20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Green Mile

12. Period Inauthenticity Part 1 - Pop Culture

The Green Mile Poster
Warner Bros.

When Hollywood makes period-set movies, the idea is usually to create the illusion of the time and place - not necessarily to be perfectly accurate.

The Green Mile was originally set in 1932, but was pushed forward to 1935 to allow the important insertion of footage from the film Top Hat, which had come out that year.

However, music doesn’t have quite the same fixation in time as cinema: popular forties and fifties singer Eddy Howard is featured on songs on the film’s soundtrack that were recorded in 1940.

Similarly, the Billie Holiday recording of ‘I Can't Give You Anything But Love’ they use in the movie wouldn’t be recorded until 1936. It’s also highly unlikely that a Louisiana radio station in the thirties would play anything by a black artist, too.

And if you really want to be picky, when Edgecomb describes the doctor’s diagnosis as ‘gobbledygook’, he was anticipating the coining of that word by nine years, since it was invented by Congressman Maury Maverick in 1944.

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