The Shawshank Redemption Mistakes
(Total Mistake Entries: 25)

Directed by: Frank Darabont
Written by:
Frank Darabont (screenplay)
Stephen King (short story "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption")
Starring:
Tim Robbins - Andy Dufresne
Morgan Freeman - Ellis Boyd 'Red' Redding
Bob Gunton - Warden Norton
William Sadler - Heywood
Clancy Brown - Captain Hadley
Gil Bellows - Tommy
Mark Rolston - Bogs Diamond
James Whitmore - Brooks Hatlen







Here are a collection of some the more noticeable Shawshank Redemption mistakes and errors:

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Factual: In the panning shot of Andy's completed Chess set the playing pieces are set on the wrong side of the board. The rule of chess is "White on the Right". The right corner square should be white, not black.

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Factual: Close to the end of the movie, Andy is shown driving a red convertible down the coast. The setting was 1966, yet the car was a 1968 or 1969 Pontiac GTO.

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Plot Hole: At the end of the movie the inmates are talking about their good friend Andy. One of the men at the table laughing about his "friend" is the same guy who told Billy he murdered Andy's wife and the golf pro.

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Factual: When it shows the library after Andy receives the $500/year allowance from the legislature, the narrator says it occurred around the time of the Kennedy assassination. The Hank Williams Sr. album that is shown in the scene wasn't released until 1970.

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Visible crew or equipment: Towards the beginning of the film, during a beautiful aerial shot of the bus entering Shawshank Prison, the camera flies over the buildings, where we see the prisoners on their way to "greet" in the new inmates. As the camera circles around, at the top of the frame, in an area of green grass, near a building, the shadow of the camera's helicopter is clearly visible.

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Continuity: When Red is talking to Andy for the first time, he is throwing a baseball between himself and Haywood. Just as Andy stoops down, Red catches the ball and seconds later, catches the ball again without throwing it back.

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Continuity: When Andy comes out of the cell in his first morning in prison, Red is shown wearing a shirt with a number that begins with 311, not beginning with a 302 which is the number on his shirt in the rest of the movie.

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Continuity: In the aerial shot where Andy's bus approaches the prison, next to the gate is a red brick building and it's sidewalk is strewn with debris. As the bus pulls in seconds later and we see the gate and same brick building from the vantage point of guards who hurried from a tower, the sidewalk is clean.

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Continuity: In the scene where the warden is tossing cells and comes to "size up" Andy, Capt. Hadley knocks over the small stone chess pieces on the window seal. In the next shot one of the pieces is upright again:

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Continuity: When Andy is playing the opera music, the whole prison stops what they're doing and stares at the speakers. When they show the infirmary, an African American man gets out of bed and looks out of the window. When the camera goes to the prison yard it pans around and goes right across the same African American man, who is now standing in the yard.

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Continuity: When Boggs gets beaten up by Capt. Hadley he tries to escape from his cell and holds on to the bars on the other side of the passage. From the side shot you can see that his right hand grabs a diagonal bar, but in the shot seen through the bars he is holding on to a vertical bar:

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Continuity: When the warden is given a bribe in a box containing a pie, it's in a disposable aluminum pie pan. In a later scene when the warden gives the same pie to Andy and Andy and Red are eating the pie you can see that the pie pan style has changed:

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Continuity: At one point, one can clearly see Andy aging - his hair becomes more gray - but a few minutes later, there is less gray and he looks younger again.

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Revealing errors: The warden is clearly almost a foot shorter than Andy, and yet Andy presumably fits perfectly into his suit.

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Revealing errors: When the top of the pipe is broken open, it shoots a fountain, indicating that it is pressurized (if only by gravity). But then the pipe drains nearly empty. It should only have drained to the lowest point in the hole broken at the top.

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Continuity: When Warden Norton pushes his arm through the poster of Raquel in Andy's cell, the next shot shows only his hand on the poster.

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Continuity: When Norton is walking to Andy's cell after his escape, he tells the guards to question "that friend of his... him!" and he points to Red with the index finger on his left hand. The shot then cuts to a frontal shot of Red in his cell, and Norton is now pointing at Red with the index finger on his right hand:

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Continuity: When the warden comes into the cell the morning after Andy escapes, the poster covering the tunnel hole is fastened down on all four corner. Andy could not possibly have reattached his poster to his prison cell wall on the night of his escape after squeezing into that small hole. This was also confirmed by the director, Frank Darabont on the DVD commentary.

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Revealing errors: Andy is shown breaking into the sewage pipe by simply slamming a large rock against it a few times. Even if the pipe was old and rusty, it would have taken much more effort from Andy than depicted to create a hole large enough to fit his body through.

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Continuity: When Andy is in the bank withdrawing the warden's money, we can see a man standing at the counter talking to a teller. A moment later when Andy leaves, the same man is walking up to the teller's window:

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Continuity: When Norton is about to load the revolver you can see a black and white photograph in a white frame on the desk. In the next scene when Norton has shot himself, you can see that the picture has now moved across the desk and is leaning against the lamp.

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Continuity: When Norton loads his gun you can see that the bullets are scattered over the desk. In the next shot when he takes aim to kill himself you can see the bullets are now neatly stacked in one place:

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Continuity: Before Andy escapes he puts the warden's account book and other papers in a plastic bag and ties the bag to his ankle with the six feet of rope he obtained. When Andy escapes and plunges into the flooded creek, he is shown dragging the bag underwater. No matter how tight Andy originally tied the bag, after he dragged it through the tunnel, the sewage pipe and the creek, there is no way the plastic bag could have remained waterproof. At a minimum, the ink on the papers inside would have started to run, and the pages would have been damp and stuck together. Even after being dried, the pages would have been stained, wrinkled and possibly unreadable. Yet when Andy sends the book to the authorities it looks like it was bone dry the entire journey.

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Continuity: The bullet hole under the warden's chin is in a different location than where he placed the gun barrel a moment before he committed suicide. In the 10th Anniversary DVD release, Frank Darabont admits that this was an error, it had bugged him for 10 years, and they finally fixed it in the 2004 DVD release.

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Continuity: When Red is on the bus, one shot shows all of the windows on the bus open and Red's arm is outside the window. In the next shot of the bus (a long shot from a distance), all of the windows are closed and Red's arm is not in the shot.

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