I do

Angela Senior (Script Supervisor) and Lisa Mulcahy (Director)

Fighter pilots have to make 30 decisions every six seconds or is it sixty decisions every three seconds? Well, whatever it is its pretty impressive multitasking but not quite on a par with the amount of things a script supervisor has to remember whilst shooting a movie. Script supervisors are invariably women (in this country anyway) and in the olden days were referred to as continuity girls. If you refer to a script supervisor as a continuity girl these days you’re likely to get a thick lip so don’t.

For the next two days we are shooting in a pub. It is a working pub but from 8 in the morning until 7 in the evening they have given us sole use of the bar. The lounge is open for the regulars, a few of whom seem slightly disgruntled at being pushed off their bar stools and shoved into the lounge where they wouldn’t normally be seen dead. Some traditions (like men not drinking in lounges where ‘wimin’ lurk) will never die out. I hope. 

So, we have a bunch of scenes to shoot with a bunch of actors (well, four) sitting at the bar with a bunch of pints cogitating about life and all it’s quirky and inexplicable ways. Shooting these sorts of scenes can become tedious after a while. A bunch of lads sitting yakking for hours. But these scenes are never boring for the script supervisor because she is too busy trying to keep track of who took a drink of which drink at what point of dialogue from whomever happened to be speaking at the time.

Some actors are good at remembering to slurp from their pint at the exact same point of dialogue during every take and during every different angle that is taken for each scene. Most actors are crap at this and that’s why someone like the script supervisor has to do that job for them. If you left this sort of detail to the whim of the actors you’d end up in the cutting rooms trying to put a scene together using all your different angles and sure every take would be different and nothing would match and there’d be what we call in the trade, bleeding continuity errors all over the shop and even thinking about it is making me exhausted and vowing that I will cut any scenes in future scripts that involve groups of people talking whist also eating or drinking or smoking or God forbid, all three at the same time.

Angela is our script supervisor and I want to marry her. A good script supervisor is worth their weight in gold because if they’re really on the ball they will spot a million potential errors that the director or the DOP or everybody else will miss. These are the sorts of errors that make it impossible for the editor to cut together a scene that makes sense.

In brief whilst we are doing a take these are a few of the things that Angela has to remember; to start her stopwatch to time the scene so that she can tell you afterwards that it is running a minute too short of five minutes too long; she has to listen through earphones to what the actors are saying and make notes on her script when they say a wrong line or even prompt them when they suddenly freeze having forgotten their lines all together; she has to watch and note their every movement to make sure that they do stuff at the same time during each take, like walking or smoking or scratching or coughing or whatever unpredictable things actors tend to do to make each of their performance seem fresh and different. Script supervisors don’t really want fresh and different. They want the exact same thing at the exact same moment every time please. They rarely get it and I am constantly amazed that more of them don’t pull out loaded guns or machetes when actors and directors get all excited with each other because one of them has just had a brilliant idea which they are going to try on the next take which she knows will be completely unusable because it will not match even one of the fifteen takes they have done of this shot already. 

She will patiently point this out to the said actor and director who will invariably ignore her ‘cos their idea is simply too brilliant for rubbishy notions of matching actions or words. All of this comes to a sorry conclusion when the director gets to the cutting room and the editor tells them that their brilliant idea is a load of crap and would never have worked because the actor has used his right hand in one take and his left hand in another and did the director not spot that at the time? The director will go very quiet for a moment, privately consider the disastrous consequences of their actions and then will openly blame the script supervisor for the idiotic mistake.

There is also another subject very close to a script supervisor’s heart that I could talk about here and it’s called ‘crossing the line.’ However, the mere sniff of those words being uttered on set sends my nerve sensors into overload, my eyes rolling deep into their sockets and gives me an instant yearning to get into the foetal position so if you don’t mind, I won’t.

Suffice to say that Angela, if you’re in the market for a wife, you know what my answer is