During Mr. Maud’s stint at the FSU film school in the late 90’s, I served as script supervisor on a couple of student film sets.
The ostensible duty of the script supervisor is to ensure continuity — i.e., that the director gets the eye lines right, that an actor doesn’t have food on her plate in one shot and an empty plate in the next. But the truth is that the director, at least in the student film context, never actually wants to hear a lackey opining about shot angles and eye lines.
Hollywood screenwriters fare about the same, evidently:
still disbelieving this gigantic error he almost made, the director stomps over to me, whispering, “Are you absolutely sure? It doesn’t say she’s not in this scene on the page.”
I couldn’t believe they were still questioning me.
Being the bossy broad sort that I am, I said something like, “[Director’s name deleted], the bitch dies on page 40. You’re shooting 62. What am I supposed to do, type on the top of every page for the rest of the script, ‘The Bitch Is Still Dead’?”
(Via TEV.)