XVI. The Cut (Part 1)

Welcome to the weekly production log of my first feature film, The Big Pay Off. My budget is $15,000 and I am producing and releasing it completely independently from the current Hollywood regime. If you are a new reader and are curious why I’m doing this, you can read my manifesto here. Thanks for stopping by!

Charles Brackett was Billy Wilder’s first longtime writing partner. The pair’s batting average was dizzying. Together they wrote and produced such all-time classics as Ninotchka, Balls of Fire, Five Graves to Cairo, The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard.

Wilder once referred to Brackett and himself as “the happiest couple in Hollywood” but in reality their relationship was a rocky one. Wilder was the out-of-control womanizing creative genius, constantly taunting the refined, patrician Republican Brackett with invectives during grueling writing sessions. More than once Brackett broke up the relationship.

In Brackett’s diaries, he goes back and forth between admiration for Wilder and open disdain. In the end, he always arrived at a curious sort of respect for a difficult fellow who nonetheless produced the gold-standard film work of the time. (And I would argue ever since.) One of Wilder’s masterpieces of the era was Double Indemnity, a movie Brackett did not collaborate on. Their relationship was on the rocks at that point.

It’s interesting to read Brackett’s outsider thoughts on the movie. At first, he writes about it with the low-grade bitterness of a slighted ex lover:

December 2, 1943: […] at 2 o’clock went with Billy, Joe, Doane and Lee and Ray to see Double Indemnity, which I enjoyed very much, rather the more because while a good picture, it is not a great one, being extremely one-noteish and rather drab than tragic. I think it will have a success d’estime or de shock, but doubt that it will be much of a money-maker. The direction is uneven and some of the writing extremely poor, and my black heart sang like a bird…

A couple of months later, back working with Wilder on a few projects, one of whom would become The Lost Weekend, Brackett writes:

January 28, 1944: …dined and hurried to the first sneak of Double Indemnity and, as edited and scored, it is an absolute knockout of a picture, the most flawless bit of picture technique imaginable. The awful giggling-kind audience was held spellbound and those who knew pictures were set back on their heels and I am to report in myself a kind of rejoicing that it was such a superb thing.

Here, Brackett’s passion for his creative partner was reignited, his schadenfreude from earlier turned into adulation.

It’s a funny thing in creative work, this seesaw between love and hate, ecstasy and diffidence, jealousy and happiness. And if I’ve learned anything in the years of my own creative toil, it’s that good work almost always happens at the exact nexus of those feelings.

Another thing these two excerpts show neatly is that a movie is really made in post. As the adage goes, a film’s story is told three times: once in the script, once on set, and once in post. But it’s only after the refinement process of the edit, once sound design and music complement the images that the true power of a movie can assert itself. It’s how a “drab” and “one-notish” film can, two months later, thanks to “edit” and “score”, become “a superb thing”.

And why looking at dailies or a first rough cut of a scene can be such hell.

There is a story about Steven Soderbergh I like that might or might not be an urban legend. George Clooney supposedly approached him during the wrap party of Ocean’s 11 and asked if he thought the movie would turn out any good. Soderbergh just looked back at Clooney and asked, “wanna see it?” He had edited the movie himself all throughout the shoot and had a cut of it with him on his laptop.

Soderbergh has since talked about always editing the day’s footage after wrap. If he realizes he’s missing a shot, or something else isn’t working, he’ll call his AD to schedule a quick reshoot at the beginning of the next day. I wish I had the resources to do that myself (having an AD seems like an insane luxury) but I have my own version of it.

Because my budget is so low and I can’t pay anyone a day rate, we only shoot on weekends or during certain carefully pre-scheduled weekdays. This means I have a lot of time in between shoots to edit. I do a first pass, then hand it off to Adam, my editor, and we pass notes back and forth.

Adam is also an extremely talented director. We met 15 years ago in New York and have collaborated on many projects since. When I emerged from the haze of my feature’s first shoot day, I lined up all the footage in my editing software’s timeline and hit play. I instantly wanted to die. It all seemed wrong. Nothing was working. The tsunami wave of self-doubt that I had somehow kept at bay during prep now came crashing down on me and washed away any sense of accomplishment I might have felt the night before when we wrapped. Here was insurmountable proof that I was untalented and delusional, cursed with the ridiculous hubris to think I would ever be able to competently direct a movie. The result, plain and simple to see in front of me, was the worst bit of hack work ever accomplished in over one hundred years of the film arts.

I texted Adam and asked him how he feels the first time he looks at the footage he shoots for his own projects. “Pure despair”, came his answer.

Somehow, this made me feel better.

Lately, the positive vibe on filmstack has been really infectious. But fear not, fellow travelers, I am here to rain on this parade. I am here to talk about The Doubt. For, The Doubt will be your constant companion. As exciting it is to work towards completing a feature and being part of a burgeoning new film movement, The Doubt is never far off. I can feel like a million bucks after a great production meeting, as soon as I sit alone in my car on the way home, The Doubt comes creeping in. Write a killer line of dialogue? The Doubt makes me delete it instantly. As soon as I yell “cut” on set, The Doubt clouds my judgement. And when I lay awake in bed at 2am, The Doubt all but paralyzes me.

And I know for a fact this is not just the case for myself but almost every creative I have ever talked to. I have seen, more than once, creatives give up on projects they had poured years of their lives into because The Doubt became too strong and they simply gave up. Not to mention the innumerable projects that were never started because The Doubt was too strong in the first place.

If we are trying to inspire each other to rewrite the rules of the film game, let’s also talk openly about The Doubt. For one of my strongly-held believes is that the most important skill any filmmaker can have is the ability to keep going. Forget talent, skill, gear and technical knowledge. If you can’t shut out The Doubt and just keep going, you’ll never finish your movie.

My own movie is far from finished, but already I could have broken down completely at many turns. Difficulty finding crew? Check. A horrible table read? Check. My lead actor dropping out? Check.

And now, this footage I was gaping at from my first shoot day. This footage that seemed all but unusable.

Dear reader, the footage is not unusable. Far from it. I just kept going and put together my edit the way I had planned it. I realized soon enough that the footage is great. The footage is not perfect but it’s everything I need to put together a scene that has all the tension, humor and release I hoped it would have. To the extent that I made any mistakes on my first day of directing, they are lessons learned I have already been able to apply on subsequent shoot days.

The further I kept going, the more the seesaw of despair and elation evened out. When I saw the first full cut of the scene, even without color-grading or sound mix of any kind, a new sort of feeling bloomed within me: pride. I was proud of the achievement, proud I kept going, proud of the work. With all the flaws still apparent, I could see the potential. I could see that what had led to this was not undue hubris but good planning and good creative instinct. While it’s not the most “flawless bit of picture technique imaginable”, it is also far from drab and uneven. And while The Doubt never went away, this fortified me to ignore it and say it with my chest:

When in Doubt, keep going.