Mysterious sign in the backgroumd of a movie...

January 21, 2012 11:51 PM

What is this sign from the background of a scene in the movie Moneyball?

cropped screencap. There doesn't appear to be any text with it, and it is just slapped up on a billboard without any relevance to the movie. any idea?

posted by upc_head to media & arts (10 answers total)

Clicky.

Looks like "no airheads allowed" to me.
posted by no regrets, coyote at 12:11 AM on January 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

Everything in a movie has to be approved by lawyers. Every background painting on the wall, every photo in a picture frame, every character name, every business card, every logo and every billboard.

Sometimes, you get told that a scene has been moved up several weeks and is shooting the next day. And so, sometimes you call your printer at 2am and beg him to please, please get out of bed and print a billboard for you that someone can pick up at 5am.

Occasionally, none of the things you've submitted to the lawyers have been approved yet, so you make something up that doesn't make any sense, or is relevant to absolutely anything, because that's the only way you know it'll be approved after the fact.

Or, sometimes these things are inside jokes.

Or, possibly, in this case it actually means something.
posted by thebrokenmuse at 2:11 AM on January 22, 2012 [3 favorites]

[I fixed the link and typo]
posted by taz at 2:23 AM on January 22, 2012

My initial thought that it was a symbol that was supposed to mean 'no gang colors allowed', and that if that didn't make sense based on where it was in the movie that somebody just used it in post-production to cover up a brand or something else they didn't want to appear (in a scenario like the brokenmuse describes) because they were amused by the cute-ridiculousness of that symbol trying to communicate that message.

But there's a big part of me that think if that symbol was used for that anywhere, it would also be easy to find it mocked somewhere on the Internet, and, at least a cursory search, doesn't find that to be true.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 6:22 AM on January 22, 2012

"No beaning"? The picture could be construed as the result of nailing someone in the head with a baseball. (In context, it might also be an anti-Billy Beane pun.)
posted by backupjesus at 8:32 AM on January 22, 2012

No 2 Pacs maybe?
posted by humboldt32 at 9:50 AM on January 22, 2012

"Don't get any fancy ideas!" or "Don't shoot projectile ice cream cones at others".

Going back to the lawyer and printer thing: if it's not an inside joke, it could just be "I have no ideas for this sign".
posted by tatma at 10:04 AM on January 22, 2012

"It is unsanitary to open your skull in the locker-room environment."
posted by secretseasons at 10:06 AM on January 22, 2012 [1 favorite]

No open minds?
posted by the jam at 10:26 AM on January 22, 2012

I'm with The Jam - that isn't a head band, the top of the head is actually ajar, letting magic pixie dust in (or out). Given the theme of the movie - flying in the face of conventional wisdom, that actually makes a lot of sense.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 9:58 PM on January 22, 2012