Moviemakers, Beware: Mistake Catchers Are Watching

Website has devoted set of film nitpickers
By Harry Kimball,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 25, 2010 12:27 PM CDT
Moviemakers, Beware: Mistake Catchers Are Watching
Film and a clap board.   (Shutterstock)

Rikki Rosen is a 48-year-old mother in St. Louis and the bane of movie script supervisors everywhere. “Sure, a movie can have mistakes,” the No. 2 contributor to the film-gaffe-chronicling site Movie Mistakes tells the Wall Street Journal. “But sometimes it's just one after the other after the other. It smacks of not caring.” Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl: 293 mistakes, including one in which Johnny Depp passes out with dirty fingernails and wakes up with clean ones.

Jaws: 156 mistakes, including an extra having long sleeves in one shot and short in the next. “I look at everything,” explains Rosen. Script supervisors, who ensure continuity in a movie, take exception to the nitpickers. “They think they see things nobody else sees—it makes them feel clever,” says one. “We're not assuming that people who watch DVDs will keep going back and forth and back and forth,” says another, who apparently hasn’t met Rosen. (More Rikki Rosen stories.)

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