Yayyy!!!! Picture for Scene 28 is DONE.
THAT is a LONG scene, as previously mentioned. Nine pages. I did manage to get it to seven minutes, though (and actually, the nine pages/seven minutes includes Scene 27, the "gay comedian" scene with Bill and Marissa eating Chinese crackers on the couch, watching TV, which is a page - these "scenes" really go together, as they follow each other temporally and even share some dialogue as the characters call across the apartment). It really does contain three distinct parts - the discussion of their lame love lives, the discussion of the nature of attraction, and finally, Marissa's phone call with Larry and Bill's reaction to it.
Having now spent several days re-familiarizing myself with the countless angles and takes, I have this to say as addendum to the previous post about tone:
In a way that was sometimes funny and sometimes troublesome (both of those things on set, as well, I now recall, prompted by hearing a snippet of between-take dialogue), Kevin (playing "Bill") thought the scene was long and dragging and so spoke his lines with increasing rapidity to try to pick the energy up, but Christine (playing "Marissa") wasn't responding the way he wanted her too, so he - i.e., both Kevin
and Bill, are clearly irritated. In editing, this was a challenge because not all takes are at the same pace or demonstrate the same kind of emotional relationship between the actors. In the end, I tried to cut this for effect -- to "use it" as actors might say -- to show Bill's enthusiasm for his ideas and Marissa's comfort and familiarity with that enthusiasm. That is, Bill may grow a little irritated to not be fully understood or appreciated right away, but Marissa remains unfazed by his irritation.
One thing that was hard, though, was to avoid a version where condescension comes into play. That was unexpected because I didn't really sense any condescension, watching the takes whole, but cut up and re-rhythmed, if you will, it was easy to make either one of them seem sort of belittling of the other, and, indeed, to encourage a feeling in the audience toward belittling one or the other -- which was definitely unwanted. That was kinda weird - I still don't entirely understand where it came from; I think it probably came from the way I sped up the pace -- the slower pace made them seem more relaxed with each other, or something. Speeding it up may have looked at times like impatience on the parts of the characters, rather than simply like the "rapid fire" of an interesting conversation. I hope I managed to keep it at bay.
As to other issues raised in previous post:
The eyelines are not great at times, but I managed to cut around the most serious breaks; it's not
too bad. I wonder, though, why we did it is as we did it. Why did we not want Bill's "across the room" to be at the counter where he really, non-diagetically, was -- it would have been fine... ??
Also, now having heard more of the little snippets of between-take comment from me, and seen more closely how the takes change as we go along, I see that I did not lose sight of the desired tone quite as much as I declared in the previous post. I definitely was not always on top of it, for sure, but I think I was also unsure of how to communicate what I wanted in a way that the actors understood. I had tried what I knew how to say, and was limited in my ability to get at it another way. That's one of the things I have really taken away in good supply, editing this movie as a whole: that I was under-prepared for not being immediately understood. I hope that teaching has given me more skill in this area since 2002. ALSO: I do the slate for 28E, and I'm _clearly_ Very Tired. When one's brain is not rested, one has fewer good communication skills - No Doubt.
