Planning: general 🌇 Planners in movies

[NickSticks]

Chinatown with Jack Nicholson focuses on land and water politics and corruption in 1930s Los Angeles.

 

[imaplanner]

Bill Murray plays a city planner that dresses up like a clown and robs a bank in Quick Change.

 

[Tranplanner]

We've actually been here before: Previous Thread

 

[arcplans]

Almost forgot:

In Grand Theft Auto San Andreas: the stage in Las Venturas where you have to steal the hotel building plans, you have to go through the Las Venturas Building and Planning Department. I shot the entire department to death...after stealing the plans of course. I don't know if you consider that suicide or not?

 

[beach_bum]

Numb3rs-tv show

Alan Eppes is a former L.A. City planner, a widower and the father of both Charlie and Don Eppes. He is portrayed by Judd Hirsch.

 

[Shellac And Vinyl VelocitY]

We've actually been here before: Previous Thread

On which thread should we post?

 

[danthonyjr]

I finally thought of one --

Cars -- the Disney/Pixar movie.

There's a great discussion about what happened to the city when the new interstate was built.

 

[eric89]

Over the Hedge (with RJ the Raccoon and all his friends) pokes fun at suburbia.

 

[JNA]

[OT]

Over the Hedge (with RJ the Raccoon and all his friends) pokes fun at suburbia.

Any (attitude) resemblance between the Over The Hedge's RJ and the Cyburbian RJ is purely coincidental. :-D

except maybe when it comes to hottubing. (previous postings)[/OT]

 

[cch]

In the movie Singles, the Campbell Scott character is a transportation planner in Seattle, and his rapid rail idea gets shot down.

 

[montclair]

His character is just really conservative. That's the joke. It is pretty funny.

 

[vagaplanner]

The movie Primal Fear had a "real estate deal gone bad" story line to it that was one scenario for the murder of the priest.

 

[johnelsden1]

The dad that played (or plays) on "Numbers" touts himself as a City Planner.......

 

[Mastiff]

I just bought Quick Change and watched it again... Geena Davis does call Bill Murray a planner at one point. Here's the synopsis:

Synopsis: Bill Murray co-directed (along with Howard Franklin) this mixture of The Out-of-Towners and After Hours, concerning Grimm (Bill Murray), a frustrated city planner who is fed up with the corruption and venality of New York City. Getting together a couple of accomplices -- Phyllis (Geena Davis), who admires Grimm for his audacity, and Loomis (Randy Quaid), a follower to Grimm's leader since grade school -- Grimm decides to rob a bank, pocket the money, get out of town and take off to tropical splendor.

 

[KangaroosRule]

I haven't seen it, but The Unforeseen is a documentary about a subdivision in Texas, land use politics and the essence of good design. My local APA chapter sent an email promoting the movie with the trailer.

The NY Times said Robert Redford was too big of an influence in the film, creating a bias

 

[DecaturHawk]

There was an episode during the first season of the The Sopranos where Christopher's girlfriend, Adrianna (I think he offed her in a later season) wanted to get into the music business and tried to get in with a gangsta rapper named Master P. At one point in the episode, Master P reveals that he has a degree in City Planning.

 

[Bear Up North]

Script Suggestions

For the horror fans.....

Blood Lust In The Cul-De-Sac
Typical suburban neighborhood, complete with cul-de-sacs. Tim is a zoning inspector with the township, frustrated with the anti-sprawl decisions made at the state government level. When his anger hits the boiling point he uses the internet to reesearch "monster creation". Channeling his frustration to positive "monster creation" energy he does indeed, create a modern version of Frankenstein.

His intentions are to drive "Frank" to the state license bureau offices, located near his cul-de-sac home and unleash some homespun terror on state office employees. As expected, though, "Frank" has other ideas and goes on a deadly rampage in the neighborhood.

Especially gory is the classic scene when "Frank" attacks the hockey moms who are in the yellow Hummer.
_____

For the musical fans.....

Zoned For Love
Andrew and Kim have been married for 15 years, going through the normal ups-and-downs of a relationship. When zoning inspector Rico stops over to check on a missing building permit, Kim hits on him. Understanding his position, Rico offers to "look the other way" in regards to the homemade small animal barn that Andrew had been working on.....for seven years. The couple fall into each other's arms while looking at the barn's unfinished (yet quite trendy!) interior. Songs during this act include "Please Permit Me" (with fine vocal stylings by Kim) and the title tune, performed by Kim and Rico.

Classic scene: During their third encounter in the barn, Kim's husband arrives home early.....totally unexpected. The interplay is super, with Andrew belting out a fine rendition of "When You Are In His Arms", Kim offering that gold standard "Bill Me, But Let Me Go", and Rico surprising all with his bisexual taunt, "Going Animal For You".
_____

For science fiction fans.....

Urban Mars
Many years in the future, the good people of Earth have erected and nearly perfected a living community on the planet Mars. Home to more than 2000 solar system settlers (most who were born on the Red Planet), the community is starting to show signs of urban decay. The obvious cause is the harsh environment.

Kardo is an urban planner from Earth, a specialist regarding harsh environments. His work with the ocean-floor community called Atlantis makes him a natural to travel to Mars and help plan a new city. When he arrives he is paired with the beautiful Jarisa, a planner-by-trade who has been working on the problems with the Martian compound.

As they begin their work, strange events start to take place. Kardo starts to wonder, "Is Jarisa really what she claims to be?".....or something so deadly sinister that it can't be mentioned here?

Classic scene: The community reaction when first noticing "the crack" in the protective shell that surrounds the city.
_____

See.....planners and planner types can be incorporated into film.

Bear

 

[Joe Iliff]

Not a movie, but one of my favorite episodes of the television show Law & Order has a murderer with a degree in city planning. He is presented as being very intelligent, but mentally unstable. He chooses to defend himself in court and not to allow his history of mental health problems to be entered into evidence, so people do not discount the validity of his ideas. Jack McCoy says that he is "too insane to know he's insane". He's found guilty, despite attempts by his brother to introduce evidence of his mental disease or defect during the trial. That evidence is finally introduced during sentencing, and is observed by the jury when he loses control in the courtroom upon its introduction.

 

[Richmond Jake]

ZG and I (both planners), made a movie once. Oh wait, you're not talking about those kinds of movies. :-$ :a: 8-! :h:

 

[Dan]

A few more planner films:

Novaya Moskva
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0174990/

"The Russian comedy film 'New Moscow' is barely known even in Russia; apparently it incurred the wrath of the commissars during its original screening in 1938, and was suppressed afterward. I'm amazed that it survived at all.

Alyosha (played by Daniil Sagal, uncle of Peg Bundy!) is a Siberian farmboy who looks amazingly like the Bolshevik version of Li'l Abner. But Alyosha longs to be an architect and urban planner: accordingly, he has designed and built a model of a glorious utopian city which he calls 'Moscow Future': if only the commissars will listen to him, Moscow Future will become reality. (Among its other merits -- by communist standards -- this Moscow has no trace of Saint Basil's Cathedral nor any other church.)

Alyosha schleps his model all the way to the real Moscow, where urban renewal is in progress. This is a source of dismay for Fedia (Pavel Sukhanov), a cityscape painter who can't finish any of his paintings ... because the old buildings are torn down and new ones erected more quickly than he can paint them. While Alyosha prepares his presentation, he falls in love with little blonde Zoya (Nina Alisova), who looks like a somewhat more modest and chaste Russian version of Daisy Mae Scragg.

The high point of the film is when Alyosha activates his model city, and it almost magically seems to come to life. But this is a comedy, so the mechanism gets jammed in reverse. Alyosha is horrified as his midget Moscow actually begins to regress to its Czarist condition, with onion domes springing up and so forth."


Romansu
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114493

"Two friends in their thirties meet a woman in a bar. One man (Shibata, played by singer Koji Tamaki) makes a living as a real estate project planner. The other man (Anzai, played by TV personality and comedian Ishii La Salle) works at city hall as a city planner. The woman (Kiriko, played by Kaori Mizushima, director Nagasaki's wife) does not reveal very much about herself, but she is charming, bold and believes in UFOs. The three end up on the rooftop looking out for alien spaceships."


Saw V will have a planner as a major character. I don't plan on seeing it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Saw_characters#Luba

 

[ofos]

More Scripts

For distribution fans:

Ship of Fools

A small midwest community, S. Wanton, has recently engaged a full-time distribution planner of 70's vintage to help them compete with their larger and more affluent neighbor, N. Wanton. The planner, Ursus DuNord, fantasizes about the perfect distribution center to bring an economic boom to the community.

His fourth assistant, K.D., is a specialist in the reclamation of aging Wolverines who soon realizes that Ursus has become obsessed with his spreadsheet of distribution tasks that includes color coding the location of each of the inhabitants of N. Wanton.

As the distribution center grows, it becomes apparent that the population of N. Wanton is beginning to decline at an alarming rate. Where are they going? Is there any relationship between the disappearances and the pallets of colorful packages being shipped to the Port of De Rock? Will Ursus’s fascination with the lovely and intoxicating Linda Loma be his downfall?

Classic scene: Ursus at sunset on Lake Eerily with the MuniSingers performing "Sittin' on the De Rock of the Bay".


See.....distribution types can be incorporated into film. :-D

ofos

 

[dandy_warhol]

we just got done watching "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." they mention city planners. the line is something like, "A city planner would never put a playground next to a sewage plant."

 

[JNA]

we just got done watching "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." they mention city planners. the line is something like, "A city planner would never put a playground next to a sewage plant."

The line is found at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0800039/quotes
I have heard that line said about civil engineering too. :-D

 

[RandomPlanner]

I had a couple of professors back in college use movies an example of planning, usually more on the social aspects of planning though.

One of them was the beginning of Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Another was Metropolis, a 1920s silent movie.

It seems like I remember saving a list that they had come up with, I will have to see if I can find it.

I actually took an undergrad class called "Planning In Film" or something to that effect. We watched a different movie every week and had to write papers comparing and contrasting them.

I remember Metropolis.
We also watched Blade Runner, which i.m.d.b. describes "The city ... is a huge, sprawling, bleak vision of the future."
I'll look for my notebook and give you more...

I also voted for Back to the Future as our end, student chosen, film. I lost.

What about Erin Brokovitz? That's about the big corporation polluting the world, but also argueably about innapropriate adjacent uses and such...

 

[MacheteJames]

As RandomPlanner alludes to, it may be worth mentioning films that depict a future vision of the city but do not make it the main focus of the plot. A few that come to mind are the Fifth Element (23rd Century NYC), Judge Dredd (also NYC), I Robot (mid 21st century Chicago) and Minority Report (mid 21st century Washington DC).

 

[BurgPlanner]

OK...so I haven't seen this movie myself, but my boss has. The latest Saw movie...I think it is Saw 5. Three of the characters that get trapped in the building and are forced to play the "games" are:

A Developer (you might say that's appropriate)
A Building Inspector

and.......


A City Planner

I know...it's not a movie about planning, but when was the last time you saw a movie where one of the main characters is a City Planner???

 

[Suburb Repairman]

From a charming bit of cultural polution: Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Character Darald, when discussing bedroom anatomy issues and his new wife on their honeymoon:

Let me just say that if God was a city planner he would not put a playground next to a sewage system!

Not really a topical planning issue, but funny none-the-less.

 

[mgk920]

Wasn't the central plot in Disney's The Love Bug a battle between some little guys and an ego-maniacal developer and his equally audacious proposed building project?

Mike

 

[Streck]

"The Unforeseen" (2007) is available at Netflix.

There have also been six major media reviews of the film quoted there - mostly positive.

 

[H]

The Sunshine State

"A woman and her new husband returns to her hometown roots in coastal northern Florida, and must deal with family, business, and encroaching real estate development. "

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286179/

 

[natski]

The Castle

An Australian Movie (was released in the US- redubbed- not as good as the Aussie version at all) about a family who's house is located next to an airport and the airport wants to expand.

Has become a classic Australian movie- lots of one liners

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118826/

 

[JMo]

Two Weeks Notice (2002)

Millionaire real estate developer George Wade (Hugh Grant) doesn't make a move without Lucy Kelson (Sandra Bullock), his multitasking chief counsel. Now, after a year of calling the shots -- on everything from George's clothes to his divorce settlements -- Lucy is giving her two weeks' notice. Finally free of George and his 24-hour requests, Lucy is ready to change course … Or is she?

Memorable quote:

George Wade: This whole project is worth about 50 million in profits.
Ruth Kelson: No offense, but I think it's *immoral* for one person to acquire that much wealth. How do you sleep at night?
George Wade: Well, I have a machine that simulates the sound of the ocean.
Larry Kelson: Do those really work?
George Wade: Oh, yes, quite well actually.

 

[planr]

Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" (1989) is an interesting look at the Bed-Stuy neighborhood in Brooklyn through the lens of diversity (Majority black population, Italian's running the pizza joint, Puerto Ricans on the street corner, Korean shopkeepers, etc)

 

[Bear Up North]

Patiently Waiting

This Bear (and perhaps some others) are patiently waiting for more script ideas or more references to planners in film.

What say you?

Come on people.....if you can swing traffic calming in that north side neighborhood near the line-up of big boxes, you can do some scripting.

:-D

Bear

 

[arcplans]

Bump.. reviving this thread

Soo..
I was watching 30 rock on thursday night and they aired a promo for Amy Pohler's new show called "Parks and Recreation". It has a city planner in it, and the show is suppose to be a "mockumentary" of government and all its quirkiness. When i caught the preview i had to jump online and because i told myself, "no way did he not say that." It was a comment regarding the public. I am sure it is a comment many of use, including myself feel about the "public" at times. Check it out. Hopefully this show sticks around for a while.

http://www.nbc.com/Primetime/parks-and-recreation/

It is the first video, couldn't figure out how to embed the thing

 

[Shellac And Vinyl VelocitY]

Bear has already reviewed Breaking and Entering. I'll expound on Jude Law's role as a landscape architect.

Snipped from http://land.asla.org/2007/0130/minghella.html:

It’s a fact noted by critics (in other publications that would not likely draw accusations of a bias to the profession) that landscape architecture plays a significant role in the movie.

The [Jude Law] character, Will Francis, works at the at a firm Green Effect. The firm’s notable project in the film is a large-scale plan in King’s Cross, a transit hub fallen into squalor which has become a redevelopment site of historical proportions while spurring gentrification.

To better develop the identity of the [Jude] character and the firm, Anthony Minghella, who directed and wrote the screenplay for Breaking and Entering, wrote the following manifesto...
. . .
Keep in mind one atypical detail about landscape architect Will Francis: He hates flowers and plants and loves concrete.


Green Effect Manifesto

Green Effect is certainly not against nature, although we are accused of being against nature. Rather, we are against the fraudulent advocacy of nature, the misnaming of mediated space as natural, the mistaking of grass as nature, of green as nature. We are against decoration—the flowerbed, the plant, the lawn—those miniature gestures of appeasement which nature would not recognize. Nature is not tame, by definition, and there is no space in Britain or Europe that can be described without irony as natural. That a site is designated green space is already a gesture of control. It can be termed a national park or a wildlife sanctuary, its boundaries marked, its animal life monitored—Nature this way!

What Green Effect advocates is hardly modern. Nash was designing both internal and external spaces in the nineteenth century. The Regent’s Canal, Regent Street, and Regents Park are all illustrations of a coherent arrangement of private and public environments—elegant terraces grouped around the park, with its inner and outer circles. Regent’s Park is made, of course, a construct no more or less natural than the curving rows of stucco buildings. The confident harmonies, which develop from this marriage of house and environment, have direct and positive impact on those who inhabit them. It’s great to walk in the park and look at the facades; it’s great to look at the park from inside the buildings. These values are self-evident. The same is true of the Italian Piazza; its grandest expressions—in San Marco in Venice, the Piazza Navona in Rome—without a blade of grass, are as architectural, as pleasing, as defining as any building, as communal as any park. They say something about a culture in the way as our endless verges, our muddy borders, our clumps of bamboos, forlorn trees, and concrete flower beds speak volumes about our current society and its lack of respect for what happens to our citizens when they leave their front doors travelling to the glass boxes of their offices. A glance at the budgets for enclosed spaces and exterior spaces indicate society’s true valuation of our constructed environments.

Green Effect views the built landscape as an art, one which requires as much care as any structure and as much acknowledgement of design. We believe that there has to be more than a token recognition by architects that they contribute to an environment gestalt, that the choreography of bound and unbound space should be determined as a whole and not simply with the one determining the other—I’m here, fill in around me. Every large-scale urban project should employ landscape and building architects simultaneously, and Green Effect will only commit to projects where such a dynamic exists and where the possibility lies for the demands of landscape to genuinely effect the position and external characteristics of any structures. Where possible, Green Effect will design both. It will favor environment, it will insist that harmonies between the so-called male and female spaces have political impact, not least on crime but most of all, that respect and wit toward exterior space improves the quality of life of every citizen.

Green Effect Partnership. 2005

Snipped from http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/mar/26/architecture.communities:

. . .Breaking and Entering is a picture of two utterly different worlds that overlap in place, but not in time. By day Law's office, set in the midst of the vast redevelopment site that is King's Cross, hums with the comfortable sense of entitlement of middle-class creatives. But at night it is overtaken by Nigerian cleaners and Kosovan crack dealers, who keep coming back to steal his computers.

Minghella's film is a timely reminder of how these two urban worlds depend on each other. But the conventional response of planners is to try to sweep the dark underbelly of the city away. To do that is to risk the collateral damage that will destroy the very qualities that make a city work. It attempts to turn a city into a village, which is no place for the disposed and the ambitious, desperate to escape from poverty.

The area known as the King's Cross railway lands is a gash in London's fabric that has never healed since the canals and railways tore into it at the start of the 19th century. It reflects the reality of city life in the most brutal and extreme form. Hookers and addicts share the pavements with commuters, skirting the vast swathe of canals and sheds trapped between the Euston Road and the residential streets of Camden Town. King's Cross is currently undergoing a paroxysm of development that irresistibly recalls the feverish transformation of this very piece of land portrayed by Charles Dickens in Dombey and Son

Dickens captured the surrealistic dislocation of houses left stranded by railway embankments, and roads that lead nowhere. Almost the same thing is happening again. The huge glass and white steel box awkwardly tacked on to the back of Victorian St Pancras, designed to handle the high-speed rail link to Paris and Brussels, is nearing completion. The new station represents a construction project on a scale that matches that of the Victorians - if not their confidence, or their architectural ambition. Negotiating the area, you thread your way through new viaducts that erupt from the mud, past tower cranes and ancient warehouses and gasometers. The landscape is by turns pastoral and derelict.

Breaking and Entering is a powerful portrait of urban life as it really is. But it is already something of a period piece. Minghella has captured the last days of a King's Cross that is already passing. Planning permission was last week granted for a massive redevelopment of an area larger than Canary Wharf that will complete what the new channel tunnel rail link has started. The gash in London's fabric will finally be healed.

The plans for the new King's Cross are the product of an architectural team that includes both mainstream modernists Allies and Morrison, and the architectural fundamentalist Demetri Porphyrios. They are an unlikely pair. Porphyrios is best known for building authentic gothic university buildings, such as the Magdalen College Grove Quadrangle in Oxford, in solid, load-bearing stone. Allies and Morrison design polite glass and steel offices for the BBC. The project is being led by Argent, a company run by Roger Madelin, a developer with a penchant for motorcycle jackets. He worked with the same architects on the Brindley Place area of Birmingham, where they stitched together canalside warehouses with a mix of offices, shops and cafes that carefully avoids iconic statements or grand gestures. After six years of work by Madelin and his team, Camden Council has said yes to a scheme that takes a very similar approach. All it needs now is Ken Livingstone's approval.

Even though it's hard to see much of a future here for Minghella's Kosovans, it's difficult to argue with the mix of uses that Argent has in mind. One area will be devoted to corporate offices. A cultural zone will have the new Central St Martins school of art as its focus, while the northern part of the site will be devoted to housing. Less convincing is the form of the scheme that combines dense urban blocks with disappointing piazzas and parades that do their best to pretend that this is a slice of traditional city, rather than the massive transformation that it really is.

Argent's architects are apparently driven by the belief that London is a gently haphazard city that has always grown in fits and starts, and avoided the grand gesture. That is a misreading of London which despite its reputation for informality, has usually been able to rise to an occasion. John Nash's Regent's Park was heroic enough to inspire Napoleon III to remodel Paris, just as it was the London Underground that once set the pace for the Paris metro. It's hard not to feel a certain regret that the last attempt to redevelop the same plot of King's Cross land - a huge, oval green the size of Regent's Park and ringed by skyscrapers, was killed off by the 1990s property crash.

In the last quarter of a century, London has got out of the habit of seeing that such bold strategies are possible. As it is now, King's Cross is a mud-splattered, anarchic mess that reveals the shifting tectonic plates of urban life. The new King's Cross that Argent is planning will be a polite, comfortable place for commuters to drink latte on their way from the train to the office. But a city in the sense that Jude Law's tormented character would understand, it will never be...

This 2007 film is on HBO's video on demand until March 30. (Free if you subscribe to HBO.)

I usually watch movies with other people; I made a point of viewing this one alone in order to leisurely freeze and study shots of London and the plans.

 

[Seabishop]

Just saw a movie called Humpday about a straight Transportation Planner who plans on starring in an "adult movie" with his buddy. He mentions his profession but he's never shown at work and his job never comes up again. The movie isn't really worth seeing in general but I figured you'd all want to know.

 

[beto_venegas]

Inception!! (Great movie by the way...)

I liked the place where Dicaprio's homes, through time, were place in line in an urban pond.

 

[steviede]

city form and cinematic representation

Hey all,

I am a town planning student in Western Australia, about to prepare my final dissertation, am interested to hear what people might think about this idea....

what can town planning draw from the way cities are portrayed in films?? can town planning learn from the way 'creative' popular culture thinks cities of the future will look like.

may be planning as a solely political, scientific medium needs to take into account other dimensions??

if anyone get give me some direction where i could go with this, it would be much appreciated!!!!!!

 

[jobaba]

In a Seinfeld episode, George awards a scholarship to a slacker student who wants to be an architect.

When the student changes his mind and decides to be an urban planner instead, citing architecture as a poor man's urban planning, George flies off the handle and rescinds the scholarship.

Great episode and interesting enough, I can't even count the number of architects I went to urban planning school with...

 

[JNA]

In a Seinfeld episode, ...

"The Van Buren Boys".

That has been posted in the following years:
2001 http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showpost.php?p=1160&postcount=2
2003 http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showpost.php?p=56267&postcount=1
http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showpost.php?p=73371&postcount=59
2004 http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showpost.php?p=134086&postcount=36
http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showpost.php?p=177945&postcount=3
2005 http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showpost.php?p=238698&postcount=8
2008 http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showpost.php?p=458216&postcount=4

 

[Pragmatic Idealist]

"Volcano" (1997) was a ridiculous movie about lava in Los Angeles, and most of the film is set on Wilshire Boulevard where people are debating the construction of the extension to the subway.

 

[Pragmatic Idealist]

"Crash," also set in Los Angeles, explores the socioeconomic balkanization and ethnic fragmentation that the cars have created in southern California.

 

[Citizen K]

The short-lived sitcom "Men Behaving Badly" from the '90s featured a very unctuous, obnoxious next-door neighbor character trying too woo a pretty girl. In one scene he's just finishing up an obviously very long and very boring story, and the poor girl's eyes are glazed over.

He ends with: "And THAT'S how I became an urban planner."

 

[Rygor]

There was an episode of Criminal Minds this past weekend wherein a guy works for an environmental company that does site cleanup work and finds out there is a serial arsonist working for him. They mention EPA site cleanup regulations a bit and talk briefly about a rezoning from a commercial-warehouse zone to "ES" - elementary school (nevermind that I've never heard of a zoning district created for something as specific as elementary schools).

 

[The One]

Atlanta Zoning Office

Anyone see the latest Walking Dead episode on AMC? They introduced Jackie, an official from the Atlanta Zoning Office I wish we had a zombie emoticon for this post. I give her one or two more episodes before she is consumed by a zombie8-!

 

[johnelsden1]

The Series "Numbers" (unfortunately cancelled last year) starred Judd Hirsch as an urban planner................

 

[JimPlans]

The short-lived sitcom "Men Behaving Badly" from the '90s featured a very unctuous, obnoxious next-door neighbor character trying too woo a pretty girl. In one scene he's just finishing up an obviously very long and very boring story, and the poor girl's eyes are glazed over.

He ends with: "And THAT'S how I became an urban planner."

The series "Doc Martin" had a throwaway line in it that made me laugh. One of the characters (Louisa) was marrying Doc Martin (a doctor), and her maid of honor was crying because her ex-boyfriend had gotten her pregnant and then left her, and at least Louisa was marrying a doctor, because her lousy ex-boyfriend was only a "city planner."

I quote [USER]Citizen K[/USER] because the lead actor in Doc Martin is Martin Clunes, and he was also the lead character in the original BBC version of "Men Behaving Badly." Hmmm.

 

[short timer]

Yeah, I saw the Walking Dead episode and laughed out loud. Then I wondered how a zoning person would know about the sewage tunnel. It would've been more plausible if she was from DPW

 

[Queen B]

There were two Christmas movies in a row yesterday that made mention of planning. One where the Mayor says he has a Planning Commission meeting.

The other where Shelly Long was a city lawyer? and had her Santa Clause father thrown in jail because of zoning violations. ( I have to say I wasn't watching all that close so my details could be a bit off.)

No wonder people think poorly of us...:-c