OK, well:
I have so far cut together the following scenes:
1-13: Marissa leaves hospital and arrives at Bill's quietly; eventually she is welcomed by Bill, who brought raspberries; Sarah rejects Bill over ice cream in Davis Square; Sarah, Amy & Larry arrive at the first dinner - Larry's shirt has a blotch; Larry and Marissa accidentally see each other half-naked in turns, and then all reconvene for the dinner ("Get it while it's hot!" Bill says, and then we all look like we're going to pass out because it was 105 degrees).
23-27: Larry returns to "the piano room" after running into Marissa on the beach, daydreams about M and "the game," then converses with Amy about his father and his new job; meanwhile, Marissa hears a message in Quaker meeting about alone vs. not alone/crazy vs. trusting; then Bill and Marissa watch the gay comedian on TV.
32-37: Following their dinner, which didn't end well, M walks home and experiences her ESP in public for the first time; she then hurries home and writes, joined eventually by Bill (who does not call her "Miss Bat Ears" because I took out that line when, upon hearing it said, I found it unbearably stupid); the next morning, Amy wakes up alone and is soon greeted by an apologetic Larry, who proceeds to have his own ESP-sort-of-sensation connecting him to Marissa, which freaks him out, but not Marissa (what? did someone say "foreshadow"??).
All together, this amounts to about 24-ish minutes of video. 24 mins is probably too big a chunk of the target final run-time of about 100 minutes -- especially considering that none of these scenes is what I think of as one of the "long scenes" -- i.e., M&L Showdown, M&BCrying, first dinner including the recognition, the suicide scene -- nor the shorter-but-key scenes like M&L's private dinner and game experiment, Bill's coming out, and Marissa's Montage of Humanity, which culminates in the drunk stranger screaming at her. Not to mention all the other scenes, which also matter and take up screen time. I'm going to just cut each scene together and then see how long the first rough cut is. Hopefully it won't be more than like 110 mins (??!!).
One nice thing about the timing of the first 13 scenes is that the "inciting incident" (Larry arrives for dinner and thus meets Marissa - it is the event that makes the story happen) does seem to be falling around the 10th minute, which conforms to the "classic aesthetic" of narrative film. Yay! I think this bodes well for the rhythm of the script in general.
Next I am going to tackle the first dinner scene (14) and Marissa's recognition of Larry, which is technically the following scene (15) because they've moved to the living room by then. THIS IS GOING TO BE HARD. Man oh man. My plan is to go back to the script and actually make a storyboard sketch of theses scenes based on my ideal shot sequence (e.g., which moments should be shots of the whole group, which should be close-ups of individuals -- all these choices have "meaning," ideally, that contributes to the overall impact and purpose of the film). Did I do a storyboard in '02? No, I did not. Did I make all these poor fucking actors go through the whole damn scene over and over and over from a million angles even though it was 1,005 degrees? Yes, I did. And sometimes we had two cameras going at once. Mother. Of. Pearl. ... So, uh, I'll do the storyboards and then I'll look through the PEDL (see Glossary) I made in '02, then I'll look through all the footage, then I'll cut the scene as close to how I want it as the footage will allow.
Wish me luck!
Love,
Rachel
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