by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/03/19 16:04 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/03/19/8770668856267196346.aspx
The other day, in the blog post titled Broadcasting closed captions with a passive vocabulary (http://www.siao2.com/2015/03/05/8770668856267196313.aspx), I gave a pretty full list of the reasons why closed captioning text might not match the movie or television program that it accompanies, and largely tagged it as the technological equivalent of passive vocabulary.
However, there was one major source of the difference that I passed over, and that is when the source of the captions is not from the actual program, but from either
• another version of the actual script, or
• the actor or actors going up on their lines, which is a fancy way used in the acting trade to say that someone either adlibbed or replaced the actual text in the script with one that the actor decided was better on the fly, as it were.
I noticed this in movies like Best Seller (starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy) particularly with lines James Woods was saying. I have never met Mr. Woods and thus have no idea whether this was or is his nature, but it did seem to happen often enough to be a little distracting.
An interesting concept, nevertheless -- and I'm not sure what it would be called from a linguistic standpoint. Does anyone have any thoughts, beyond simple ego of the performer? ;-)