Feb 25

Feb 25 Finishing the First Cut on The Hollywouldn'ts

Finishing the First Cut on The Hollywouldn'ts, blog post by Darius Stevens Wilhere

I remember the first time I was in an edit bay being shown how to edit film. I was 9ish and it fascinated me how I could wind film backwards and forwards through a little metal machine with a screen and control the image and sound and then take pieces and put them in different places and change what I was seeing.

Fast forward 31 years and close to 15,000 hours of editing later and here I was finally cutting my own feature film. It's unbelievably daunting because even after editing hundreds of commercials, concerts, shorts, tv show episodes and ridiculous amounts of corporate material, I still found that I was learning. Not the technical tools, but the more important aspect of editing: how to tell the story.

And you have a massive advantage when you are editing someone else's material: you aren't innately connected to it in the way that a writer/director is. Working on someone else's material it was always easy to say: this needs to go.

So it was interesting to me when I read Walter Murch's book "In the Blink of an Eye" for the first time and he described how almost always the first cut ended up being 3-4 hours long and then they would spend months whittling the story into what would become the film. I laughed, I was like: what kind of an idiot would shoot so much of a feature that it would be 4 hours long when cut together unless they were doing some super heroic epic???!!! Well today I answered that question for myself: me. I am that kind of idiot.

My first cut came in at 3 hours and 10 minutes including rough timing for titles.

Dear lord. It left me wondering: how had this happened? I mean aside from a fair amount of improv from some really talented actors, there was a definite reason why. Looking back I remembered writing the script and having it come in at a solid 110-112 pages. And then I started telling all my friends I was actually going to shoot it. And then I was suddenly adding parts and pieces for said friends. And then suddenly there was a celebrity cameo. And and and the script blossomed out of control to a ridiculous 156 pages. Then I justified to myself how so many movies with long scripts were cut quick and rounded out at two hours. And and and. I knew I needed to do another draft and trim the fat.

But I had also just done a bunch of work cutting a tv show comedy for Netflix and was running about 45 seconds a page. Because I wasn't precious with the material, I knew which laughs needed to stay and which laughs needed to go.

I knew I needed to rewrite the script and I was ready to do it! And then I got told I could have a really amazing Canon Cinema camera package!!!! But...only for the next 24 days (which was kind of like winning the micro-micro-budget film lottery). And so I shot the film thinking "I'll rewrite it in the edit bay and keep it fast paced."

And now as the writer/director/editor I find I have gotten far too attached to the material and must do as William Goldman once accurately described: Murder all my darlings. I know I'll be able to drop 30 minutes pretty simply, but man that last run is going to be brutal. Not just because it's my material, but because it's good.

I love so many of the scenes I'm now having to cut. Maybe one day I'll figure out how to show the full 3 hour cut, but for now, onward into battle. This is going to be a painful few weeks, but I've learned a valuable lesson as a writer and a director.

Finishing the First Cut on The Hollywouldn'ts, blog post by Darius Stevens Wilhere