Talk:Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (film)

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Reversion

There needs to be a large manual reversion because of edits by an IP user with awful English. - NewTestLeper79 talk 20:32, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"James Gandolfini cameo"

I have just now removed the erroneous claim that "James Gandolfini made an uncredited appearance as the cook in the two scenes filmed at Clary's Cafe." This factoid seems to have come from user-submitted info on IMDb originally, and then been subjected to citogenesis in the past dozen years — that is, the process in which authors of "reputable" publications (such as newspapers and print books) copy wholesale from IMDb and Wikipedia without doing any fact-checking of their own, and then later Wikipedia editors use those publications as "references" to support the initial erroneous items. To try to get clarification on that point, I emailed the author of the Coen Brothers Encyclopedia, writing (in part):

Wikipedia currently claims, in their article on Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, that the line cook briefly seen in one scene is played by James Gandolfini. The cited source is your "Coen Brothers Encyclopedia" (2014). (Coincidentally, the same claim was removed from their article on Gandolfini earlier this year; there it had been sourced to a June 2013 ABC4NY listicle which erroneously claimed he had a "notable role" in the film.) [...]

Now, all you actually wrote in your own entry for Gandolfini is "He worked [...] with Clint Eastwood in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), and [...]" — so I understand that it wasn't a major point of your research. :) Still, I read all the references in your entry's endnotes (Itzkoff, O'Hehir, Remnick, Travers) and none of them mention Midnight. Which leaves only Biography.com (your book gives no URL). In the year 2024, as far as I can tell, Biography.com no longer hosts any essays on Gandolfini except one from 2021 recapping his death (with no mention of Midnight).

So I figured I might as well try to ask you — do you happen to remember where you got that claim from, back in 2014? Obviously it's no problem if you no longer have any idea, or remember pulling it from a Biography.com listicle that no longer exists. I'm just grasping at straws to trace the meme back to wherever it originated, to see if there's any there there.

Nine days later, she hasn't responded. I think that's sufficient research and time-elapsed to remove the claim from Wikipedia. It won't stop citogenesis from continuing to percolate outside the Wikipedia ecosystem — listicles citing other listicles — but we can at least keep Wikipedia itself free of the erroneous claim.

FWIW, to me, the cook in that shot looks nothing like James Gandolfini so I can't imagine how the rumor could ever have gotten started. If I were forced to guess a celebrity actor that looks like that cook, I'd pick Mike Starr. But it's clearly neither Gandolfini nor Starr; it's just some guy. --Quuxplusone (talk) 01:41, 5 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]