The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch

During the pandemic, Forrest Wickman got into birds. So into birds, in fact, that he started noticing when birdcalls in movies didn’t match up with the birds that were actually on screen. And nothing was quite so egregiously mismatched as a particular bird who appears in 2000’s Charlie’s Angels and is definitively not a pygmy nuthatch. Thankfully, Forrest Wickman is as obsessive about the truth as he is about birds, and his curiosity led him down a doozy of a rabbit hole. Calling it now: This is the most entertaining story you’ll read all week.

It was actually a whopping 17 writers who ended up working on the script. In the words of a Los Angeles Times article from the time, “Never has so much top-flight talent been put to work on such a trifle.” “There’s what’s called revision pages,” August said. “If you are adding something new to a script, you put those pages out in a different-colored sheet of paper. So first it’s blue revisions, then pink revisions and yellow revisions. They went through that color rainbow so many times it was like double-cherry revisions by the time the movie stopped shooting.”

So whenever our pygmy nuthatch entered the script, it must have been on one of those colored revision pages, written by one of the other 16 screenwriters who worked on this movie. That meant that there were 16 other suspects to question, and any one of them could have written in the pygmy nuthatch.