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The Art of Cinema/Sky Arts

Last week’s programme presented by Ian Nathan focussed on script supervisors, once called ‘continuity girls’.

These provide an essential input by creating the illusion of reality in a film and avoiding ‘bloopers’.

Clive James once presented a programme on Saturday mornings highlighting bloopers.

Well do I recall my Dad’s disdain as his Dad would visit the cinema twice a week once for the Pathé News and once for the latest film.

“Who cares about such mistakes?” my father retorted in a rare burst of anger ‘”The cinema meant so much to people”.

It’s perhaps difficult in an age of rolling news to comprehend that Bob Danvers Walker’s resonant and overblown commentary on Pathé News was all the news you could receive.

Typically, the script supervisor would sit by the director who, however tyrannical, would treat such person courteously and he/she would pick out the Starbucks plastic coffee cup on set. Now that the brand is extended over three or more films the script supervisor also has to be aware of any increase in weight of an actor.

They interviewed one lady who worked with David Kwan and on The Third Man who only identified the film star as Miss Monroe, as she called her, as “difficult”.

In the days post-War, when British studios and films thrived, character actors like Sam Kydd could make several films in one day, sometimes returning several hours later to complete a walk across a courtyard. For reasons of budget and convenience a film could be shot out of time sequence with the studio element filmed before the location shoot.

Again, the script supervisor has to be vigilant.

Film critics and  humourists like Clive James like to show how clever they are by, for example, picking out a credit card in Mephisto, though set in the early 30s.

Ian Nathan and Steven Armstrong explained that nowadays there has been a reversal and, for example, a blooper in George Lucas’s seminal Star Wars (1975) was actually retained.

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About Neil Rosen

Neil went to the City of London School and Manchester University graduating with a 1st in economics. After a brief stint in accountancy, Neil emigrated to a kibbutz In Israel. His articles on the burgeoning Israeli film industry earned comparisons to Truffaut and Godard in Cahiers du Cinema. Now one of the world's leading film critics and moderators at film Festivals Neil has written definitively in his book Kosher Nostra on Jewish post war actors. Neil lives with his family in North London. More Posts