Getting it right is what it is all about whether fiction or fact. In a work of finction, the setting, the historicity, the details all serve to draw the reader/viewer into the created reality of the piece. When a detail is wrong it defeats the author's purpose and jars you the reader out of that reality. If the work is good and tight in all other aspects one can generally find their way back in with a little suspension of disbelief. If I can't do that, I'm finished. I can't read or watch any more of it.

Right now I am reading Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quiggley, which my son gave me as a gift. Well, it's not really a history. It's an opinion piece made to look like history. It is indexed but saddly lacking in footnotes and corraborating evidence. Some of it is heresay, some purported inside information and much of it is fact which tends to provide camoflage for the opinions. Some of it is self contradictory within a page or two of previous statements. I am annotating the margins for my son's sake as he expressed a desire to read it himself. Ever the father, that's me. I hope he appreciates it.

But YES! Those details matter. In films and other visual productions that is the job of the "Best Boy". It is his to make sure that all the props are in exactly the same place between takes which may be months apart. Sometimes I watch for shadow variations or ships passing by in a harbor shot, things which the film crew has little or no control over. I'm no fun to watch a movie with!!