A long time ago, I read an article complaining about how nobody says “goodbye” at the end of phone calls in movies and TV shows. Characters just hang up. “Now that I’ve pointed this out, I guarantee that it will drive you crazy,” the author wrote. It does drive me crazy: in stage and movie director terms, it “takes me out of the story.” Because it’s so obviously a device to save time, the omission of “goodbye” reminds me that I’m watching a performance. (Lately, I have noticed, “goodbyes” are appearing here and there, but still in a minority of productions.)

My late wife was a fanatic about such things, and she ruined many a show and film by pointing then out. One of her favorites, a pretty famous continuity botch, was Judy Garland’s constantly changing pig-tails in “The Wizard of Oz”: they are shorter and longer not only from scene to scene, but sometimes from shot to shot in the same scene. Grace was also the one who first pointed out to me the absence of rear-view mirrors in most shots of a character driving a car; now that drives me crazy.

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