“I started paying special attention to this particular botch when my wife and I were invited to a dinner decades ago at the home of a woman who worked for me. Prominently displayed in the couple’s living room was a fancy chess board and pieces. It was set up incorrectly. That was signature significance: my staffer’s husband didn’t play chess, he just wanted people to think he did. I knew then that he was a fake. Sure enough, the husband proved to be an insecure, posturing jerk, desperate to impress without the goods to do so legitimately….”

I wrote about it again last year in “Confronting My Biases, Episode 20: The Chessboard Tell,” which concluded in part,

“It tells me that the people responsible for any of these are careless and untrustworthy. The gaffe symbolizes all the laziness, ignorance, carelessness and lack of integrity in the world. It should never happen, ever; if it does, it means that nobody involved in the project cared enough to make sure the project was done right.“

They have the chess board set up properly in “My Cousin Vinnie.” The black square isn’t on the right in “Silverado,” or “Independence Day,” or in the sexy chess game Faye Dunaway plays with Steve McQueen in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Mel Brooks even has the giant chess board set up correctly in 1981’s “The History of the World, Part I], where he plays King Louis XVI of France using real people as the chess pieces, and clearly doesn’t know the rules [“Jump the queen!”] It isn’t hard if film makers give a damn, and have the modicum of literacy to know the bare minimum about the most important and influential game in world history, yes, even more than baseball.