Any writer who doesn't want school children to point out errors in his work should do the necessary historical research.

Isaac Asimov once wrote an introduction to a book by L. Sprague de Camp describing de Camp's research for his historical works. But sometimes de Camp's research failed him.

The protagonist of Lest Darkness Fall (1939) is transported to Rome in the 530s. He asks for directions from the Pantheon to the Forum and and is told to turn left where he should turn right. He arrives at the Forum anyway and sees that columns have been removed from the pagan temples. As far as I can tell from my historical reading most or all of the Forum temples still had their columns for centuries afterward. There is another scene where the standards of the Roman army are described as having the inscription "S.P.Q.R.", which many people believe they did, even though there is no evidence that they ever did, let alone in the 530s.

The Lindsay Davis novel The Silver Pigs (1989) has Roman "detective" Marcus Didius Falco investigate a conspiracy in AD 70. There is a scene set at a imperial function in Nero's Golden House, but it is my impression that Vespasian never used the Golden House, in order to appear humble. One scene is set in the vestibule with the colossal statue of Nero. The vestibule is described as a room with a roof, but archaeologists usually think the vestibule was a open air courtyard or even a recess in the palace facade.

P.C. Wren's Beau Geste (1924) gives a rather accurate impression of life in the French Foreign Legion, but has a number of historical inaccuracies. One scene establishes the date as after the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901. In another scene characters reach Agades before the official first European visitors, the French mission of 1906, putting the fictional date sometime in 1901-1906. The French actually annexed Agades in 1900.

But Heinrich Barth reached Agades in October 1850.

Today a memorial tablet honours him as the first European to have ever entered the city.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Barth1
One of the problems with locating the fictional Fort Zinderneuf is that it is said to have been established in the Air country, years before the French reached Agades. But Agades was the capital of Air for centuries. So Fort Zinderneuf has to be somewhere in the Air country far enough from Agades that the French would build a fort there years before they annexed Agades, among other requirements.

Another historical inaccuracy is the Geste brothers participating in an expedition and battle against Tauregs with an entire French brigade, which was far larger than any French expedition into the Sahara.

The sequel, Beau Sabreur (1926), happens at an inconsistent date. German agents plot to drive the French out of the Sahara, and mention Wilhelm II's visit to Jerusalem when a great breach was made in the city wall for him to enter. But actually the breach being made in the city walls is an urban legend.

So the date of Beau Sabreur should be between Wilhelm II's visit to Jerusalem in 1898 and the final German defeat in WWI in 1918. But an American women visiting the Sahara has romantic notions about desert sheiks from movies she has seen, and as far as I know the first romantic movies about desert sheiks were The Sheik (1921) and The Son of the Sheik (1926).

But Beau Sabreur clearly ends just a few years after Beau Geste, and thus probably before 1910. So it has a very inconsistent date.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell one doesn't have to do any historical research at all, or can totally ignore your historical research, if you write for movies and TV. At least that often seems the case when watching movies and TV shows when I know anything at all about the historical periods.

For example, I haven't seen Hostiles (2017) but it is said to be a good movie. But this synopsis seems to be historically implausible.

In 1892, after nearly two decades of fighting the Cheyenne, the Apache, and the Comanche natives, the United States Cavalry Captain and war hero, Joseph Blocker, is ordered to escort the ailing Cheyenne chief, Yellow Hawk--his most despised enemy--to his ancestral home in Montana's Valley of the Bears. Nauseated with a baleful anger, Joseph's unwelcome final assignment in the feral American landscape is further complicated, when the widowed settler, Rosalie Quaid, is taken in by the band of soldiers, as aggressive packs of marauding Comanches who are still on the warpath, are thirsty for blood. In a territory crawling with hostiles, can the seasoned Captain do his duty one last time?
Written by Nick Riganas

www.imdb.com/title/tt5478478/2
And anyone with a basic knowledge of real life Indian Wars history knows there weren't any hostile Comanches roaming the plains in 1892.

And it seems to me it would have been really easy for the scriptwriter to select a year for the story - 1872, for example - when hostile Comanche warriors were a danger.

The Fantasy Island episode "My Fair Pharaoh/The Power" (10 May 1980) featured a historical character portrayed by an actor four times as old as the character ever lived to be. www.imdb.com/title/tt0577765/3
And examples of errors in television can be found even in allegedly non fictional TV programs. For example, the Bone Detectives episode "The Warlord of Bamburgh Castle" (24 March 2008), was about Edwin (killed AD 633), the first Christian king of Northumbria in Britain. And Edwin probably did have a stronghold at Bamburgh.
www.imdb.com/title/tt1192189/?ref_=ttep_ep124
So filming scenes at Bamburgh Castle was a good idea. Except that they forgot to mention that the present stone castle there was built centuries after Edwin's time and rebuilt about 1900.

And they said that Edwin's enemies Penda and Cadwallon were his enemies because they were pagans and Edwin converted to Christianity. Penda, king of Mercia, was a pagan, but members of his family converted to Christianity and Penda had political reasons to be Edwin's enemy.

Cadwallon, king of Gwynedd and probably king of the Britons, was a Christian from a family which had been Christian for centuries and produced a number of British saints, including his own son Cadwallader the Blessed. Cadwallon attacked Edwin because Edwin had invaded Gwynedd and driven Cadwallon into exile in Ireland.

I wonder what Mr. Evan Vaughn Anwyl of Tywyn thought if he watched that episode. Why should he care? Because he is probably the present day heir of Cadwallon, and since a legend claimed that Cadwallon married Penda's sister, possibly also the heir of Penda.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwyl_of_Tywyn_family5
The first historical error I ever noticed was when I was in an elementary school which I left when I was eleven. The class watched a sort of television documentary on the Little Bighorn. It mentioned that Custer sent a detachment under Captain Benteen one way and a detachment under Major Reno another way and rode on with the rest of his men in a third direction. So far so good. But then it said that Custer reunited with Benteen and Reno before making his last stand.

And that didn't sound correct to me. So I checked out a couple of books about Custer and Custer's Last Stand from the school library and the public library and read that Reno and Benteen did not, repeat not, reunite with Custer before Custer's Last Stand, which is why most of their men survived.

Being an introvert, I didn't bother to tell anyone. But any kid who was more extroverted than I was might have complained to the teacher about that error, which could have resulted in some humiliation for the creators of the documentary.

So any writer of fiction or non fiction who doesn't want to be humiliated by school children pointing out his errors should do the necessary historical, scientific, geographic, etc. research.

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