As the saying goes, “#%*! happens.”

This is true in moviemaking as much as any walk of life. Getting a large number of people to all march in rhythm and conform to a single agenda is a challenge under the best of circumstances. When that large number of people consists of temperamental artistic personalities and high-strung egos, and the single agenda entails trying to create a coherent story out of discontinuous fragments created out of order, the expectation should be for mistakes, and lots of ‘em.

Which is why I object to this site:  The 15 Worst Movie Mistakes in History

The premise of this site is to catalog allegedly egregious examples of continuity errors from major tentpole movies–but for what purpose? The whole thing is akin to pointing out typographical misprints from NY Times best sellers: “hey look it, everybody, he put a semicolon where he meant to have a dash!”

I could retort that their site itself sports a few typos, but that’s not the point.

The stance of that site seems to imply that the authors feel a certain betrayal that with all the hundreds of millions spent on those blockbusters and all the people employed over such a long stretch of time, that cinematic typos really shouldn’t have occurred at all. That’s silly. The longer the production, the more that goes into it, the greater the opportunity for glitches. But instead of marveling at all the ways that these huge productions did manage to coordinate the efforts of so many different interest groups and competing personalities, they nitpick the tiniest details as if they had any meaning.

The films selected for their ridicule and criticism aren’t boring flops, they chose some of the most popular movies of recent memory. These are genuine blockbusters, with millions of fans across the globe–they have enthralled audiences across cultural boundaries and rewarded many multiple viewings. I’m not saying they are beyond critique–I think there are in fact many legitimate ways to critique each of these films–but I am saying that there is a distinction between a thoughtful analysis that identifies why a given reviewer didn’t respond to a popular movie the way the masses did, and just sniggering at continuity errors.

All those millions of happy customers who enjoyed Oceans 11 or Spider-Man either never noticed the continuity errors, or noticed but didn’t care. The dramatic thrall of the films kept those viewers entertained, such that inconsistent background details could be swept under the rug. When someone focuses single-mindedly on the background details, it says more about them than it does about the movie.

So, as an antidote, I want to offer my own list of movie “mistakes.” This list identifies something other than unintentional continuity errors, though–these are massive violations of protocol and accepted practice, which resulted from compromises the filmmakers we forced by circumstance to reluctantly accept. These are things the filmmakers themselves identify as mistakes, but which made their respective movies immensely better.

Miscasting.

When author Nigel Kneale conceived of his scientist hero Professor Quatermass, he envisaged a realistic portrayal of a technical “boffin,” which was how most of the sundry TV versions approached the character. When Hammer filmed feature adaptations of The Quatermass Experiment and Quatermass 2, though, the financing deals obliged them to use Brian Donlevy in the lead. Kneale was vocal in his disgust at this turn of events–to him, Donlevy couldn’t have been more wrong. Donlevy was a loud, pushy American, and an unmanageable drunkard to boot. The entire production team saw him as a burden–but his blunderbuss portrayal gave a life to Quatermass missing from all the other variations.

Donlevy’s Quatermass is a figure of authority, whose overwhelming persona implies he’s not used to being told “no.”. This makes his frustration and terror in Quatermass 2 that much more meaningful–if this guy’s worried, things must really be bad!

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Quatermass 2 is one of the sharpest, tightest, most awe-inspiringly thrilling SF thrillers of the 1950s, and much of its sucker punch intensity is attributable to Donlevy.

Low budgets

The legends spoken of this film vastly overstate its threadbare limitations. But even though it had a longer shooting schedule than the six days of the myth, and more money than is generally believed to have been spent on it, the fact remains this was an uncommonly cheapskate endeavor, forced by its poverty into various compromises. Instead of New York scenery, the characters stroll a fogbound limbo, for example.

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There’s a lot about Detour that works by any measure–it’s a grim story, following a cruel logic, and the menacing vixen played by Ann Savage is the stuff of nightmares. But one of the reasons this modest little movie from 1945 still has legions of admirers is because of its clever exploitation of its own modesty–remake this thing with $100 million and you’d completely miss the point.

Missing scenes

The makers of Primer decided, for reasons that don’t bear scrutiny, to insist on as a close to a 1:1 shooting ratio as possible. The insistence on capturing and using the first take of every scene gave the performances a rough vitality that added to the feeling of realism–which is a central asset of this disturbing puzzle box mystery. Not many science fiction films about time travel can claim “realism” as their strongest suit, but that’s a large measure of why Primer has become a modern day cult favorite.

However, this attitude had a cost–any scene that they royally screwed up on the first take, well, they’d just abandon that scene and move on, rather than reshoot it to fix it. So, a handful of what ought to have been essential moments in the story just never got filmed correctly and were left out. I want to be careful about how I word this, so as not to spoil anything for those who haven’t seen it yet (and why haven’t you? What are you waiting for?), but the turning point in the center of the film involving the discovery of a second time machine and an additional time traveler is completely confusing, because virtually none of the relevant footage exists.

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However, curiously, this glaring omission actually makes the film stronger, because it keeps the entire narrative from the point of view of characters who themselves are not in a position to know what happened either. They know something went screwy, and now have to make crucial decisions to respond to these incomplete and baffling revelations, but must act without full knowledge–just as people do in real life all the time, regardless of whether they have time machines.

I am immensely tired of science fiction stories in which scientist characters suddenly and magically know all the answers (one of the reasons I gravitate towards Quatermass, see above), and Primer is a tremendously refreshing work of sci-fi realism, thanks to its makers’ stubborn unwillingness to shoot anything twice.

Front office interference

Speaking of science fiction movies improved by having scenes removed, the original theatrical cut of Donnie Darko is vastly superior to its Directors Cut on almost every level. In fact, exposure to the Directors Cut actually cooled a lot of my passion for this movie and made it harder for me to enjoy the original version.

For those who have not seen both versions, or either version for that matter, it is another time travel story, about a disaffected and possibly mentally ill suburban teenager who believes he has received information about the impending end of the world from a six foot tall evil rabbit named Frank. When a jet engine destroys his bedroom, but no plane appears to being missing an engine, he starts to piece together clues that he is now living in an alternate timeline, and that to save the world he has to travel back in time and restore the proper sequence of events.

Or, something to that effect.

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What makes the original cut work so well is that this bizarre and over-complicated idea is presented with ambiguity. Donnie’s notion of what’s going on isn’t the only possible explanation, nor is it at all very well explained.

But director Richard Kelly had filmed additional material that helped clarify the time travel story and define Donnie as a super hero like figure. The studio objected that the movie was too long, and insisted on cuts just to trim its running time. Kelly reluctantly complied, and the result was a deliciously mysterious film, full of crags and warrens into which different viewers could project competing interpretations. A cult hit was born.

Years later, that cult popularity gave Kelly enough clout to demand a second bite at the apple, in which he reincorporated the deleted scenes and provided some new special effects to tie everything together. In so doing, he destroyed most of the mystery and plastered over the places where competing interpretations could live. The film became more banal and two-dimensional–a sign that sometimes, front office interference in a director’s artistic vision can actually be a beneficial thing.

Bad special effects

Steven Spielberg intended Jaws to feature a monstrous shark, a menacing oversized animal in the vein of classic movie monsters of the 50s and 60s. But the mechanical shark was too disappointing in execution for all but the most limited screen appearances. The money was tight and there was no effective Plan B. So, he had to leave the shark out of much of the film–an unseen presence indicated by ominous music and point of view camerawork.

In other words, the very artistic choices that made Jaws a massive hit. The same movie, dominated by an onscreen monster, would have been trite–and would have been the director’s original intention, if mistakes had not forced him into a better path.

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I rarely even notice continuity errors, and when I do I rarely care. If it’s a well-made movie, the glitches are irrelevant to an engrossing experience. If it’s a poorly-made movie, the overall problems of the movie tend to outweigh whatever continuity gaffes are also present. But big mistakes, huge massive missteps–why, they can take an otherwise mediocre or pedestrian effort and turn it into the sublime!