Wes Anderson’s films are stuffed with gorgeous production details that reward the careful viewer. Everything in his meticulous dollhouse worlds, from the covers of Suzy’s books in Moonrise Kingdom to the set dressing of Max’s plays in Rushmore, speaks to Anderson’s carefully thought-out sensibility.
The one place Anderson does seem to cut a few corners on, though, is in some of the text for the fake newspapers that appear in his films, normally only viewable by sharp-eyed viewers pausing the DVD. While in 2009’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, that meant filling columns with excerpts from the Roald Dahl book he was adapting, for this year’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson instead grabbed text from the most authoritative source possible: Wikipedia.
As pointed out by Redditor haveblue70, while the articles about the movie’s plot are completely (and amusingly) written, the ones to the side have long sections that have been copy and pasted from Wikipedia into the Trans-Alpine Yodel. To be fair, the articles quoted—Music, Carnival, and Avalanche—are relevant to the supposed news stories they’ve been inserted into. And some of the other text on the page is totally original, including a bizarre interview about the upcoming war (in the upper left of the shot) that ends with the enigmatic exchange “Q: Who is your blind friend?” “A: I’ve never laid eye on this man in my life.” Still, it’s comforting to know that even brilliant auteurs, like bleary-eyed college students around the world, sometimes have to resort to passing off Wikipedia’s words as their own.