured by state film commissions and go to the authentic locales and honor the geography and the historic record.
Lou -
Let me first say that Mann's LOTM is a wonderful film in its own right. As a native of Upstate New York, I am disappointed that he could not find any "authentic" film sites in the whole area between Lake George and Lake Placid, where the story originally took place, but then how many movies are actually filmed "on-site"? Besides, since he completely re-wrote Cooper's novel, who cares where he filmed it?
One of the Mohicanland's Cooperphiles
Gayle