When Joe Gillis is first reading Norma's script at her house, she tosses him a bundle of pages to read. The sheets in this bundle are all askew, but the bundle he catches is neat and aligned.
When Joe is initially examining the scripts, Norma is shown with a very short cigarette butt. The camera pans to Joe and then back to Norma, whose cigarette is now (seconds later) significantly longer.
After Joe takes a dip in the pool while Norma sits sunning herself, he gets out of the pool and dries his face and chest completely. In the next shot, he is dripping water from the face and chest.
When Joe drops the "slave market scene" into a wastebasket and he and Norma have their first argument about the Salome script, she orders him to put it back in. Instead of fishing it out of the wastebasket, he picks the discarded page up from the edge of the desk.
When Norma and Joe are being driven to Paramount, Norma raises her left hand to the left side of her face as Max adjusts the rear view mirror. After the cut, Norma's reflection in the mirror shows her hand immediately relocated to the right side of her face.
During the bridge game with the "waxworks" the auto repo men magically appear at Norma's door, but no doorbell is ever heard.
When Norma Desmond is explaining how her star sign and Cecil B. DeMille's are aligned, she mentions that DeMille is a Scorpio. However, he was born on 12th August, making him a Leo.
As great as this film is, the screenplay never reveals exactly why Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) was unemployed. Unlike some silent stars -- Pola Negri, Clara Bow, and John Gilbert to name a few -- she had a fine voice, and she looked great.
However, artistic license allows the writers and director to omit details some viewers feel should be included. There are many potential reasons that Norma Desmond hadn't gotten any recent roles, the most likely one being that as an actress "of a certain age" (i.e., late-40s or 50s), she no longer was in demand by the movie-going public.
However, artistic license allows the writers and director to omit details some viewers feel should be included. There are many potential reasons that Norma Desmond hadn't gotten any recent roles, the most likely one being that as an actress "of a certain age" (i.e., late-40s or 50s), she no longer was in demand by the movie-going public.
As the policemen run towards the pool, you can see the dead man's head lift up out of the water.
When Norma's car is pulling up to Studio 18, you can see that the driver is clearly not Max as Erich von Stroheim did not drive. Furthermore, the uniforms are quite different.
When Norma Desmond drives through the Paramount gate, Jonesy, the guard who let her in, dials his phone and speaks into the phone, asking for "stage 18" before the phone's dial has even returned to zero.
When Joe returns to the mansion after having been in the rain in a vicuna coat twice, the coat shows no signs of being wet.
Gillis comes to Sheldrake's office destitute, and begging to do absolutely any kind of work to earn a little money. Sheldrake apologizes for having nothing. But when he suggests turning Joe's script, "Bases Loaded", into a Betty Hutton musical, Joe winces and asks him if he's kidding, even though a rewriting of his original script would entail a great deal of paid work for him.
When Max is telling Joe about directing Madam's first pictures, there is a bad dub of the word "sixteen". After the Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle trial and the subsequent establishment of the Hays Office to enforce the new Production Code, the producers were concerned that the original age of 14 would be considered child porn and had the line changed in post.
At the New Year's Eve party (at Norma's house), we hear someone plucking a violin, but when we look at the orchestra, they are all playing with their bows.
When Joe Gillis gets out of the pool and Norma offers to dry him off, several crewmembers as well as lighting, microphones, and other equipment, are reflected in Norma's large, dark sunglasses.
The shadow of a camera as it moves in on Norma's bed is visible on Joe's back.
When Joe enters his bedroom and turns on the light, a crewmember's arm (with wristwatch) is visible in the mirror next to the door.
As Joe approaches the suicidal Norma lying in her bed, shadows of the tracking camera, and reflections from extraneous lights can be seen moving across the back of his overcoat.
While Norma meets with C.B. DeMille, Joe spots Betty and pops into her office. The individual shots of Joe and Betty show two completely different views out of the "same" window.
When Norma is holding the screenplay being written by Joe and Betty, their names are joined by the word 'and'. This would mean that Joe (who is listed first) had written the entire screenplay, sold it to a studio, only to have Betty revise/rewrite the script. Since the two characters were working together, their names should have been joined with an ampersand ('&').
Norma tells Joe how Mabel Normand was a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty with her in the old days, but Mabel was never in that group, having left Keystone for Goldwyn by the time they became a film staple.
Wallace Reid died in 1923, three years before Paramount's Marathon Street studio opened, thus he could not have had a bungalow on wheels on the lot as Max had pointed out (unless of course, he was pointing towards Sunset and Vine where Paramount had its lot at the time of Reid's death).
Norma tells Joe that she's bought a "revolver," but the gun is not a revolver.
When Joe is sneaking out to work at the studio with Betty, he pulled the Isotta Fraschini out of the garage forward. When he came back, he also pulled it in the garage forward leaving proof that he was taking the car.