I am a real fan of really bad movies, and my particular delight is finding technical incompetence with boom microphones. I nominate the original version of "Coma" with Genevieve Bujold (and even Tom Selleck as a dead body!). For shear cluelessness by a boom operator, this is it.

In scene after scene, a swiveling boom mike dips in and out, like some obscene appendage. The best scene: the doomed janitor and doctor whisper in a two-shot while the black boom mike dips and gyrates against a white background. This scene goes on and on while the observer viewer laughs harder and harder! Subsequent versions have been fixed, but originals are still around.

Response From RinkWorks:

Technical incompetence is one of my favorite bad-movie staples, as well. My absolute favorite scene in Roddy Piper's "Hell Comes to Frogtown" is the scene where a badguy falls off a high rock, and you can not only see but *hear* the stunt bag the guy falls into. Too funny.

-- Dave.

Interestingly, boom mike errors have been said by many to be errors on the part of the projectionist, not on the part of the film's director or boom mike operator -- that is, if you see a boom mike, it means the projectionist did not frame the picture correctly. On a video tape, the error was that of whoever did the transfer. (This makes sense with regard to "Coma" -- the original video transfer would have been a botched transfer job, and future editions had the transfers done correctly.)

At any rate, I'm told all this by people who should know -- yet I find it difficult to conceive that this could actually be the case. It would mean that what is filmed on set is a larger picture than what is ever intended to be seen -- that the edges are supposed be cropped during projection. This doesn't make sense to me. Why would any part of the frame exist just to be cropped? You'd get better resolution if you used the whole frame and don't crop any of it. Surely a visible boom mike is at least partially the fault of the director, who allowed the boom mikes to be a little too close to the camera frame.

But as I know virtually nothing definitive about the filming process, I am reserving judgment until I happen upon a sensible technical explanation from a reliable source.

Either way, visible boom mikes are funny.

-- Sam.