Mistakes and anachronisms

I'll take your word about the drum roll -- while I took drum lessons for a few years as a kid in the '60s I have no appreciation for the history of grips, as, I imagine, most viewers of the film wouldn't.

On the colloquial use of "hopefully" I think you may be presumptuous. I'd be willing to bet the word was used this way in the '70s (possibly by me), but that still gets us only halfway back to 1937. But I take your point. The movie doesn't work hard to use period language, though I believe Zac Efron does say "Swell" when he first meets Zoe Kazan (Greta Adler) in the music store. Anyone who has seen enough Hollywood movies from the early/mid '30s has heard this word used often -- and rarely delivered with anything resembling authenticity. (In a movie or not, did anyone ever say, "Gee, you're swell!" and not sound like a nitwit?)

The only mistake I noticed in the movie was probably made deliberately. When McKay and Efron take Welles's hired ambulance to the CBS radio studios you would imagine that if Welles really did do such a thing -- and he claims he did -- he would make sure the ambulance had its siren blaring all the way ... otherwise, what's the point of hiring an ambulance in the first place? (No ambulance is going to run red lights without a siren!) But, of course, there is no siren in this ambulance-interior scene because it would have interfered with the dialog and been a huge distraction. I'm sure Linklater hoped the audience wouldn't notice.

(Spoiler to follow): If I were Welles, I might have fired the kid too, but only for doing such a lousy acting job onstage. Of course, it was partly Welles' own fault for not directing him properly. In the play, the boy Lucius is supposed to be half asleep in the lute scene--that's why Brutus keeps apologizing for making him stay up. In fact the kid falls asleep halfway through, in time for Brutus to see Caesar's ghost by himself. Fortunately, some of the real stage actors portrayed here were better, and in fact Welles continued to use a number of them in plays and movies in the following years (e.g., Cotten and Coulouris, both of whom were in "Citizen Kane").

But Gene Krupa is exactly who the kid sarcastically says he is when asked. And Sing, Sing, Sing was used in the movie.

According to Merriam-Webster, "hopefully" became popular in its "misused" state in the 1930's. And a kid cutting school and bored with English class was probably as likely as any to "misuse" it.

Regardless, I would hardly call it a misuse. It seems entirely common and has for a while - again, Merriam-Webster points to the 18th century.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hopefully

Nobody spotted the modern thermos coffee container that's right in the middle of a kitchen to disappear a second later in the next shot?
Not to mention that 90% of all men have modern hairstyles.
And all women wore either no stockings or stockings without seams, both pretty unusual back then.

Does it matter?
Does it make the story or the acting of any less quality?
Maybe not but it does mean someone on this production didn't do their job properly and that is a shame.
To anyone with any knowledge of that period these are just a few more little things that break up the illusion of watching the past.
Every little mistake stands between a movie being a good movie or a masterpiece.
It what makes a movie age quickly and be dated in a few years or be timeless.

Complaining is almost as bad as complaining about complaining.

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The most glaring of all: "...this whole business is based on BS" - Sonja during the poster marking scene at a bench outside