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Episode: Decoder Ring: The Wrongest Bird in Movie History

Author: Slate Podcasts
Duration: 00:51:41

Episode Shownotes

There is a prominent bird in the 2000 film Charlie’s Angels that makes absolutely no sense. This so-called Pygmy Nuthatch doesn’t look or sound like it should, or live where the characters say it does. The bird is so elaborately wrong that it has haunted the birding community, including Slate’s

very own Forrest Wickman, for almost a quarter of a century. In this episode, Forrest embarks on a wild goose chase: Why can’t hundreds of filmmaking professionals with a $100 million budget accurately portray a single bird? This episode was reported and written by Forrest Wickman. It was edited by Willa Paskin. It was produced by Max Freedman. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin, Evan Chung, Katie Shepherd, and Max Freedman with help from Sofie Kodner. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. In this episode, you’ll hear from Charlie’s Angels screenwriters John August and Zak Penn, director McG, animal trainer Guin Dill, and sound editor Michael Benavente; and bird experts Nick Lund, Nathan Pieplow, and Drew Weber. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected] Want more Decoder Ring? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock exclusive bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus to get access wherever you listen. Disclosure in Podcast Description: A Bond Account is a self-directed brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Deposits into this account are used to purchase 10 investment-grade and high-yield bonds. As of 9/26/24, the average, annualized yield to worst (YTW) across the Bond Account is greater than 6%. A bond’s yield is a function of its market price, which can fluctuate; therefore, a bond’s YTW is not “locked in” until the bond is purchased, and your yield at time of purchase may be different from the yield shown here. The “locked in” YTW is not guaranteed; you may receive less than the YTW of the bonds in the Bond Account if you sell any of the bonds before maturity or if the issuer defaults on the bond. Public Investing charges a markup on each bond trade. See our Fee Schedule. Bond Accounts are not recommendations of individual bonds or default allocations. The bonds in the Bond Account have not been selected based on your needs or risk profile. See https://public.com/disclosures/bond-account to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of Seed Burn, Forrest Wickman explores the peculiar inaccuracies surrounding the depiction of a bird identified as a Pygmy Nuthatch in the 2000 film Charlie's Angels. Despite the film's substantial budget, the bird was inaccurately portrayed, sparking confusion within the birding community for years. Wickman investigates the chaotic scriptwriting process and the production choices that led to the inclusion of a Venezuelan trupial instead. The episode features insights from the film's creators, shedding light on the cultural implications of such cinematic inaccuracies while questioning the bounds of artistic license in sound design and wildlife portrayal.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Decoder Ring: The Wrongest Bird in Movie History) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_12
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00:00:29 Speaker_16
Before we begin, this episode contains some adult language. This summer, Decoder Ring producer Max Friedman and I headed to Brooklyn's Prospect Park to meet up with Slate's culture editor, Forrest Wickman.

00:00:49 Speaker_03
Why don't we go towards the boathouse area, the Audubon Center, and camp out there for a minute. Because right now all we have is cars and house sparrows.

00:00:59 Speaker_16
Forrest is wearing a backpack on his back, binoculars around his neck, and a camera over his shoulder. It's his birdwatching getup, because that's what we were going to do. bird watch.

00:01:19 Speaker_03
That's why they're called great egrets.

00:01:22 Speaker_16
Like a lot of people, Forrest got into birdwatching during the pandemic. And when Forrest gets into something, he's not a halfway kind of person. When he got into movies, he turned thinking about movies into his job.

00:01:33 Speaker_16
When he started to run, he was doing half marathons in no time. And when he got into birds, well, now he goes out just about every morning.

00:01:41 Speaker_03
the height of migration, I like to get out really early. So it can be like three. If it's like May 15th and I get out at 6am, I can bird for four hours and see like 80 species of birds before work starts. And it's super fun.

00:01:55 Speaker_16
As someone who can basically only recognize pigeons, it was amazing to me how many birds Forrest could spot.

00:02:02 Speaker_03
So there's an eastern kingbird on the end of, see this downed tree that reaches out into the water? It's kind of black or gray on the back and white around the belly and there's like a white tip on the tail.

00:02:14 Speaker_16
As we were walking, Forrest would sometimes get a faraway look in his eyes and concentrate, shut out the trucks and the planes and the people, to really listen to the birds.

00:02:29 Speaker_03
That's the song Sparrow. I think of it as almost like a dial-up modem. It has like a few different phases to the song. you've got mail.

00:02:40 Speaker_16
He was seeing things but also hearing things that I never would have noticed.

00:02:46 Speaker_03
It is a slightly consciousness-altering experience because once you start tuning into everything that's around you, so I'm hearing American Goldfinch's singing right now and that's a warbling vireo that just sang over there.

00:02:57 Speaker_03
So you have a kind of an entire track of your brain that is tuning into that. It feels like you're in the Matrix. A little bit. You know those scenes where they're seeing all of the codes but they can read the code?

00:03:12 Speaker_03
If you get good at ear birding, if you get good at kind of recognizing bird songs and bird calls, it feels a little like you're in the Matrix.

00:03:22 Speaker_16
And now that Forrest is in the Matrix, it affects his whole life. Bird calls are everywhere. Just like birds. Not just outside, but inside too. like even at the movies.

00:03:35 Speaker_16
And it's actually something that happened in a movie that inspired Forrest and I to go on this bird walk in the first place.

00:03:42 Speaker_03
Movies are often wrong about birds. They rarely sound, look, or behave like they should.

00:03:49 Speaker_03
But the same way you learn to accept that every phone number in every movie starts with 555, if you're a birder, you learn to accept that every bald eagle in every movie screeches like a red-tailed hawk.

00:04:03 Speaker_03
Like any good moviegoer, you suspend your disbelief. But there's one bird in one scene in one movie that has tormented me. It has kept me up at nights. It has had me scouring the internet.

00:04:17 Speaker_03
It has had me questioning the competence and intentions of a wide array of seemingly devoted, certainly well-compensated filmmaking professionals. Meet the most elite crime-fighting force ever assembled.

00:04:31 Speaker_14
Good morning, angels.

00:04:33 Speaker_09
Good morning, Charlie.

00:04:35 Speaker_03
That's right. I believe the film Charlie's Angels contains the wrongest bird in the history of cinema.

00:04:51 Speaker_16
This is Decoder Ring.

00:04:53 Speaker_03
I'm Willa Paskin. And I'm Forrest Wickman. There is a bird in the film Charlie's Angels that makes absolutely no sense. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong.

00:05:06 Speaker_03
And it has haunted not just me, but the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.

00:05:11 Speaker_16
So Boris came to us and asked if he could investigate this catastrophe for decodering. And you know we said yes.

00:05:18 Speaker_03
And so I embarked upon a wild goose chase to understand how and why this Frankenstein monstrosity of a bird was allowed to take flight.

00:05:28 Speaker_16
Forrest talked to script doctors, scoured legal statutes, he electronically analyzed bird calls, all to figure out who laid this giant egg.

00:05:38 Speaker_03
So today on Dakota Ring, why can't hundreds of people with $100 million accurately portray a single bird?

00:06:01 Speaker_16
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00:07:50 Speaker_16
Forrest is going to fly off with the rest of this episode.

00:07:53 Speaker_03
So I just want to say right up front that I do not consider myself a pedantic person or not very pedantic. I don't go to movies looking to nitpick them or the birds they contain.

00:08:03 Speaker_03
But then I watched Charlie's Angels and I could no longer just move on with my life. Charlie's Angels started as a hit 1970s TV show about a trio of crime-fighting women.

00:08:19 Speaker_03
In 2000, it was rebooted as a movie, helmed by a music video director known as McG. It stars Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu, who are trying to save the world from what else but a tech billionaire.

00:08:36 Speaker_01
I'll tap the signal from the roof. I'm gonna go deal with Knox.

00:08:41 Speaker_03
The scene that drives me cuckoo, the one that aggressively flouts all bird logic, happens right before the big action finale. At this point, the Angels seem done for.

00:08:53 Speaker_03
Their headquarters has just been blown up, and their beloved helper Bosley, played by Bill Murray, has been kidnapped and trapped in a prison cell God knows where.

00:09:01 Speaker_09
Oh my God, Bosley!

00:09:05 Speaker_03
But it turns out Bosley has a radio transmitter implanted in his tooth. And so, as the Angels wade through the flaming wreckage of their old offices, they hear a familiar voice. But at first, the Angels have no idea how to find him.

00:09:31 Speaker_04
He could be anywhere this half of North America.

00:09:34 Speaker_03
And then, a clue appears. A bird flies to the window of Bosley's cell.

00:09:40 Speaker_14
Jack, tell him where I am. What?

00:09:49 Speaker_09
It's a cytopygmaea! A pygmy nuthatch!

00:09:54 Speaker_03
That's Cameron Diaz's character, Natalie, supposedly a bird expert.

00:09:58 Speaker_09
They only live in one place! Carmel!

00:10:03 Speaker_03
And so, with that one bit of birdsong and Natalie's expertise, the Angels are able to get to Carmel, free Bosley from his prison cell, and save the day.

00:10:12 Speaker_14
Nice work, Natalie.

00:10:14 Speaker_09
Thanks, Bosley.

00:10:16 Speaker_03
Like most of the movie, the scene is knowingly dumb and very fun. And yet, it is absolutely riddled with errors. The problems with it are as follows. One, the pygmy nuthatch could not have revealed Bosley's location.

00:10:31 Speaker_03
It does not, quote, only live in one place. I've personally seen pygmy nuthatches in at least three states, and it can even be found in parts of Canada and Mexico. 2. The bird shown on screen is not a pygmy nuthatch.

00:10:47 Speaker_03
The pygmy nuthatch is a tiny, drab, almost grayscale bird, so small it could fit inside a roll of toilet paper.

00:10:56 Speaker_03
Instead, what's on screen is a Venezuelan trupial, which is black and neon orange, almost six times the size of a pygmy nuthatch, and also not found in Carmel.

00:11:09 Speaker_03
Three, and this might be the most baffling thing, the bird heard on the soundtrack is neither a pygmy nuthatch nor a Venezuelan trupeal. It's an unknown third bird whose identity has befuddled birders for years.

00:11:23 Speaker_03
To summarize, the bird in the scene does not live where it's supposed to, look like it's supposed to, or sound like it's supposed to.

00:11:30 Speaker_03
To put this in terms of mammals, it's as if a sloth climbed to Bill Murray's window, howled like some sort of unknown species of canine, and then Cameron Diaz identified the howl as a sea otter, saying that sea otters only live in one place on Earth, Carmel, California.

00:11:49 Speaker_03
For anyone who knows anything about birds, this scene is a disgrace on a scale that's simply impossible to ignore. The bird involved is not some background figure.

00:11:59 Speaker_03
It is front and center, strutting around so shamelessly that the first time I saw it, I honestly thought that the filmmakers might be trolling me, that they might be flipping me and others like me the bird. But I am a journalist.

00:12:14 Speaker_03
And as such, it is my first responsibility to get the facts. To allow that perhaps the scene is a disaster because of something other than malevolence or ignorance or incompetence.

00:12:26 Speaker_03
So I decided I needed to methodically make my way through each and every absurd error in the scene to understand how it had been allowed to stand. And I was gonna start with the very first one. Who introduced a pygmy nuthatch into the script?

00:12:42 Speaker_03
and had the temerity to say it only lived in Carmel.

00:12:46 Speaker_06
So when you emailed me, I had no recollection of a bird being in the movie at all.

00:12:52 Speaker_03
Our first suspect was the man who conceived of the scene, screenwriter John August. He was hired to write Charlie's Angels back in 1998. It was a challenging assignment.

00:13:03 Speaker_06
It's one of the most difficult things I ever had to write because every scene has to do 19 things.

00:13:08 Speaker_03
Those things included servicing the storylines and romances of all three angels, plus Bosley, all while keeping the complicated plot moving forward and being both funny and action-packed.

00:13:19 Speaker_03
It was so involved, John swiftly copped to not giving a hoot about the bird.

00:13:24 Speaker_06
I would say, given the many complexities of the Charlie's Angels script, 100% scientific accuracy, birder accuracy, was not a priority.

00:13:34 Speaker_03
Still, John didn't remember writing the words pygmy nuthatch into the script himself, though he admitted it was possible he had.

00:13:41 Speaker_03
So I asked John, who keeps meticulous records, if he was willing to show us his very first draft of the script to see where it all went wrong.

00:13:49 Speaker_06
First draft A. Let's see if I can get this to open.

00:13:52 Speaker_03
But as he looked closely at the script, it began to seem like his quasi-confession had been premature.

00:13:58 Speaker_06
Oh, so I can talk you through here. So initial scene, I'm seeing Bosley whistles to a bright red songbird who's landed on the windowsill. The bird whistles back. So it was red at one point. Natalie says, that's an iwi. They only live in one place.

00:14:13 Speaker_06
And now it says Hawaii.

00:14:15 Speaker_03
So the pygmy nuthatch was not the bird John had started with. And the bird that John had started with, it was absolutely ornithologically accurate. The i'iwi really is a bright red songbird, and it really does only live in Hawaii.

00:14:30 Speaker_03
But for logistical reasons, the location of the scene kept changing. Instead of Hawaii, they were going to shoot somewhere closer to Hollywood. So the i'iwi flew out the window, and John had to pick a new bird.

00:14:43 Speaker_06
October 26th, 1999. Scene 121. Bosley whistles to a blue and white songbird that has landed on the windowsill. The bird whistles back. Natalie says, that's a loggerhead shrike. Lanius, Ludovic, Gyanthus, and Yothi. They only live in one place. Catalina.

00:15:02 Speaker_03
So this wasn't as on point as the eevee.

00:15:06 Speaker_03
A loggerhead shrike isn't blue, but the Latin name that the script gives, it belongs to a subspecies, the island loggerhead shrike, which really was only known to be in Catalina and, okay, some other islands nearby.

00:15:20 Speaker_06
Here's a little bit of my defense. It's early internet. So I probably had to actually like look it up in a book or something about like what are birds and what would birds look like.

00:15:29 Speaker_03
So John had tried to get it right, and yet at some point, the bird had really jumped the shark. What had gone wrong? Turns out, John left the movie.

00:15:41 Speaker_06
We had a reading maybe a month before production started, and that reading went disastrously bad. People started freaking out about stuff.

00:15:49 Speaker_06
And at that point, I left the project, and maybe like 11 different writers came on and did like a week or two of work during production.

00:15:58 Speaker_03
It was actually a whopping 17 writers who ended up working on the script. In the words of a Los Angeles Times article,

00:16:11 Speaker_06
it was one of those really challenging movies where the script kept getting rewritten. There's what's called revision pages, and so if you are adding something new to a script, you put those pages out in a different color sheet of paper.

00:16:24 Speaker_06
So first it's blue revisions, then pink revisions, then yellow revisions. They went through the color rainbow so many times, it was like double cherry revisions by the time the movie stopped shooting.

00:16:33 Speaker_03
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 there were 16 other suspects to question.

00:16:47 Speaker_03
Any one of them could have written in the Pygmy Nuthatch. I started with Zach Penn.

00:16:52 Speaker_02
There was, and still is, this tendency to, like, throw screenwriters at the problem without regard to money or how efficient a use of time it is.

00:17:02 Speaker_02
I mean, it doesn't make any sense, but it's very lucrative for all the writers, so you kind of don't complain about it.

00:17:09 Speaker_03
Zak has worked on some of the biggest action franchises of the past three decades, including the X-Men and Avengers movies. And I had reached out to him because I had a hunch his rewrites had touched on the bird.

00:17:22 Speaker_03
His name was on a later draft of the script I found online, where the bird had been changed to something even worse, a blue-spotted egret, which isn't a real bird at all.

00:17:33 Speaker_03
I figured anyone who had the gall to straight-up invent a bird could have also been the perpetrator behind our pygmy nuthatch.

00:17:41 Speaker_02
You know, when I was a kid, I actually had, like, a bird-watching book and, like, I remember, like, black-capped chickadees and things like that, but... No, I couldn't give less of a shit about birds.

00:17:52 Speaker_02
Until you told me a blue-spotted egret wasn't a real bird, I had no idea that it wasn't.

00:17:57 Speaker_03
Despite his rather cavalier attitude towards some of our world's most beautiful creatures, Zach denied responsibility for the bogus blue-spotted egret. He also didn't think that he came up with the pygmy knothatch, and he didn't know who had.

00:18:11 Speaker_03
But just as I began to mentally prepare to reach out to the other 15 screenwriters, Zach told me that even though he didn't know the identity of the guilty party, he was pretty sure he knew their motive.

00:18:23 Speaker_02
Charlie's Angels was pretty betwixt and between, and that leads to a lot of people throwing a lot of shit at the screen trying to find something that sticks.

00:18:33 Speaker_02
It's so hard writing a comedy in the studio system because everybody gets bored and thinks the script isn't funny anymore because this is the 18th draft they've read.

00:18:43 Speaker_03
All those writers were desperate for a bird that could make their bosses laugh and could keep them laughing on the 18th read. And Zach thinks the pygmy nuthatch's name makes it uniquely qualified in that regard.

00:18:55 Speaker_02
If somebody had said, you know what, bird, you're talking to a pygmy nuthatch, I'd be like, that's fucking good. Let's use pygmy nuthatch.

00:19:04 Speaker_03
I had to admit, he was right. After all, it contains the word nut.

00:19:10 Speaker_02
Like most conspiracies, my guess is it's just the chaos is what led to this.

00:19:18 Speaker_03
Chaos and comedy were the true culprits. And so, out had gone the accurate Eevee, the semi-accurate Shrike, even the godforsaken blue-spotted egret, and in came the pygmy nuthatch. But for the life of me, I still could not understand.

00:19:36 Speaker_03
Why didn't they then use that bird in the movie? If you name your bird a pygmy nuthatch, why not cast a pygmy nuthatch? When we come back, I find out who's responsible by getting a witness to the film shoot to sing like a canary.

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00:21:40 Speaker_03
OK, so the screenwriters had introduced the name Pigby Nuthatch to be funny, but then someone had to go get an actual bird.

00:21:47 Speaker_11
So there's a lot of species of birds you just wouldn't ever want to use. They just can't handle it.

00:21:53 Speaker_03
Quinn Dill has been wrangling all sorts of animals, not just birds, for 30 years.

00:21:58 Speaker_11
If a bird gets stressed, they go poof, and they just like poof out all their feathers. They lose all their feathers, and then what do you do?

00:22:04 Speaker_03
Quinn was the animal trainer on Charlie's Angels. And as such, she was responsible for finding the pygmy nuthatch specified in the screenplay and putting it in front of a camera. But as you know, the bird on screen is decidedly not a pygmy nuthatch.

00:22:18 Speaker_03
Was she to blame? That wasn't our decision. It turns out the drab gray pygmy nuthatch did not have the look that producers and director were going for.

00:22:28 Speaker_11
They wanted something very tropical because it was supposed to give it away that he's on this island.

00:22:34 Speaker_11
So keeping that in mind, they were kind of looking for vibrant, a little bit spectacular, but had to be a small enough bird to kind of fly in through the window, do the song and then fly out.

00:22:46 Speaker_03
So Gwen had to find birds that would fit the bill and share them with the production team.

00:22:50 Speaker_11
We sent pictures initially. It's kind of like sending headshots of actors. We do the same thing. So we send them an array of pictures and then they kind of pick and choose whether it be because of their ability or look.

00:23:02 Speaker_03
Now, if I were an animal casting director, I would have at least included a headshot of the pygmy nuthatch in this batch of pictures. I mean, why not give truth a chance? Or that's what I thought, until I learned something unexpected.

00:23:17 Speaker_11
We cannot use a lot of birds that are indigenous to the United States, so it's not that easy.

00:23:25 Speaker_03
It turns out no animal handler would ever have included a pygmy nuthatch, because they are not just small, drab, and unlikely to grab a viewer's eye. They are also illegal to cast in a movie. And the reason for this goes back more than a hundred years.

00:23:42 Speaker_08
People in the late 19th century and early 20th century were just killing birds wholesale.

00:23:47 Speaker_03
Nick Lund works for Maine Audubon and has written many articles about birding.

00:23:51 Speaker_08
There were not the same rules that there are now about hunting regulations, hunting season, bag limits, that kind of thing. And birds were just getting decimated.

00:24:01 Speaker_03
Some of this was for food, but people were eating much more than turkeys and pheasants and ducks. They were eating sparrows, grebes, loons, thrushes, grackles, ibises, pelicans, bobblinks, woodpeckers, and more.

00:24:15 Speaker_03
In one of John James Audubon's books, he reported that the snowy owl tastes like chicken. And birds were not only being killed for food or sport. They were being killed for women's hats.

00:24:29 Speaker_08
There was this giant millinery trade. And so people were killing birds for their feathers to make these dumb looking hats that were super popular at the time.

00:24:38 Speaker_08
And killing giant, you know, large amounts of the populations of herons and egrets and things for their feathers to decorate hats. Can you describe some of these hats? They're the dumbest things I've ever seen.

00:24:49 Speaker_08
You know, it's one thing to think about, oh, I have a hat maybe with a feather sticking out. No, this was like taxidermied birds plopped onto a hat, the entire dead bird just on a hat.

00:24:58 Speaker_03
It was like if you took Bjork's infamous swan dress and put it on her head and made it out of an actual swan. At first, Americans weren't too concerned about what all this carnage meant for bird populations.

00:25:13 Speaker_03
In the 1800s, scientists were still debating whether it was even possible for a species to go extinct. Audubon himself insisted that North American birds were so numerous that, at least with our birds, it could never happen.

00:25:29 Speaker_03
But then came the tragic case of the passenger pigeon. The passenger pigeon had once been so plentiful across North America that Audubon described them blotting out the sun for days.

00:25:41 Speaker_03
But they were massacred by the thousands, and in 1914, a passenger pigeon named Martha, the last known member of her species, died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo. There was powerful outrage about all of this slaughter, but especially about the hats.

00:25:59 Speaker_03
And while these hats were mostly worn by women, the fight against the hats was also largely led by women.

00:26:06 Speaker_08
It actually makes me laugh because, you know, it's such a dumb sort of fashion trend. And it resulted in all these great laws, including the founding of Audubon Societies.

00:26:15 Speaker_03
One of these laws is called the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It was passed in 1918.

00:26:21 Speaker_08
And it's this sort of interesting, wide-ranging, broad law that protects migratory birds. It basically prevents people from harming, taking, killing, capturing native birds in the United States.

00:26:34 Speaker_03
The law has had humongous positive impacts. That egret that Willa and I saw soaring over Brooklyn that made her exclaim in wonder? That was there because of this law.

00:26:45 Speaker_08
We have them here in Maine, all over the place, or all over the East Coast, all over the country in great numbers because we stopped that hunting because of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

00:26:55 Speaker_03
But the law also says that you can't keep our native birds as pets. And though we may not be used to thinking of animals in movies as pets, that's what they are, working pets.

00:27:07 Speaker_08
What that means is you can't keep them as actors. You can't force them to be actors. And so when a company wants to put a bird on TV in the United States, they can't use a native species.

00:27:18 Speaker_03
And a pygmy nuthatch is a native species, a bird covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. So even if anyone involved in Charlie's Angels had wanted to use a drab little pygmy nuthatch in the movie, they couldn't have.

00:27:33 Speaker_03
They were always going to have to use another bird. And once that's true, I mean, why not get a bird that has real star quality? And so that's exactly what Gwynn Dill, the animal handler, did. In fact, she got two of them.

00:27:49 Speaker_03
Jack and Jill, they were brother and sister. Did both of them appear in the movie? Is this like a Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen scenario? Yes.

00:27:58 Speaker_03
Jack and Jill were Venezuelan troupials, resplendent birds the color of a tangerine, with a shiny black hood, a sky-blue teardrop around each eye, and a blazing lightning bolt across each wing.

00:28:09 Speaker_11
I think I still have scars from the True Peels.

00:28:12 Speaker_11
They knew right where your cuticle was, and they would take those sharp beaks and they'd go, wah, wah, wah, wah, and they'd just make you bleed until you like, we'd have like Band-Aids around all of our fingers, you know.

00:28:26 Speaker_03
So now I knew why screenwriters would write in a pygmy nuthatch, and why, to play one, an animal handler had to bring in a foreign import.

00:28:34 Speaker_03
But even once the filmmakers were stuck with the name they picked for fun, and the South American stand-ins that they were legally obligated to cast, they still could have made the bird sound like an actual pygmy nuthatch, right?

00:28:48 Speaker_03
Or even like a Venezuelan trupeal? But in fact, they did neither. They cast a third bird to lend its voice, one that nobody has been able to identify. And that means that there were actually two mysteries left. Why on earth did they do that?

00:29:06 Speaker_03
And what bird was it?

00:29:22 Speaker_14
We have one more act for you this evening. I don't even need to say his name. Mr. Bob Dylan!

00:29:29 Speaker_15
From the director of Walk the Line and Ford vs. Ferrari. If anyone is going to hold your attention on stage, you have to kind of be a freak. And starring Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan.

00:29:37 Speaker_10
Are you a freak? Hope so.

00:29:41 Speaker_15
Inspired by the true story. I want to know which side he's on. This Christmas.

00:29:48 Speaker_07
They just want me singing and blowing in the wind for the rest of my life.

00:29:52 Speaker_15
Bobby, what do you want to be? Whatever it is they don't want me to be. He defied everyone.

00:29:59 Speaker_10
Turn it down! Play it loud!

00:30:02 Speaker_15
To change everything. He's our Elvis. Timothy Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro.

00:30:12 Speaker_14
Make some noise, B.D. Track some mud on the carpet.

00:30:23 Speaker_13
This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. There's nothing sweeter than baking cookies during the holidays. With Prime, I get all my ingredients delivered right to my door, fast and free. No last minute store trips needed.

00:30:35 Speaker_13
And of course, I blast my favorite holiday playlist on Amazon Music. It's the ultimate soundtrack for creating unforgettable memories. From streaming to shopping, it's on Prime. Visit amazon.com slash prime to get more out of whatever you're into.

00:30:51 Speaker_03
So here I was still on the case. The case of the nonsensical bird call. I had been wondering who the hell voices the Pygmy Nothatch since the moment I first saw Charlie's Angels. And it wasn't just me.

00:31:06 Speaker_03
For decades, birders have been flocking to the internet to point out the problems with this scene.

00:31:12 Speaker_03
Blogging about it, tweeting about it, posting it to forums and message boards and imdb goofs and moviemistakes.com, mentioning it everywhere from local newspapers to W Magazine.

00:31:25 Speaker_03
But while these enraged bird lovers have long identified the Hollywood imposter on screen as a Venezuelan trupeal, none of them have ever been able to identify the bird we hear. And with just my ear, I couldn't either.

00:31:41 Speaker_03
But I was going to figure this out one way or another. I started by reaching out to the crew member who ought to know best.

00:31:48 Speaker_07
Hi, I'm Michael Benavente. I was the supervising sound editor of the film. And the sequel. Full throttle, of course.

00:31:56 Speaker_03
Michael told me right up front that not only did he not remember much about the bird, it really wasn't a priority at the time.

00:32:04 Speaker_07
I wish I could give you an interesting answer. Yes, of course. But it really doesn't. To be honest, that sound was a very minor part of the film. I know it as a plot point and pays off and that kind of stuff.

00:32:15 Speaker_07
But there was so much other stuff going on with sword fights and just big action sequences.

00:32:23 Speaker_03
But I'd come this far and I wasn't going to take indifference for an answer. So I asked him to re-watch the scene with me.

00:32:30 Speaker_07
Okay, great.

00:32:32 Speaker_00
Come on Bosley, tell us where you are.

00:32:35 Speaker_03
I haven't seen that in a long time. After I played it for him, some things did start to click in. One was that in the context of the scene, an accurate sound effect wouldn't have felt right.

00:32:49 Speaker_07
Quite frankly, realistic doesn't always play dramatically or as interesting. You want to punch things up and make them sound fun.

00:32:57 Speaker_03
The bird is helping the angel set Bosley free. It doesn't need to sound realistic. It needs to sound like deliverance. And for what it's worth, that is not the sound of a Venezuelan trupeal. A Venezuelan trupeal sounds more like a car alarm.

00:33:17 Speaker_03
And the song of a real pygmy nuthatch has problems too. Namely, it sounds like it's being chewed up like a squeaky toy.

00:33:27 Speaker_07
Yeah, a lot of times the real thing just isn't cutting it.

00:33:31 Speaker_03
So Michael's team needed to deliver a bird song that was more uplifting and joyful. But there was another thing. Not only did they have to match the song to the bird on screen, they had to match it to one of the humans. Cameron Diaz.

00:33:45 Speaker_03
See, if you listen very closely to the sound effect, there's this rising, whistled trill at the end that repeats three times.

00:33:56 Speaker_03
But the third time you hear it, it's actually Cameron Diaz's character whistling a pitch-perfect imitation of the bird, blowing through her hands like they're a flute. And that's the thing that Michael Benavente was focused on.

00:34:14 Speaker_07
Basically, I would be more concerned about making sure it looked like it was coming out of her mouth.

00:34:19 Speaker_03
So he had to find a song that would line up with what had already been filmed.

00:34:23 Speaker_07
So I would get that bird, I would sync that up, edit that so it worked with her, cut her first, and then use that same rhythm and everything for the bird.

00:34:33 Speaker_03
So now I knew why they hadn't used the song of a pygmy nuthatch or a Venezuelan trupeel. But that's where I hit a dead end. Michael had no idea what bird they'd used instead.

00:34:46 Speaker_03
Still, I was undeterred because I had a bird in the hand, aka the guy who literally wrote the book on bird sounds.

00:34:55 Speaker_05
I am not allowed by my friends and family to comment on the bird sounds when we are watching movies or TV because they have had enough of my commentary.

00:35:07 Speaker_03
Nathan Peeplow is a self-described obsessive birder who put together the field guide to bird sounds, using a method that relies not on our ears, but on our eyes.

00:35:18 Speaker_05
The beautiful thing now that you can do is you can create what we call spectrograms, which are computer-generated pictures of the sound.

00:35:26 Speaker_03
A spectrogram is a visual representation of an audio recording. And in Nathan's field guides, they look like notes on a staff. It's sheet music for birders.

00:35:36 Speaker_05
With practice, you can learn how to read the spectrograms so that you can look at the picture and you'll know what it sounds like or the other way around. If you hear a bird sound, you can picture what it's going to look like.

00:35:49 Speaker_03
All of this practice has made Nathan an excellent ear birder, and you don't have to take my word for it, because my producer Max and I, we devised a little test. From Brooklyn, the podcasting capital of the world, it's Name That Bird!

00:36:09 Speaker_03
Max, would you play for us our first bird?

00:36:15 Speaker_05
The main bird that was vocalizing there that was screaming was a red-tailed hawk. Correct. Okay. In the movies, when an eagle opens its mouth, what usually comes out is that scream of the red-tailed hawk that we heard earlier.

00:36:35 Speaker_05
But what we just heard is what bald eagles actually sound like in real life. Now I'm thinking we're in Hawaii, and now I'm thinking that we just heard an eevee. I think that was a pygmy nuthatch.

00:36:59 Speaker_03
As you've just heard, I had reason to be confident in Nathan's ear birding. I was sure the answer was within our grasp. Max, could you play our mystery bird?

00:37:09 Speaker_14
Tell her where I am. What?

00:37:16 Speaker_05
That, I don't recognize that bird sound.

00:37:25 Speaker_03
So my bird in the hand, it turned out to be a turkey. This bird was really, really ridiculously hard to identify.

00:37:33 Speaker_03
And as I listened to it over and over, I kept circling back to that part that repeats at the end, that Cameron Diaz whistles back perfectly.

00:37:42 Speaker_03
It's weird because it repeats exactly, and I mean exactly, in a way that sounds too uncanny, too mechanical to be the work of any real bird. Was it possible it wasn't the call of a real bird? Could it be synthesized by a machine?

00:37:59 Speaker_03
There was only one thing to do. Ask another machine.

00:38:06 Speaker_18
My name is Drew Weber. I'm the Merlin project manager.

00:38:09 Speaker_03
Drew is obviously not a machine, but Merlin is.

00:38:13 Speaker_18
I like to call it kind of like your personalized birding coach.

00:38:16 Speaker_03
Merlin is an app that has been downloaded more than 10 million times that's basically Shazam for birds. I'd already tried using Merlin on Charlie's Angels, but the app had been just as bewildered as the rest of us.

00:38:28 Speaker_03
But Drew explained that the app on my phone would never identify the sound for me, and that's by design.

00:38:33 Speaker_18
By default, Merlin's only gonna show you results for your location and your time of year.

00:38:39 Speaker_03
But then he told me there's another, more powerful version of the software.

00:38:43 Speaker_18
Internally, we have like a, we call it a dev app, and it allows us to toggle off the various filtering for location and time of year.

00:38:52 Speaker_03
So Drew set loose his behind-the-scenes version of Merlin on Charlie's Angels. And he got a hit.

00:39:00 Speaker_18
The song that we're hearing is a Fox Sparrow. I was dumbfounded.

00:39:07 Speaker_03
We have Fox Sparrows in Brooklyn. If the bird in Charlie's Angels was a Fox Sparrow, why hadn't I been able to identify the song on my own? For that matter, why hadn't my version of Merlin?

00:39:19 Speaker_03
But before I threw my phone across the room and my ego completely crumbled, Drew told me that the Fox Sparrow in Charlie's Angels was no New Yorker.

00:39:28 Speaker_18
It sounds like the thick-billed subspecies from California.

00:39:32 Speaker_03
This is what a thick-billed foxbarrow sounds like. I had to admit, it sounded pretty close, but I still wasn't sure it was quite right, and I wanted a second human opinion. So I emailed this ID to Nathan Peeplow, the bird call expert.

00:39:56 Speaker_03
He wrote back, asking me to give him a call.

00:39:59 Speaker_05
Well, when I got your email about this, I made a spectrogram of the bird that's singing in Charlie's Angels.

00:40:07 Speaker_03
So you kind of turned the sound and you made it into like a picture or like a chart that you can look at?

00:40:11 Speaker_05
Exactly. And so I started thinking, maybe, maybe I could actually find the source recording that this was made from.

00:40:20 Speaker_03
Turns out, when Nathan was researching his field guide to bird sounds, he had fed a vast library of field recordings of birds into a computer program to turn them into spectrograms. Spectrograms he still had.

00:40:32 Speaker_05
So I went to the folder called thick build Foxborough. And within about two minutes, I had found the exact individual bird that was recorded. and used in Charlie's Angels.

00:40:48 Speaker_03
So not only the species, not only the subspecies, but the exact individual bird that we hear in the movie. Yes. Is there like a date and a location?

00:40:59 Speaker_05
It is a thick-billed fox sparrow that was recorded by Thomas G. Sander on June 2nd, 1990, at the Black Pine Spring campground in the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon.

00:41:13 Speaker_13
Fox sparrow.

00:41:18 Speaker_14
Jack, tell him where I am.

00:41:24 Speaker_03
It was the smoking gun tape. I had goosebumps. We had gotten our bird. And then, it got even better. Using spectrograms, Nathan could explain to me what was going on with that weirdly mechanical series of trills at the end.

00:41:41 Speaker_03
It was just another snippet of a different song from that same individual fox sparrow, looped three times over so Cameron Diaz could perform it.

00:41:52 Speaker_09
It's a cytopygmaea! A pygmy bat hatch!

00:41:58 Speaker_03
So at this point, I was feeling pretty satisfied with all I'd been able to uncover, and it was starting to make me see things a little differently.

00:42:06 Speaker_03
I had begun this investigation thinking that everyone involved in this movie just didn't care about birds. But now I knew that wasn't the case. I mean, they didn't really care about birds.

00:42:17 Speaker_03
But rather than being careless or obtuse or lazy, they had each been trying to solve a problem, and had stretched themselves to do so creatively. And I could understand and even admire that. I couldn't let it obscure the big picture.

00:42:34 Speaker_03
The bird in Charlie's Angels was still a mess. As resourceful as everyone had been, their individual choices did not add up. And there is one person on a movie who was supposed to keep that from happening.

00:42:48 Speaker_03
One person who was supposed to be taking in the bird's eye view. And so I needed to go to that person and demand an explanation. I needed to talk to the director.

00:43:00 Speaker_04
I'm McG, which is short for McGinty. I'm a 28-year-old Leo and I enjoy interspecies friendship. No, I'm kidding. In fact, today's my birthday. I'm 56, sadly.

00:43:13 Speaker_03
Before Charlie's Angels, McG was best known for music videos, like the one for All Star by Smash Mouth. He's since gone on to direct the fourth movie in the Terminator franchise and, as of a few weeks ago, the number one movie on Netflix.

00:43:27 Speaker_03
But Charlie's Angels is what made McG, McG. And I was curious if any of this bird drama had even registered with him.

00:43:34 Speaker_04
With the greatest respect, I'm the only person to speak on this issue.

00:43:38 Speaker_03
It turns out McG remembered everything. He had total recall of the scene, right down to the bird's Latin name. And he was well aware that there was a problem with using that song.

00:43:50 Speaker_04
The call is very different of a pseudopygmaia than the call reflected in the film.

00:43:56 Speaker_03
This was my guy. He got it. And not only had he given a hoot, he tried to make it right.

00:44:03 Speaker_03
Before deciding on the two Venezuelan trupials he got from Gwynn Dill, the animal wrangler, he'd actually wanted to cast a bird that looked a lot more like a real pygmy nuthatch. But that bird wouldn't fly.

00:44:14 Speaker_04
It had a very bright white underbelly. And on top of having difficulty hitting its mark, the white underbelly was casting a bounce onto Bill Murray's face that was unsavory to the director of photography.

00:44:30 Speaker_03
Faced with using a less accurate bird, he had then tried to justify the wrongness of said bird with a character detail.

00:44:38 Speaker_04
What people don't realize is a subtext of the Natalie character is that she has synesthesia. And she hears things differently.

00:44:47 Speaker_03
So differently, I guess, that her synesthesia not only translates sounds into visuals, it translates bird calls into other bird calls, and what we hear is what she hears in her mind?

00:44:59 Speaker_03
But this synesthesia storyline was a little nutty, and it had not made it into the movie.

00:45:05 Speaker_04
Boy, is that a deep cut that never got paid off.

00:45:08 Speaker_03
At this point, it saddens me a little to say, McG, like everyone else, had given up. The movie was over budget and he was under a lot of pressure.

00:45:18 Speaker_04
I was nearly fired off that movie, you know, no less than six or eight times. It was just so colorful and weird and buoyant and effervescent. And, you know, the studio brass at the time was like, what the fuck is this?

00:45:31 Speaker_03
so he was going to do whatever it took to get the shot.

00:45:34 Speaker_04
You can't spend 90 minutes trying to get the bird to sit on the windowsill to interact with Bill Murray. So if one bird can do it, that bird's going in.

00:45:45 Speaker_03
And the Pygmy Nuthatch did have something going for it, its name. It was wrong in all sorts of ways, but the tone, the spirit, the word nut, it had that special something. McG knew it the first time he heard it.

00:45:59 Speaker_04
What a great name. What a great name, we gotta do it. It felt so Charlie's Angels.

00:46:03 Speaker_03
And McG, he definitely knew what felt like Charlie's Angels.

00:46:07 Speaker_03
Charlie's Angels, with its goofball mix of action and comedy and knowing stupidity, became a franchise-launching hit, earning good reviews and one of the highest-grossing opening weekends of all time for a first-time director.

00:46:21 Speaker_03
And, though I hate to admit it, it did it all with a janky bird. because as I've learned, you can't make a movie without breaking some eggs.

00:46:29 Speaker_04
We desperately wanted to get it right, but then with great regularity, reality shows up and kicks you in the ass.

00:46:37 Speaker_03
I knew, with this scene, what right meant to me. But I am not too stubborn to admit that the people actually working on the film got it right in so many other ways.

00:46:47 Speaker_03
They picked a bird name that would make you laugh, a bird actor who would hit his marks and catch your eye, a bird song that would sound like hope. For years, I thought I had caught the movie out in this egregious mistake.

00:47:01 Speaker_03
But maybe I was the bird brain. Maybe it was time for me to eat crow. Maybe the wrongest bird in the history of the movies, maybe it's just right. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Forrest Whitman.

00:47:21 Speaker_16
And I'm Willa Paskin. I want to tell you about a special Decoder Ring bonus episode for Slate Plus members that's available right now, just in time for Halloween.

00:47:31 Speaker_16
Spooky season feels like it's getting bigger and bigger every year, and I wanted to know how that had happened. So I spoke with Lisa Morton, an expert on the history of Halloween.

00:47:42 Speaker_16
We start all the way back in Celtic prehistory and trace how the holiday came to involve costumes, candy, and frights, none of which it started with. Here's a sneak peek. Was there a time you could get a trick?

00:47:56 Speaker_16
Like now, you know, it's like trick or treat. You just get a treat. There's no, like, nasty thing on offer. Was there?

00:48:03 Speaker_00
Well, what the phrase breaks down to is not, I am asking you for either a trick or treat, but I am going to play a trick if you don't give me a treat.

00:48:13 Speaker_16
OK. Yeah, yeah. OK. It's like a threat. Exactly right. It's a threat. If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page.

00:48:30 Speaker_16
Or visit slate.com slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen. We're going to be releasing bonus episodes regularly, including answers to your mailbag questions, so sign up now.

00:48:44 Speaker_16
Don't forget, Slate Plus members also get to listen to our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads. And you'll get unlimited access to Slate's website.

00:48:55 Speaker_16
Again, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free or visit slate.com slash Decoder Plus to sign up. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at DecoderRing at Slate.com.

00:49:12 Speaker_16
This episode was written and reported by Forrest Wickman. It was edited by me. It was produced by Max Friedman. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Max, Evan Chung, and Katie Shepard, with help from Sophie Codner. Derek John is executive producer.

00:49:26 Speaker_16
Merrick Jacob is senior technical director. We'd like to thank Stephen Flick, Eleanor Kagan, Christopher King, and Robert L. Friedman. If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:49:41 Speaker_16
And even better, tell your friends. And we'll see you in two weeks.