From The Wall Street Journal March 25, 2010
In Movies, to Err Is Human, To Nitpick Is Even More So
A Committed Cadre of Carpers Catches Flubs in Flicks; Rikki Rosen’s Watching
By BARRY NEWMAN
ST. LOUIS—Johnny Depp’s fingernails are dirty when he gets drunk on rum and passes out in the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.” When he wakes up and brings his hands to his face, the fingernails are clean.
Rikki Rosen caught that. She reported it to a Web site in Britain called Movie Mistakes, which does nothing but list mistakes in movies. While Mr. Depp inspects his pirate crew, the sun shines from different directions between cuts. Ms. Rosen also caught that mistake. When Mr. Depp bites into an apple, the bite mark changes shape from shot to shot. Ms. Rosen caught that one, too.
In all, she has reported 293 mistakes in the pirate movie to Movie Mistakes. She has also reported 3,695 mistakes in 181 other movies—including the bit in “War of the Worlds” when Tom Cruise yells “We’re under attack!” and it’s obvious that the inspection sticker previously on his van’s windshield is no longer there.
Ms. Rosen is a 48-year-old with red hair and a bad cold. Her inner-suburban living room contains couches and cat baskets; an old Sony television with an Xbox under it; tea cups, a computer and stacks of DVDs. At last count, she was Movie Mistake’s No. 2contributor, behind someone called “Hamster” with 4,413.
“Sure, a movie can have mistakes,” she said, curled up on her couch one morning. “People are imperfect. But sometimes it’s just one after the other after the other. It smacks of not caring. These things should not be blatant on the screen.” Ms. Rosen suppressed a cough. “So I look,” she said. “I look at everything.”
All movie sets have nitpickers. They were “script girls,” early on. Now they’re “script supervisors.”
They ward off wobbles that make movies less believable. But the Internet has stirred up a nest of similarly obsessed volunteers. They nitpick the nitpickers.
Jon Sandys, 31, founder of Movie Mistakes, posted a few gems on the Web in 1996 and asked people to send more. Now he lists 85,000, among them the Cessna in “Terminator 3” marked “N3035C” on the ground and “N3973F” in the air.
At IMDb, his huge rival, “goofs” rank in the top pages viewed by 57 million monthly visitors. “It’s smart people making connections,” says Keith Simanton, the site’s editor.
Clicking the names of script supervisors leads to lists of every mistake reported for every movie they’ve ever worked on. “They think they see things nobody else sees—it makes them feel clever,” says Sharon Watt, 32, a script supervisor in New York. “I can explain every one of my mistakes.”
Like this one: In “Precious,” a 2010 Oscar winner, Gabourey Sidibe steals some fried chicken and runs from a restaurant leaving her notebook behind. In the next scene, she has a notebook again.
In the script, someone gives her a new notebook. The moment was filmed exactly in keeping with the script. “We shot it,” says Ms. Watt. But disharmony arose in the production. Ms. Watt left. Three script supervisors succeeded her. In the final cut, the moment when Precious gets a new notebook is gone.
“The one person you don’t want to change on a shoot is the script supervisor,” Ms. Watt says. “A movie is like a jigsaw puzzle, and you’re the only one who has the cover of the box.”
Script supervisors keep thick logs of props, locations and costumes. Scenes aren’t shot in order. A bruise might have to look old in the morning and fresh in the afternoon. Actors ought to sync the same words with the same actions in each take. The idea is to give an editor film that can be spliced into a coherent whole.
Yet when a collar button is missing in an actor’s finest performance, an editor will usually forget the button and go for the performance.
“We’re not assuming that people who watch DVDs will keep going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth,” says Michael Taylor, a New York script supervisor turned editor.
Mr. Taylor hasn’t met Rikki Rosen—who was in her living room, feeding “Jaws” into her Xbox. The credits fade to a close up of a boy at a beach party. Behind him is a guy in a long-sleeve shirt. In the next shot, the sleeves are short.
Ms. Rosen hit the pause button and said, “See!”
“Jaws” was scarily flawless when she saw it as a teenager in Brooklyn. “I didn’t go swimming all summer,” Ms. Rosen says. Eleven years ago, she moved to St. Louis, where her husband is a salesman and she illustrates school materials. Her three growing sons watched a “Jaws” DVD over and over, and so did she.
The more she watched, the more mistakes jumped out—156 to be exact—and the worst of them are those yellow barrels the shark yanks off Quint’s boat in the final petrifying sequence:
“Look—two barrels on deck,” Ms. Rosen said, stopping the action and starting it again. “But here—three. Now two on the boat, three in water. Three on the boat, two in the water.”
The more mistakes she saw, the less scary “Jaws” became. Ms. Rosen calls that realization “cathartic.” When she isn’t watching horror movies, Ms. Rosen tries to keep her disbelief suspended. But sloppy moviemakers, in her opinion, won’t let her.
“Certain people have to do a better job,” she said, sipping tea. “One of my sons said to me, ‘Ma, you should be one of these people. You have this eye.’ ”
To prove it, she teed up “Some Like It Hot,” the all-time-great comedy with 51 IMDb goofs. Ms. Rosen had seen it once, years ago.
Instantly, she caught the broken (then unbroken) hearse window and the oddly leaky coffin. She got the rearranged beach chairs, and Marilyn Monroe’s disappearing bra strap.
But when the girls in the band run across the sand for a swim, Ms. Rosen missed the mountainous backdrop, which reveals that the movie was shot in California, not Florida. “I wasn’t looking,” she said, letting out a laugh. “I got carried away with the story.”
Well, nobody’s perfect.
