The Final Rewrite

THE FINAL REWRITE
This book offers a unique perspective on crafting your screenplay from an

editor’s point-of-view. Special features include before and after examples
from preproduction scripts to post production final cuts, giving screen-
writers an opportunity to understand how their screenplay is visualized
in post production.
By the time a script reaches the editing room, it has passed through
many hands and undergone many changes. The producer, production
designer, director, cinematographer, and actor have all influenced the pro-
cess before it gets to the editor’s hands. Few scripts can withstand the
careful scrutiny of the editing room. This book reveals how to develop a
script that will retain its original vision and intent under the harsh light
of the editing console. It provides insights that writers (as well as produc-
ers and directors) need and editors can provide for a safe journey from
the printed page to the final release.
This book is ideal for aspiring and early career screenwriters, as well as
filmmakers and established screenwriters who want to gain a better
understanding of the editing process.
John Rosenberg, ACE, MFA, is a film editor, writer, and professor. He

teaches the aesthetics of motion picture editing at USC’s School of
Cinematic Arts, where he is also the Core Curriculum Coordinator for
undergraduate production. He has taught extensively throughout Asia.
For over 30 years, Rosenberg has worked as a feature film editor, as well
as a writer, producer, and production executive, for such companies as
20th Century Studios, New Line Cinema, Alpine Pictures, Orion Pictures,
and Artisan. He is a member of American Cinema Editors (ACE). Along
with feature work, Rosenberg has written and edited a variety of reality-
based TV projects, including for National Geographic. He is the author
of the award-winning novel Tincture of Time as well as the popular film
book The Healthy Edit: Creative Editing Techniques for Perfecting Your
Movie, currently in its second edition and recently translated into
Mandarin.
THE FINAL REWRITE
How to View Your Screenplay with a Film
Editor’s Eye
John Rosenberg
Cover design credit: artwork by Michael Rosenberg
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 John Rosenberg
The right of John Rosenberg to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rosenberg, John, author.
Title: The final rewrite : how to view your screenplay with a film editor’s eye /
John Rosenberg.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical
references. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022049184 (print) | LCCN 2022049185 (ebook) | ISBN
9780367752262 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367750596 (paperback) | ISBN
9781003161578 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture plays--Editing. | Motion picture authorship.
Classification: LCC PN1996 .R677 2023 (print) | LCC PN1996 (ebook) | DDC
808.2/3--dc23/eng/20230127
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049184
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049185
ISBN: 978-0-367-75226-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-75059-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-16157-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 The Final Rewrite 3

First Man 5
The Screenplay 10
Notes 12
2 Best Intentions and Excellent Fails 13

Not Quite Heaven 13
How to Help Your Characters Succeed 21
Notes 27
3 The Well of Coverage 28

The Dailies 28
Coverage 29
Permutations of the Script 32
Organization 33
4 The Scene and an Approach to Dailies 36

A Word about Scenes 36
Writing the Scene 37
First Steps 38
The First Draft 42
Notes 45
v
C ontents
5 Another Approach 46
The Gift of Memory and Its Limits 46
Beyond “Cut” 51
Keep Rolling 51
Discovering What to Lose 54
Movies Move 58
Note 59
6 What Writers Know 60

Structure 61
Genre 65
Sense and Setting 65
Notes 69
7 What Editors Know 70

Power of the Shot 70
Sculpting the Story 71
Establishing Tone 73
Notes 80
8 Tricks of the Editor’s Trade 81

The Magician 81
Repurposing Shots 81
The Intercut 83
Point-of-View 91
Notes 92
9 The Essence of Time 93

Clock Time versus Film Time 95
Notes 103
10 The Filmic Moment 104

Note 110
11 Aspects of Dialogue 111

Dialogue and Subtext 111
Subtext 119
The Sound of Silence 122
vi
C ontents
12 Dialogue and Character Issues 124

Space 124
The Ensemble 125
Improvisation 133
Voiceover 134
Notes 136
13 When “Cut to” Isn’t Enough 137

Transitions 137
14 Following the Line 144

Non-linear Trajectories 144
Notes 153
15 Formula but Not Formulaic 154

Genre 154
Ritual Objects and Story 158
Formula 160
Notes 166
16 The End Is the Beginning 167

Where to Begin 169
The End 171
Notes 179
17 Hindsight Is 20/20 180

Emotional Logic 180
Creativity and Inspiration 183
Notes 185
Index 186
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge the help of many in putting this book together. First,
to my wife Debbie Glovin Rosenberg, the perennial first editor who read an
initial draft and gave stellar, insightful notes. Also, my gratitude to Cindy
Davis of the University of Michigan and Eric Young of Chapman University
who read an early draft and gave terrifically helpful and specific comments.
Also, much gratitude goes to acquisitions editor Katherine Kadian, who
first promoted the book to the publisher, and to my wonderful and patient
editor Daniel Kershaw and his immensely helpful and gracious assistant
Genni Eccles who helped shepherd the book through the editorial process
and out into the world. Much gratitude is also due to production editor
Eleonora Kouneni and copyeditor Louise Smith. Credit is due to Script Slug
for supplying some of the scripts that are quoted herein. Thanks also to Tod
Goldberg, Joshua Malkin, Mark Haskell Smith, and Mary Yukari Waters
of the UC Riverside Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts
MFA program. To world class composers and dear friends Garry Schyman
and Mark Adler whose music has enlivened my work over the years. And to
my friend and colleague James Savoca whose presentation when we guest
lectured at Shanghai Film Academy encouraged me to write about filmic
moments. Also, to my colleague and friend Brad Barnes for his insights into
directing “feels.” To the world-class faculty and staff at USC’s School of
Cinematic Arts, including Dean Elizabeth Daley, Vice Dean of Faculty Akira
Lippit, who encouraged my sabbatical to allow more time to write, Vice
Dean Michael Renov, Associate Dean Alan Baker, Chair of Production Gail
Katz, Vice Chair Susan Arnold, previous Chairs Mike Fink, Barnet Kellman,
and Michael Taylor, Assistant Chair Cedric Berry, Editing Track Head Nancy
Forner, ACE, and to all our students who make USC SCA one of the top
film schools in the world. Finally, to my daughter Sarah who encouraged
the writing of this book, to my son Michael who created the artwork and
designed the book cover, to my parents, Maryanne and Frank P. Rosenberg,
and to our family friends who were some of the greatest writers of their time
– Julie Epstein, Sid Fleischman, Ben Hecht, Ernie Lehman, Dick Maibaum,
Rod Serling, Dan Taradash, and Ernest Tidyman. Their love of storytelling
captivated and inspired me when I was young and impressionable.
viii
INTRODUCTION
Experienced screenwriters know the importance of rewriting. The grue-

some sounding dictum to “Kill your babies” is not the tag line of a horror
film, but an oft repeated phrase among writers as they self-edit. It sug-
gests that writers must be willing to give up material they’re in love with
for the greater good of the screenplay. But it’s not just about infanticide.
Sometimes it’s about adding, trimming, rearranging.
If it weren’t for the writers who brave the blank page to create a screen-
play, film editors would have nothing to work with. For those writers,
this book will help make the process easier, by seeing their work through
the eyes of the film editor who is the privileged guardian of their work
and the purveyor of the final rewrite.
In the literary world the writer has the book editor; in the film world
the screenwriter’s work is ultimately finished by the film editor. Along the
way the script may encounter development executives, directors and pro-
ducers who give valuable input (or not), evolving the screenplay from the
original script to a shooting script. Ultimately the test of what will appear
on screens throughout the world falls into the hands of the film editor.
Since film is a translation process from script to dailies to the final cut, the
film editor has significant influence on a film’s final outcome.
As an editor and writer, I have noticed consistent issues of structure,
tone, character and pacing that occur when a film is not working as well
as it could. Writers, even with the best intentions to view their work
objectively, sometimes overlook flaws that are obvious to editors. As
one member of a highly collaborative process, however, the writer is not
solely responsible for these issues. But by addressing them early in the
process, screenwriters can strengthen their scripts, making them less sus-
ceptible to unexpected or ill-advised alterations. In that regard, not only
writers but also other key members of the filmmaking process will benefit
from the insights contained here.
Unlike novelists who work directly with book editors, screenwriters
rarely if ever have direct contact with the film editor. By that point in the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-1 1
INTRODUCTION
process, the script has already passed through at least two permutations –
the writer’s rewrite and the director’s (and more if one includes producers
and development executives). It eventually comes to rest with the film
editor.
In this book, we are exploring the alpha and omega, the beginning and
the end of the process. In Greek mythology, the character of Mercury had
the uncanny ability of dashing between the highest and the lowest, the
sublime and the tawdry. He visited all realms, but found attachment to
none. That could be the description of a film editor.
From the start, the editor sees with different eyes, a sort of meditative
detachment. She can let go of one thing in order to conjure something
better in its place. She can explore with intricate detail or stand back and
view the entire landscape. And she controls time.
The moment an editor makes a cut he has altered time, a privilege that
few humans enjoy. As the Webb telescope has shown us, time is a matter
of perception and in the present we can view a long lost past.
Without the introduction of a cut, time continues linearly, as we expe-
rience it in reality, our quotidian perception of the chain of events. But
with the introduction of a single cut, time is altered. It will accelerate
rapidly forward at a dizzying rate or it will linger, hover, suspend. Either
way, the cut must arouse emotion, it must influence the viewer’s heart and
mind.
In film, the final outcome rests in the mercurial hands of the editor, the
one who magically makes objects, people, feelings appear and disappear,
who alters time, who tickles us and plays with our concepts of reality,
whether through complex visual effects or a simple cut. But it all begins
with a script.
2
1
THE FINAL REWRITE
This chapter introduces the basic issues that confront writers and
editors. It suggests how they will be dealt with throughout the
book. It includes case studies as well as an overview of writing and
editing.
The first cut of the most expensive film in 1936 ran six hours long. It
was nearly unwatchable. In collaboration with the film’s director, Frank
Capra, the editors, Gene Havlick and Gene Milford, trimmed it down to
3 ½ hours. Even at that length the audience was unreceptive and many
walked out.
Jump ahead to the next preview screening and a lucky accident. When
the projectionist threaded up the film, he mistakenly left out the first reel,
and started with the second reel. The film significantly improved.
Taking a hint from this, the director and editor rethought the opening
and decided to remove the first two reels for the next screening. The film
played even better. It turned out that all the preamble and backstory of
those first two reels wasn’t necessary. It worked better to start in the
midst of the action and allow the audience to catch up, to bring their own
intelligence to bear on the film.
None of this had been anticipated when Lost Horizon was first con-
ceived. The script was lauded over, preproduction was carefully planned,
and scenes were extensively covered during production. When it arrived
in the editing room, the editors were buried under thousands of feet of
film for months. But the final film was nothing like the one that was origi-
nally scripted. It often isn’t. If only the filmmakers had the foresight that
hindsight brought, it would have saved them months of work, bundles of
money, and hours of anguish.
There are few scripts, if any, that can stand up flawlessly to the scrutiny
of the editing room. In the editing room all the best intentions and the
worst mistakes are exposed.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-2 3
THE FINAL REWRITE
Decades after Lost Horizon, and after thousands of other motion pic-
tures have splashed upon theater and television screens, we have the
opportunity to understand the editing process in a new way, in a way that
sheds light on the writing process, the genesis of it all. In more recent
times, Schindler’s List writer Steven Zaillian made a similar observation
as it relates to the editing process. In On Story: Screenwriters and Their
Craft1, Zaillian noted that
“At some point in editing I realized that, with most things I was
working on, you could take out the first reel, just throw away
the first ten minutes, and start the movie where the action starts.
That way you’d get to know the character over the course of the
real action and not as a kind of preamble. That’s something I’m
actually very conscious of doing now, thinking about what hap-
pens before the story really gets going but not writing it.”
In a sense, the end informs the beginning. Basic editing concepts such
as transition, montage, pacing, rhythm, structure, intercutting, point-
of-view, sound effects, visual effects, and the creation of what we’ll call
filmic moments can guide writers, producers and directors during script
development and preproduction stages as much as these techniques guide
the editor throughout post production.
This book will reveal how to bulletproof a script so it retains its origi-
nal vision, its primary concerns, and its initial intent in the sometimes
harsh light of the editing console. From the starting point to the finish
line, the melding of the writer’s goal and the editor’s insights lead to suc-
cessful filmmaking.
For Writers. As screenwriter Cindy Davis points

out, it is important to keep in mind that “produc-
ers, studio execs, directors -- usually have far less
knowledge about story structure and characteriza-
tion than the screenwriter, but the screenwriter is
required to execute their notes. An editor rarely
sees the draft of the screenplay that the screenwriter loved.”
With the introduction of high-definition digital capture, the volume of

raw material has increased many fold since the single-camera 35mm cel-
luloid days when most films consumed anywhere from 50,000 to 150,000
feet of film. The ease and low cost of digital file-based production gave
filmmakers greater liberty to shoot as many takes as they deemed neces-
sary, limited by time rather than cost. Even in the celluloid era, how-
ever, the numbers kept growing. The 1961 classic western One Eyed
4
THE FINAL REWRITE
Jacks, directed by Marlon Brando, nearly doubled the anticipated film

consumption2. In the waning years of celluloid’s dominance in the early
2000s, directors were beginning to shoot well over a million feet of film.
All this while knowing that their final movie would come in at around
12,000 feet or less, the equivalent of a two hour movie.
For Editors. 35mm film runs at 24 frames/second

through both the taking end – the camera – and the
exhibition point – the projector. That equates to 90 feet
per minute. Most films run no longer than two hours.
First Man
A recent example of the editor’s ability to rewrite a script through the
use of coverage occurs in First Man (2018) a dramatic retelling of Neil
Armstrong’s life in the Gemini space program. Like other high profile
films by high profile directors, First Man, was still shot on celluloid film.
Nearly two million feet of the stuff. Around 370 hours of footage.
Whether captured digitally or on film, the huge increase in coverage has
invited editors to invest more and more of their creative time and technical
skills into the storytelling process. This is certainly the case for First Man edi-
tor Tom Cross, ACE. According to Cross3, “(The director) knew we would
do a lot of writing in the editing process. … He shot an enormous amount of
footage, so there was a lot of leeway for rewriting in the editing room.”
Coverage has a different meaning for screenwriters

than it does for film editors. In the editing room,
coverage refers to all the material that was shot in
order to capture the scene, usually involving mul-
tiple set-ups or angles such as wide shots, medium
shots, close-ups, and so on. This allows the film editor to assemble
the scene in the best way possible. For writers, coverage refers to a
review of the screenplay done by professional readers, usually for a
studio, agency or production company.
Some scenes in First Man had improvised performances that deviated

from the original script. Even when the director “would shoot the scene
as scripted, he would often have a second camera to roam around captur-
ing other characters.”
“Editing is really the final rewrite of all movies,” concludes Cross. He
should know, since he was also responsible for the final rewrite of other
highly successful films such as La La Land (2016) and Whiplash (2014),
both which required extensive rewriting in the editing room.
5
THE FINAL REWRITE
During the editing of First Man, Cross found that the addition or dele-
tion of a few frames made a huge difference.
“For example, (in) the opening X-15 [test flight] scene…there

are moments where, if we held too long on a gauge, it would
break the illusion of urgency… If there’s a series of insert shots
or details played at just the right length, then there is a sense of
urgency – they build upon each other.”
This notion of shot length was first highlighted in the early days of film-
making by one of the great theorists of cinema, Sergei Eisenstein. In
developing his theories of montage he came upon the concept of metric
montage, where the mathematics of a shot -- the precise length -- creates
meaning when juxtaposed with surrounding shots. Writers often are not
aware of this. But it’s possible to build shot length and juxtaposition into
a script, such as Martin McDonagh did in the Academy Award winning
film, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri (2017).
In the dental office scene, the character Milfred (Frances McDormand)
is at the mercy of an angry dentist, Geoffrey (Jerry Winsett), who is deter-
mined to discourage her attempts to uncover the facts about her daugh-
ter’s death. But Milfred turns the tables on him and grabs his dental drill.
Here the writer gives us quick, cut-like glimpses of the action:
CLOSE-UP: The drill gets closer and closer to

his thumbnail.
GEOFFREY sweating…
MILFRED determined…
…until finally the drill WHIRS INTO THE NAIL…
Figure 1.1 Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. Mildred visits the
dentist.
Credit: Searchlight Pictures.
6
THE FINAL REWRITE
It is as if the writer had already conceived of how the film would be edited
before it left the printed page. This is one of the goals -- to bring the shoot-
ing script and the final cut into closer proximity. Screenplays are not liter-
ary works in the manner of novels or short stories. These forms are ends
in themselves while a film script is only the beginning of a long process
involving sometimes hundreds, even thousands, of people, each contrib-
uting in their own way. Consequently, taking too literary an approach to
a screenplay works against the process and encumbers it with extra ver-
biage, no matter how lovely the writer’s use of language and description.
Here’s another writer, Taika Waititi, who imagined his opening scene in
Jojo Rabbit (2019) as a series unfolding shots. The images themselves,
seemingly innocent at first, spark our attention and eventually impale us
with the disturbing meaning that those images symbolize. Only after a
while do we realize a kind of sardonic innocence that lies deeper down,
incubating until it will eventually morph into true heroism. Jojo will con-
front his unquestioning fascist beliefs to risk his life and save a Jewish
girl, Elsa, whom his mother is hiding in the attic.
INT. JOJO’S HOUSE – MORNING
We open with QUICK DETAIL SHOTS of a young

boy dressing:
-- A brown shirt buttoned.

-- Badges pinned.
-- Belt tightened.
-- Neck kerchief tied.
-- Socks pulled up.
-- Hair combed.
-- Shoes clicked together at the heels,

one foot stomps down hard on the floor.
He is dressed. We PULL to a CLOSE-UP,

coming face to face with our HERO…
JOHANNES BETZLER, (JOJO), a cute 10 year

old boy.
The room is covered with NAZI POSTERS and

other PARAPHERNALIA, including pictures
of ADOLPH HITLER. You guessed it, he’s a
little Nazi.
So, what can writers take away from films like First Man, Lost Horizon,
Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri and Jojo Rabbit? An
understanding of the editor’s final rewrite can inform a writer’s approach
to drafts of their script, all the way up to and including the shooting
7
THE FINAL REWRITE
script. Conversely, a better understanding of scriptwriting will help edi-

tors incorporate structure, story and character into their cuts. It is truly
a symbiotic relationship. Like Egyptian plovers picking food scraps from
the giant molars of rhinoceroses, the editor’s work benefits the story by
removing anything that’s unnecessary, ultimately benefitting the overall
film.
Figure 1.2 Jojo Rabbit. Jojo gets dressed.

Freshmen film students and the general audience often imagine edit-
ing as a process of merely sticking the pieces together. B follows A and
C follows B. If you have the correct coverage and, as we’ll see that can
be a big if, you should be able to follow the instructions and stick it
all together. But editing a film is not the same as putting together
an Ikea desk set and, as with some do-it-yourself kits, parts are often
left out.
In my classes, the jigsaw puzzle plays a role in introducing students to
the complexity of editing and the various elements involved, such as col-
laboration, imagination, structure, and deadlines. They only have two
minutes to put it together – thankfully, the pieces are rather large. But the
pieces don’t always fit together easily and, more than that, there are
always a missing piece – I hide one. At times the students find it helpful
to refer back to the script (in this case the picture of the completed puzzle
on the box lid).
8
THE FINAL REWRITE
Figure 1.3 Students assemble a jigsaw puzzle – Multimedia University, Malaysia.
In her book, Reading and Writing a Screenplay4, Isabelle Raynauld

suggests that
“…a screenplay should not simply recount a story, rather, it

should foreshadow the future film. Each element of a screenplay,
each sentence, should be written and read in the context of how
these words will materialize on screen, through lighting, acting,
physical space, framing, ambiance, sound, editing, actions, emo-
tions and narrative…”
She echoes our approach when she suggests that “screenwriting ought to
be based on the logic of film editing for it to be efficient and conducive
to the production of film.” Writing a screenplay requires the author to
conceive of story in a fragmented way, putting together a puzzle, piece by
piece, as in our jigsaw example.
Raynauld uses the term synecdoche to describe how “the whole is told
through its parts…the story is a whole, but the whole story is untellable.
We must choose which parts of the whole of the story are greater than us
9
THE FINAL REWRITE
and hold the most potential.” Consequently, the screen story must fit into
a particular time fame while ignoring unnecessary elements.
According to film theorist Jurij Lotman5, “It is only when cinema
decided to base its artistic language on editing that shot segmentation
became a conscious element without which filmmakers cannot develop
their discourse and the audience, its perception.”
The Screenplay
Screenplays deal with story and character, which manifest as action and dia-
logue. When you look at a screenplay it’s a fairly simple affair. Screenplays are
more like poetry. Sparse, evocative and full of promise. Screenplays ask you
to imagine who will play your protagonist, what the set will look like, how
shots will be composed. Screenplays encourage you to imagine the mean-
ing of the dialogue’s subtext. This is what draws a producer or director to
your project. This is what sparks the producer’s imagination. The tease of the
screenplay, the temptation that it holds is what entices a producer to buy it
and a director to shoot it. And it had better have a great story as well. A good
screenplay excites us with its promise, but in a sense the promise is unfulfilled.
No one knows going in what the film will really look like until it goes
before the camera and before it lands in the editing room. Unlike a novel,
poem or short story, the screenplay is only the beginning. It is not the end;
it is not the entire or self-contained work. It requires others to bring it to
life. So, its tease must be strong. Strong enough to withstand all that will
be thrown at it. Even in the development stage it will be bombarded with
endless notes, questions and suggestions, ideas that are sometimes bril-
liant and sometimes ludicrous.
Figure 1.4 Apocalypse Now – Captain Willard daydreams in a Saigon hotel.

Credit: American Zoetrope/United Artists.
10
THE FINAL REWRITE
Think of a logline. A good logline has multiple components. It intro-

duces a character, it implies a story, and it offers a twist or sense of irony
at the end. Its goal, like that of the screenplay, is to entice. A good logline
sounds something like this: “During the Vietnam War a captain is sent on
a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade colonel
who has set himself up as a god among the local tribe.” This logline from
Apocalypse Now (1979) piques the imagination. It asks us to imagine the
challenges and obstacles that lie ahead. The film, one of the classics of
that era and perhaps of all time, was based on the Joseph Conrad novel,
Heart of Darkness. It had a solid script by John Milius. Yet after all the
shooting was over, the film was drastically rewritten in the editing room
over the course of two years until it finally found its way into the hearts
and minds of filmgoers.
At the time the director, Francis Ford Coppola, shot an unprecedented
million and a half feet of celluloid film. Disenchanted with the opening
scene (and later with other scenes to come), the supervising editor, Richard
Marks, cobbled together – albeit beautifully – a workable sequence from
discarded footage he dug up from the cutting room floor. He knew that
the opening, as written, wasn’t working. The film needed something more.
So he conceived of an approach – an essential aspect that we’ll elaborate
on later – and went looking for a way to manifest it. What he came up
with, coupled to the song “The End” (given to the director by The Doors’
lead singer Jim Morrison with whom Coppola had attended UCLA film
school), changed the history of film.
No hint of this scene exists in the original script. In fact, the shoot-
ing script begins with a scene that occurs much later in the film, a
head emerging out of a swamp in Vietnam. From here it transitioned
to a spectacular metaphoric scene of fire and planetary nebulae and
then to a luxury cabin cruiser docked in Marina del Rey, California.
Only in the fourth scene did we meet Captain Willard (Martin Sheen),
the main character, on a street in Saigon. He was not the haunted,
desperate figure who is seen in a Saigon hotel room in the movie’s
final version. The script concluded with a gigantic battle scene, but
director and editors wove the ending into a more mythic and disturb-
ing finale involving the death of the reclusive Captain Kurtz (Marlon
Brando). Slowly and painstakingly the film was rewritten in the edit-
ing room. In a similar way, discovering the essence of a scene or
sequence can shepherd the writer beyond extraneous scenes, action
and dialogue.
In production, the director generally follows the road map of the script.
The action and dialogue as shot must reflect what is written. Directors
bring their points-of-view and personal visions. By the time the film gets
to the editing room, the script has pretty much been abandoned. It has
new parents. It has become a new entity. And the dailies – that production
11
THE FINAL REWRITE
For Writers: Screenwriting Basics. Think first in

terms of character and structure. Engaging, relat-
able characters with strong desires – strong enough
to bring them into conflict with other characters –
will fire up the plot. But the plot needs structure.
Screenplays, unlike literary novels, rely heavily on
structure. And structure often relates to genre (more on this later).
Generally, screenplays run no longer than 120 pages. They have
three acts. They have plot points occurring at the end of each act.
The midpoint introduces a central conflict or crisis. Beyond the
seemingly pedantic aspect of structure lies a wide open world of
character and premise and setting that brings life to the seemingly
confined world of form and outline.
footage that reflects the script -- is the new reality. Nothing exists except
the footage that sits before the editor. Most editors throw the script away
at this point. Sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally.
Editing is a journey of discovery. As most experienced filmmakers
know, there’s the film you thought you were making and then there’s the
film that you discover you are making. This is the one that you unearth
in the editing room. Sometimes it closely resembles what you expected,
but often it turns out to be something quite different. This can drive a
writer crazy. How distressing for the mother who doesn’t recognize her
own child. On the other hand, if she embraces this fact, the writer will
find in the editing process the kernel of the writing process and gain fur-
ther insights into making a highly successful screenplay.
Whether it’s Lost Horizon in the early years of the film industry or
Apocalypse Now in the middle years or First Man in this current time, films
have been rewritten in the editing room throughout the history of motion
pictures. Now it is time to discover the inner workings of this process.
Notes
1 Austin Film Festival. On Story: Screenwriters and Their Craft. Edited by
Barbara Morgan and Maya Perez. University of Texas Press, Austin. 2013.
2 Personal communication.
3 Interview by Richard Trenholm, Dec 12, 2018 in CNET.
4 Raynauld, Isabelle. Reading and Writing a Screenplay. Routledge, New York.
2019.
5 Lotman, 1977, p. 48. Translated by Isabelle Raynauld, 2019.
12
2
BEST INTENTIONS AND
EXCELLENT FAILS
Where do things go wrong in the writing and development stages?

Is it a lack of engagement, a dreary pace, a false character, a forced
plot? How do these factors affect the post production stage of the
process? How does this inform a writer’s choices? How do editors
confront this fact? How can the editing process fulfil expectations
engendered by the script?
Not Quite Heaven

Early in my editing career I was the associate editor, with Tom Walls, on a
film entitled Made in Heaven (1987). It had an excellent premise, so good
that it garnered a large budget and the top Academy Award winning
actors at the time. It was written by two excellent writers, Bruce A. Evans
and Raynold Gideon whose previous film was the highly successful Stand
By Me (1986). Yet this film had serious dramatic flaws.
The premise – a young man, Mike (Timothy Hutton) dies while doing
a good deed and goes to Heaven where he meets a young woman, Annie
(Kelly McGillis) whom he falls in love with. The twist is that she was
“made in heaven” and has never been to Earth before. As she embarks on
her maiden journey, Mike makes a deal to follow her back to Earth. They
have 30 years to find each other, or else be lost to each other forever.
The premise evokes Plato’s concept of Eros in his Symposium that
posits that we have perfect other halves who, in finding them, will bring
us happiness. A timeless and classic idea turned into a super clever prem-
ise. Except in its execution the script omitted one essential aspect of
storytelling – an all pervasive need.
In Heaven, Mike has a desperate and clear desire -- to be reunited with
Annie. But this need will eventually get misplaced when he lands on
Earth. On Earth, neither he nor Annie has any idea that the other exists
or that they are searching for their other half so as to eventually be eter-
nally united.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-3 13
BEST INTENTIONS AND EXCELLENT FAILS
For Writers: A premise, according to Merriam-

Webster is “a proposition antecedently supposed or
proved as a basis of argument or inference.” In a
story, the premise posits a problem that must be
solved, after multiple attempts and obstacles on the
way to finding a solution. The premise becomes the
throughline that everything relates to. In a good story every possi-
ble avenue is examined on the journey to the final goal. Along the
way, the premise carries the main conflict, continually reinforcing
and elaborating on the issue that was stated at the beginning. This
weaves through all the acts, no matter how many there are.
While in Heaven, Mike searches out Emmett (Debra Winger, uncredited,

as a gruff Irishman who runs Heaven) and makes his request.
EMMETT
The answer is no.
MIKE
Is she a girl?
EMMETT
The answer is no.
MIKE
Is she a girl?
EMMETT
Yes.
MIKE
Then send me back as a boy.
EMMETT
I can’t do that.
MIKE
You can do anything, Emmett.
I know you can.
Emmett gets up.
14
EMMETT
I didn’t want to see you.
How did you find me?
MIKE
The cigarette. You’re the
only one who smokes in Heaven.
EMMETT
Oh frock. Now that’s in the air.
I’ll probably have to quit.
MIKE
I’m not asking you to put
me next door, Emmett. Just put
me in the same country and I’ll
find her.
EMMETT
Mike, the two of you fell in
love in Heaven. One day you’ll
fall in love with her on Earth
and you’ll be together forever.
MIKE
When does that happen?
EMMETT
How would I know? Maybe one
lifetime. Maybe two or two
hundred. How would I know?
But you’ll love her again.
(Spoiler alert. We could probably end the movie here since Mike has
already been reassured that he’ll be together again with Annie. The ques-
tion is when, not if. If is the more compelling question. It’s never a good
idea to give away the solution to the conflict. But Mike’s impetuousness
adds a small complication.)
MIKE
But I want to be with her
now.
EMMETT
You’ll be out of your time.
You Americans drive me crazy.
15
You’re so impatient. You’re

going to mess everything up.
MIKE
I’m not happy without her.
Emmett turns and watches (some) dancers. Mike

waits.
EMMETT
I can only give you thirty
years. And if you don’t find
her in that time, you’ll never
find her again.
MIKE
If I believe I can find her,
I will, right?
The two men look at each other.
EMMETT
You hear what I’m saying to
you, Mike. If you don’t find
her this time, she’s gone.
You’ll never find her. You’ll
fall in love again and she’ll
fall in love again, but
you’ll never be happy.
MIKE
I’ll find her.
The two lovers are zapped back to Earth, living under very different cir-
cumstances. Annie, now known as Ally, is born to an upwardly mobile
middle class family – soon to be wealthy -- and Mike, now known as
Elmo, is delivered to an impoverished single mother. The former lov-
ers move through their new lives on Earth without knowledge of each
other. Elmo becomes a footloose wanderer with a bent toward music, and
Ally is destined to become the head of her father’s toy company. She has
multiple boyfriends (of which I played one in passing, on the Columbia
University campus), but none of those relationships work out.
16
Figure 2.1 Made in Heaven - Mike meets Annie in Heaven.

Credit: Warner Brothers/Lorimar Motion Pictures.
Figure 2.2 Made in Heaven – Elmo meets Ally on a New York City street.
Credit: Warner Brothers/Lorimar Motion Pictures.
Here’s the issue. In Heaven they had the deep desire to be together, but
when they are reborn as infants on earth they have no inkling of each
other, or their need to be together. Nothing.
Each lives their separate lives, taking us through various adventures and
misadventures in the story’s second act. The second act is the crucial
17
marathon that covers the most screenplay pages and develops the plot and
obstacles to the character’s desires. But these wants were scarce in the
second act. Granted, as an attempt to reignite the character’s want, there’s
a brief encounter when Emmett appears to Elmo while he’s hitchhiking to
let him know that time is running out. But Elmo doesn’t comprehend or
accept what Emmett tells him, so the encounter is more for the audience’s
benefit than for Elmo’s. “I care about you, Elmo. I want you to get the
girl.” But what girl? Elmo has no idea what Emmett is talking about.
When he finally gets a ride, the driver asks him, “Where you headed?”
Elmo replies, “I don’t know.” Wrong answer.
Ultimately, Elmo and Ally wander through the script until they eventu-
ally land within each other’s proximity on the streets of New York City
(actually Atlanta disguised as Manhattan). If they knew that they were on
a mission to find their other half, the story would have been more
compelling.
Toward the end of the film, Ally and Elmo’s lives still haven’t crossed,
but they are on the same New York City street. Ally has just received a
marriage proposal from Lyman (get it, Lie Man?) who claims to love her,
but it’s clear she isn’t in love with him. Later she runs into an ex-boyfriend
shopping with his new wife, Pam, at Bloomingdales. Ally feels crushed
and decides to walk rather than take her chauffeured limousine.
Elmo, who has been a down-on-his-luck musician, celebrates his 30th
birthday with friends, toasting his first recording contract. But time has
run out. He and Ally are both 30 years old, the deadline that Emmett set
for them. But they’re both walking the same street by coincidence –
though coincidence isn’t usually a good thing in stories:
EXT. STREET

Elmo is halfway through the intersection when
it happens. A car runs the light and hits him.
He is thrown up on the sidewalk and lays there
very still. His eyes are closed. As we MOVE IN
ON his face, the SCREEN GETS DARKER AND DARKER
UNTIL IT’S BLACK. And then the BLACKNESS
BEGINS TO MOVE. SLOW AT FIRST, THEN FASTER AND
FASTER. As we REACH MAXIMUM VELOCITY, CHUNKS
OF LIGHT HURTLE out of the darkness AT US.
Suddenly, we’re IN A TUNNEL OF COLORED WHITE
LIGHT, going EVEN FASTER than we were in the
darkness. And then we STOP. In a WHITE ROOM.
Elmo is standing in the middle of it. And he’s
naked.
18
EMMETT (O.S.)
Hello, Elmo.
Elmo turns around. Emmett, in his blue

coveralls and flannel shirt, is coming toward
him.
ELMO
Where am I? What happened?
EMMETT
You were hit by a car. But
you’re gonna be all right. She
found you.
ELMO
I don’t understand. What do
you mean?
EMMETT
I love you, Elmo.
INT. HOSPITAL ROOM – EVENING
The “ELVIRA MADIGAN” THEME FADES IN. Ally is

sitting in the shadows at the foot of the bed
watching Elmo sleep. It’s as if she’s trying to
remember where she saw his face before.
After a long time she gets up and brushes a damp

curl off his forehead. She goes to the window
and stares out. The rain has stopped. In the last
light of day, a rainbow arcs over the city. She
sighs and goes to the edge of the bed. Elmo is
still sleeping peacefully. She takes his hand.
Life is what happens while you’re making other

plans.
FADE OUT
During the editing process, we eventually added quick flashbacks, sto-

len from scenes of Annie and Mike making love in Heaven. These were
19
designed to telegraph a subliminal memory and a desire for something

lost to the past. But I’m not sure it was enough. Also, the director, Alan
Rudolph, smartly allowed Elmo and Ally to glimpse each other in passing
on the New York street, a trigger moment for a flashback that was not in
the script. He even introduced a beautifully choreographed oner where
Ally approaches the unconscious Elmo as he lies on the sidewalk after
being hit by a car (driven by Ric Ocasek of The Cars) before being trans-
ported by ambulance to the hospital where doctors work to revive him.
Oners, or a scene shot in a single take, still require

edit-like manipulation to succeed. In order to sus-
tain interest and tell the story, oners require the
introduction of well timed beats, whether in perfor-
mance, music, sound, camera position or other fac-
tors. Though generally not as commercially viable as the
Eisensteinian montage approach to editing, some excellent films
have come out of the single shot, long take approach, such as
Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). Andrei Tarkovsky’s great works, such as
Stalker (1979), present a sort of anti-Eisenstein approach. Unlike his
countryman who believed in the value of fragmenting a scene into
basic, often neutral, parts to achieve a riveting whole, Tarkovsky’s
approach to time and editing was leisurely, slow paced and natural-
istic, allowing the camera to linger on shots for minutes at a time.
The ending was changed many times, including shooting additional

scenes. Eventually, the car hit, the stunning single take on the New York
City street, the tense ambulance ride, and the hospital scene where doc-
tors fight to save Elmo were all cut out of the movie. One sensed that
they had been manufactured to create a bit of conflict (drama), but
these were not essential to the story. It was decided to end on Elmo and
Ally as they discover each other amid Manhattan traffic. The goal has
been reached – they found each other -- and the movie is over.
The director’s unique vision and the picaresque quality that mirrored
the wandering lifestyles of the late Sixties and early Seventies, made the
film a favorite of some. To those the film is a heartfelt examination of the
wandering life and the circuitous paths our lives take, with the hopeful
message that wanderers eventually find their way -- or each other. But that
might be better suited to a novel or short story rather than a 136-page
script that needs dramatic action. Failing that, it failed at the box office.
This illustrates the importance for writers to establish a strong need in
their characters. And to continue to reinforce that need throughout the
20
course of the screenplay. Establish a goal and make sure it’s strong enough
for your hero to risk everything to attain it. In the case of Made in Heaven,
there was a strong need, but it was forgotten when the characters returned
to Earth. There were some obstacles in their paths but these were often
tangential. The conflicts were manufactured to add dramatic tension, but
with only occasional reference to the central desire.
How to Help Your Characters Succeed

Writers will often tell you that they imagine a particular actor when
envisioning a character for their stories. In other cases, characters
grow out of a mélange of friends, acquaintances, co- workers who
have crossed the writer’s path. The great writer Ben Hecht (Miracle
in the Rain, Notorious, Scarface) would often say in story meetings
that he once knew someone who fit that character and from whom
he could borrow traits and dialogue. Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List,
The Irishman) observed that he reads “scripts all the time where the
writer isn’t exactly sure who the character is. They’re experimenting
with, ‘Okay, what does the character..? Gets up in the morning…What
does the character do?’ They’re starting at the very beginning of the day
and as far back into the character’s life as they need to go in order to
understand the character.1”
Having a star in mind when writing a screenplay is a common and
sometimes useful approach to character development. On the other hand,
in actual practice, stars come with more aspects than might be obvious on
the page. Their quirks, charms, reputations and idiosyncrasies influence
their character on screen. They have a particular voice, which makes them
unique. Just as a popular singer, such as Rihanna Lana Del Rey or Bruce
Springsteen have a particular tone and cadence that is only theirs.
I discovered this when re-cutting a film with Jack Nicholson (which is
discussed further in The Healthy Edit). The first cut missed some of
Nicholson’s wild and impassioned style. The jumping around, scrambling
his hair with his hands, and shouting heavenward was mainly left out of
the first cut. Though smooth and well constructed, the cut lacked the
vibrancy that made Nicholson a star. By searching through the footage
(with Nicholson’s help on days when he visited the editing room), it was
possible to build scenes that suited the audience’s expectations of this actor.
If you’re going to use a well-known performer as a guide to your char-
acter keep in mind that there’s more than action and surface personality
that build this character. There’s tone, physical movement, appearance,
back story, reputation, energy and other less easy to define elements. In
establishing this, the screenwriter can use these traits as a model for
developing the hero.
21
In a different case, Jack Nicholson was offered the lead in Mosquito

Coast (1986), a potentially excellent match for the script’s eccentric char-
acter, Allie Fox. Fox is a brilliant inventor who, having acquired a home-
stead (referred to as Jeronimo in the film) in a village along the river near
Belize City, moves his family there and eventually goes berserk. One can
easily imagine Nicholson in this part. For various reasons, he turned
down the offer, including, some say, because he’d miss seeing his dear
Lakers shoot hoops in L.A.
The offer rebounded over to another popular star of the time who had
charmed audiences in the roles of Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Harrison
Ford was known for such megahits as Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of
the Lost Ark (1981) where his magnetic personality made him a strong
and engaging hero. Audiences were accustomed to rooting for Ford and
being with his confident yet vulnerable warmth. In this case, the audi-
ences did not like Ford’s craziness along with the character’s obsessive
egotism and nastiness. Consequently, the movie failed on multiple counts,
including on the decision to alter the story’s point-of-view.
Paul Schrader’s script (and the novel by Paul Theroux on which the
screenplay is based) established the right point-of-view. In the script the
story was told through the eyes of the son, Charlie (River Phoenix), which
supplied a buffer to his father’s antics.
In this case, the final rewrite was ill conceived and, more likely, the film
could have benefited from the screenwriter’s original construction.
The original script begins in the farmhouse of the Fox family:
INT. FOX HOUSE – BEDROOM
The bedroom door opens and CHARLIE enters. He’s

fourteen years old, and a fine looking boy. He
strides across the room grabbing a desk chair
which he carries to the far wall. He climbs up
on the chair to reach the top bookshelf. He
grabs hold of a large photo album.
Charlie flips through the pages of the photo album until he arrives at the
smiling portrait of his father, Allie Fox. He speaks to himself:
CHARLIE
What happened, Dad? What
went wrong?
Wrong? It’s an intriguing question and lets us know that there’s a secret
we need to decipher. As the first scenes unfold we learn about Allie
through the eyes of his son.
22
Charlie speaks softly to himself.
CHARLIE
You were the best and worst of
Fathers. You could be a bully, but
You could also make us laugh.
You took us on the adventures of
our lives, but it cost you, yours.
Charlie looks up slowly at the CAMERA. The

CAMERA TRACKS imperceptibly toward him.
CHARLIE (V.O.)
My father was an inventor.
He breaks eye contract with the camera and

smiles to himself.
CHARLIE (V.O.)
(continuing)
Once he invented an electric mop.
The scene then flashes back to Charlie’s father struggling with a large
machine that flip-flops across the floor. His kids are mesmerized by the
bizarre sight and his mother laughs.
This humorous moment gives us some empathy for the father, a clever
but difficult idealist. Charlie continues to narrate as his mother (Helen
Mirren) tries out the mop.
CHARLIE (V.O.)
Father said that there was danger
in all great inventions.
Mother is unable to control the machine which

lashes about wildly.
CHARLIE (V.O.)
(continuing)
He saw things differently than
other people and I loved that
about him.
Since his son loves him, we can too. And Charlie loves his father because
he’s different and hopeful. But these scenes, and several after them, were
left out of the final film. Only much later in the film, on the boat ride to
23
the village, does the subject of the electric mop appear. It is referred to
in a conversation between Charlie and a missionary’s daughter, Emily
(Martha Plimpton), whom he meets on the boat.
“So, what’s your old man do?” Emily asks.
Charlie: “My father’s an inventor. He invented this mechanical mop,

sorta dance around with it. It works all by itself. You’d have to see
it.”
Emily: “Weird.”
Charlie: “My father’s a genius.”
We’re given no image of the amusing moment of the flip-flopping mop –

the script’s flashback is left out – so it becomes a tell-rather-than-show
moment, arriving too late to defuse the opinion we’ve already formed
about Charlie’s father.
In the final release version, the film opens with a shot of the Fox’s
pickup truck moving through the countryside with Charlie’s voice over:
“My father was an inventor. A genius with anything mechanical. Nine
patents. Six pending. He dropped out of Harvard to get an education, he
said.” This cuts to the interior of the pickup truck and Charlie’s close up.
“I grew up with the belief that the world belonged to him and everything
he said was true.”
This then cuts to Harrison Ford at the wheel, driving. He speaks, “Look
around you. How did America get this way? Land of promise. Land of
opportunity. Give us the wretched refuse of your teeming shores. Have a
Coke, watch TV…”
Charlie: “Have a nice day.”

Allie: “Go on welfare. Get free money. Turn to crime. Crime pays in this
country.”
Charlie laughs. Off camera Allie continues: “Why do they put up with it?
Why do they keep coming?” On Allie: “Look around you, Charlie. This
place is a toilet.”
This cuts to a wide shot of the truck moving toward us down the
town’s street surrounded by ad signs and fast food businesses. Cut to:
Interior hardware store. Allie enters and continues his rant. The shop
owner sighs, clearly he’s heard Allie’s complaints before.
Allie to the clerk: “I want an 8-foot length of rubber seal with foam
backing.” After the shopkeeper finds the rubber seal, Allie hands it back
because he realizes it was made in Japan. He wants something made in
America. The camera tracks back with him as he leaves the shop. “Okay,
we’ll get it someplace else. This is not the only place in town. Good-bye…
or maybe I should have said, ‘Sayonara.’” A most unlikable character.
24
Figure 2.3 Mosquito Coast – Allie Fox in the hardware store.

Credit: Warner Brothers.
Allie’s vitriol continues into the next scene as he rummages through a

junkyard, finding the elements to build a portable, non-electrical refrig-
erator, a cooling system which he calls Fat Boy, for his farmer neighbor,
Doc, who doesn’t appreciate his efforts. Allie freezes a glass of water to
prove it. But the farmer doesn’t understand its advantage. “Ice is civiliza-
tion,” says Allie. The farmer is not impressed. Allie drives away with the
rejected refrigerator in tow.
Afterwards, Allie shows his son the sad state of the migrant worker’s
shack. He explains that they have come from the jungle for a better life in
New England, but Ford despises that life. “They trade green trees for this
room. … It would take courage to go there.”
“Go where?”
“The jungle.” His decision is made.
Without the script’s opening scenes that depicted Ford as a caring family
man bonding with his kids, the character becomes unsympathetic. And
the casting meant that the protagonist (Ford) would play against type
rather than using an actor (e.g. Nicholson) who could better mirror Allie
Fox’s erratic and aggressive personality in an engaging way.
As most writers know, we learn about characters by what they do,
what they say about themselves and by what other characters say about
them. In the script’s case, the son’s perspective modifies the obsessive and
fiercely judgemental aspects of his father. We see him as an engaged fam-
ily man who is also an amusing and dedicated inventor with daring ideas.
An inventor whose genius eventually undoes him.
25
To accomplish this, Ford’s character needed to start off likeable and

then descend, but that trajectory didn’t materialize. In a Collider review,
Liam Gaughan declared that Ford had “shed his likeable persona to play
an unhinged villain” and the condescending nature of Fox’s lectures
detracted from Ford’s otherwise engaging personality. “Even before his
mania escalates, Fox is a repellent character.2”
It’s interesting to note that the book was remade into a 2021 television
series, starring the author’s nephew Justin Theroux (Below Utopia,
Mulholland Drive, Joker). In it the screenwriters added an additional ele-
ment of tension by giving the father more secrets and introducing govern-
ment agents who pursue the Fox family. Allie Fox is not just an idealist
fleeing from materialistic conformity with the hope of building a utopian
community, as in the original, but also a fugitive from the police. Eventually
they make it to the Mosquito Coast where other calamity follows.
In considering this example, we discover the risk of writing a script
with an unsympathetic protagonist. The hero or heroine doesn’t need to
be perfect, but he or she should have likeable qualities, aspects that we
can identify with in ourselves. Or our ideal selves. As Blake Snyder
pointed out in Save the Cat!, “Liking the person we go on a journey with
is the single most important element drawing us into the story.3” In the
case of Mosquito Coast, the screenwriter understood this and crafted a
sympathetic character in the character of the son, Charlie, but the reality
of Hollywood set in and overrode it. Stars matter and here a famous
adult actor was given more play than the lesser known teenage actor.
Figure 2.4 Mosquito Coast – Emily and Charlie meet on the boat to Jeronimo.
26
The Netflix film, The Gray Man (2022), reflects the advantage of creat-
ing a likeable character, even in one that does potentially reprehensible
actions. The film begins with a prison meeting between an incarcerated
murderer (Ryan Gosling) and a CIA recruiter. The CIA agent arranges for
Gosling’s release from prison in order to use his prodigious killing skills
as a CIA operative designated as Six. Despite Six’s sketchy history and
job that involves murder and mayhem, we come to like him because he
has his own moral code. In his first assignment, he refuses to pull the trig-
ger on a target because of the collateral deaths it would cause, specifically
to a child standing beside his intended victim. As the story develops, Six
risks his life to protect the young niece (Julia Butters) of a loyal friend,
eventually committing to be her protector when her uncle (Billy Bob
Thorton) is killed. Because the writers were careful to show Six’s caring
and altruistic side, we are more inclined to root for him in spite of his
other serious flaws.
Following this prescription requires the writer to find believable ways
of engendering sympathy so it doesn’t feel contrived, as some claimed
was the case in the collateral death scene. Made in Heaven, despite other
shortcomings, organically incorporated this approach when the main
character, Mike, comes upon a family trapped inside a car that has gone
off a bridge and into the water. Mike jumps in and saves them, but ends
up sinking with the car. He dies, but this good deed takes him to heaven
and into our hearts.
What are the skills and knowledge that writers and editors bring to the
filmmaking process that allow them to conjure films like those in our
initial examples? How do writers spin stories from the raw materials of
memories and imagination? How do editors take the material in front of
them and weave it into a successful tapestry? In the next chapters we will
look at the tools of writers and film editors.
Notes
1 Austin Film Festival. On Story: Screenwriters and Their Craft. Edited by
Barbara Morgan and Maya Perez.
2 Gaughan, Liam. “Why ‘The Mosquito Coast’ was Harrison Ford’s Riskiest
Performance. “ Collider. 30 Apr. 2021. collider.com/the- mosquito- coast-
harrison-ford-performance/
3 Snyder, Blake. Save the Cat! Michael Wiese Productions. Studio City, 2005.
p. xv.
27
3
THE WELL OF COVERAGE
This chapter offers a look at how production footage (“the dai-

lies”) grows out of the script. It discusses the different types of
coverage and latest protocol for digital dailies. The use of multiple
cameras, grouped clips, project organization, and improvised cov-
erage is discussed.
The Dailies
In the collegial way that directors and editors become close and share
stories in the editing room, I once asked a director what was the one thing
he’d want with him on a desert island. He replied: “My dailies.”
Dailies are the essence of filmmaking, and there are enough possibili-
ties in them to keep a marooned director or, for that matter, editor
engaged for all of time. It’s important for writers to understand this basic
process of how a movie grows out of their script.
Most people who are aware of the term know that dailies, or rushes as
they’re often referred to in the UK, consist of the footage that was shot
the previous day and delivered to the editing room the next morning.
That was when everything originated on film. Even the terms film and
footage, which are still used today in the digital era, refer to artifacts from
the celluloid days when film was a perforated strip of plastic, generally 16
or 35 millimeters wide, with 40 images every foot in 16mm and 16 images
every foot in 35mm, etched into it by a photochemical process.
Footage refers to the resulting rolls of film measured in feet and
frames. In 35mm, the film runs at 90 feet per minute and, in 16mm,
36 feet per minute. Because it takes time to develop and print the dailies
they are delivered to the film laboratory at the end of the day’s shoot-
ing, processed overnight, and delivered to the editing room the next
morning.
28 DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-4
T H E W E L L O F C OV E R AG E
Today, with digital file-based production, dailies can arrive instantly in

the editing room, since they require no processing time. The footage is
captured in the camera, transferred to a hard drive or cloud- based
medium, and then sent to the editor. This is the coverage that the editor
will work with. Those dailies cover every shot and nuance of character
and dialogue stated implicitly or explicitly in the shooting script and
envisioned by the director and cinematographer.
For Editors: Coverage is your friend, though

sometimes even friends can overstay their wel-
come. Too much coverage can suggest an unfo-
cused approach. Or it can leave the door open to
experimentation. Either way, it’s important to
view all the coverage (the dailies) and discover an approach
to each scene. Recently, there has been a trend toward shooting
massive amounts of footage using multiple cameras. This amounts
to hours of dailies each day. When movies were shot on film using
single cameras, dailies often consisted of only a few rolls each
day – each roll runs about 10 minutes – comprising approximately
a half hour or so of useable material. Further, individual takes
were circled on the camera reports to designate only those that
should be printed and sent to the editing room. This took a dis-
criminating eye. Now, with multiple cameras and digital media,
coverage has mushroomed, and the editor is tasked with evaluat-
ing more material and making more decisions. Either way, it’s
important for the editor to become intimate with the footage and
memorize the different set-ups so as to call upon them at will.
What will guide an editor through all the footage? Read the script
and you will answer the two most important questions: what is
the film about and who is it about?
Coverage
What are those shots that make up the dailies, and how are they arrived
at? The original script usually gives limited guidance as to what camera
angles will be required to properly communicate the meaning of a scene.
That’s up to the director and the director of photography. Directors choose
from an immense array of possibilities, capturing the scene from multiple
angles with redundant action and dialogue. This allows for continuity edit-
ing. Each camera angle carries its own meaning. A wide shot may express
29
vastness or isolation, where a close-up may suggest intimacy or intensity.

Two-shots can bring people together or, when in profile with the actors
positioned at opposite edges of the frame, they can show alienation, con-
flict, or emotional distance. The selection of angles and their composition
is one of the essential considerations that the director makes when cover-
ing a scene.
Continuity Editing: This technique depends on a

variety of angles, each conveying redundant infor-
mation in dialogue and action. The fact that the
actors’ lines and movements are captured from a
variety of viewpoints allows the illusion that a
scene is one continuous action when edited together. At the same
time, it benefits from the meaning implied by the different angles.
By matching actions, maintaining eyelines, and a handful of other
principles, the filmmakers convince the audience that the story
unfolding in front of them is one uninterrupted flow. In fact, it may
be made up of thousands of cuts.
How does a director determine the necessary angles to cover the scene?
To cover a scene with every possible angle would generally prove cum-
bersome, time consuming, and expensive. Only the coverage that best
tells the story should be shot. In doing so, the director and cinematogra-
pher imagine how the shots will fit together in order to fulfill the needs of
the script’s characters. In that way, the shots become more than images,
they become images bearing emotion.
Consequently, the director must conceptualize how the shots will be
edited together. They are the surrogate editor, as the editor will later
become the surrogate director. But this initial arrangement takes place in
a cursory way. Even with elaborate storyboards or pre-visualizations, the
true design (with few exceptions) won’t become apparent until the editor
takes hold of the footage. This is because the editor controls something
that no one else in the filmmaking process has domain over – the selec-
tion, pace, and rhythm of the cuts.
There are many lists ranking what should have priority in the edit-
ing process – is it continuity or emotion or structure or eye trace or
something else? The answer must inevitably be rhythm since finding
the proper rhythm determines the resonance of the shots and perfor-
mance and ultimately the emotion. Rhythm is meaning. Rhythm is
emotion.
30
Figure 3.1 The Graduate – Ben’s head spins.

Credit: United Artists.
Figure 3.2 The Graduate – Mrs. Robinson enters naked.

Figure 3.3 The Graduate – Ben’s stunned look.

31
In the director’s or cinematographer’s creation of shots and the editor’s

subsequent selection of those shots, the rewriting process inevitably
begins. In some cases, there may be many more set-ups than there are
shots that make it into the final cut. A classic example comes from the
seduction scene in The Graduate (1968), where editor Sam O’Steen used
about a third of the angles that were shot. Ben’s (Dustin Hoffman) memo-
rable head spin when Mrs. Robinson (Ann Bancroft) enters the room
naked was created by repeating his surprised turn multiple times. It sup-
planted many more direct and graphic images, including a full frontal
shot of Bancroft naked, which was never used. In making this choice the
editor brought subtlety to what the script described in a more blatant
way.
It is generally advised that the writer not include camera angles in the
script unless an angle is particularly illustrative of what the writer is try-
ing to say. The choice of angles is reserved for the director, which may
account for why so many writers seek to direct their own material. The
practice of excluding camera angles from a script doesn’t, however, mean
that the writer should ignore the influence of camera angles.
Well-designed camera angles elicit an emotional response. Even though
writers are not responsible for shot lists or determining coverage, there
are times when a writer will include a judiciously placed reference to a
camera angle in the script. This is best when the angle helps suggest a feel-
ing, such as a “smash cut to her shocked face” or an “insert of his fidget-
ing hands.”
Permutations of the Script

The dailies, and those angles that make up the coverage, are the crucial
first step of the translation – or abstraction – from the screenplay. This
is where the written word and the physical reality of the movie meet.
The original script which, when annotated with scene numbers, became
the shooting script is transformed into a new incarnation, thoroughly
marked up with lines, squiggles, numbers, and letters signifying where
each shot fits into the overall scene. This newly created artifact, known
as the lined script, contains a myriad of detailed annotations from the
script supervisor. It serves as a map to guide the editor through the
morass of unorganized material. Already, the script has evolved.
32
Figure 3.4 The lined script.
Organization
It is hard for people to watch dailies. Not just because dailies can be long,
repetitive exercises that can try anyone’s patience, except for perhaps the
editor’s and director’s, but because, unless you directed the scene, you’re
probably not familiar with how all the varied pieces are supposed to fit
together. Dailies are shot out of order, in the sense that expediency rather
33
than story structure becomes the driving force on a set. If the set isn’t
fully lit yet or the dolly tracks haven’t been laid, why wait to shoot the
wide shot when you can capture the close-up coverage in the meantime?
If an actor arrives late on set, shoot the other actor or insert shots or some
establishing shots. Either way, at the end of a day’s shooting, the camera’s
media files contain a massive amount of disordered footage.
In my editing room, the assistant editor is tasked with organizing the
dailies in their respective Avid bins according to the scene numbers and
the order established by the lined script. In a sense, assistant editors are
the first ones to begin the editing process, since establishing story order is
the first step toward developing a creative cut.
When examining dailies, studio executives, producers, and bond com-
pany agents expect that they’re watching a movie when in fact they’re
watching disjointed parts of something that doesn’t yet exist. So, it’s
essential to make the dailies as clear as possible by ordering them based
on story order.
Something else also occurs at this stage. Away from the madding crowd
of the set, the editor sees the film for what it is, its glories and its faults,
the aspects that don’t work, and the ones that thrill in their sublime exe-
cution. This can be minuscule and subtle or gross and earth-shaking.
When editors encounter missing pieces, they need to tell themselves a
tale that helps to fill in the gaps of the story, structure, or coverage, allow-
ing them to complete the puzzle. What the editor imagines might be the
bridge of one line of dialogue to another or a complete reworking of the
entire scene. Now the editor is hunting for something in the dailies that
will satisfy a need. A need that was created by the film’s original intent but
hidden at times in the forest of footage. The dailies have taken on a new
dimension. What was passed over previously becomes significant and nec-
essary, and we return again and again to the dailies in search of a solution.
An action or image that once meant nothing now means everything.
As the film’s final guardian, the editor will find ways to fulfill every line
of dialogue, enhance every action, coax every nuance. On the other hand,
they will also bring a subjective, creative view. The editor will discover
within the footage unexpected gems. In some cases, the ending will change,
characters will grow more prominent or recede into the background, the
beginning will start differently, a new theme will emerge, the pace will
increase or grow more leisurely, the story will find a new trajectory. All
these aspects and more appear in the final rewrite known as editing.
Even though the writer can’t anticipate all the nuances that occur dur-
ing filming, or the subtle choices that are made in post production, they
know that the more focused the story and the more detailed the charac-
ters, the greater the opportunity to fully realize the film at this stage of the
process. Editing can make a poorly written film better, but it will never
make a poorly written film great. That’s up to the screenwriter.
34
Colored Pages: The Writers Guild of America

(WGA) has established a guideline for the sequence
in which revision pages are incorporated into a
shooting script. Though individual productions are
free to develop their own scheme, this is the WGA’s
recommended arrangement:
White draft (original).

Blue revision.
Pink revision.
Yellow revision.
Green revision.
Goldenrod revision.
Buff revision.
Salmon revision.
Cherry revision.
Second blue revision.
Second pink revision.
Second yellow revision.
Second green revision.
Second goldenrod revision.
Second buff revision.
Second salmon revision.
Second cherry revision.
Keep in mind that screenwriting is not an exact science. It’s an art, and
the process involves a lot of revision. As Hemingway famously said, “The
first draft of anything is shit.” When it comes to evoking something as
complex and ethereal as human existence, it’s no wonder that screenplays
go through draft after draft before arriving at the finish line. It’s nearly
impossible to get everything right in the first few drafts of a script. Or
to envision all the changes that will occur during production and post
production. In this regard, writers can take advantage of a film editor’s
insights to help their scripts advance to a higher level.
The next chapters will provide an insight into that process and instill
in writers a way to approach the blank page with the mindset of the final
product.
35
4
THE SCENE AND AN
APPROACH TO DAILIES
The editor’s approach to dailies is seen as one of the crucial ele-

ments of filmmaking. How the editor deals with coverage deter-
mines the trajectory of every scene and ultimately the entire film.
This chapter offers insights to writers into ways to start a film and
how to sustain interest through well-considered scenes.
A Word about Scenes

Scenes are the constituent parts of movies. Within scenes are all the indi-
vidual actions and lines of dialogue that lead up to a memorable scene.
Maya Angelou once observed, “I’ve learned that people will forget what
you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget
how you made them feel.” Films are like that too. The best ones contain
memorable moments, scenes that make us feel.
Scenes are memorable when they capture the essence of the film’s char-
acters and themes. Most cinephiles know the great scenes, the ones that
somehow transcend the medium to mean something more, something uni-
versal, in the way that classic stories resonate in the collective conscious-
ness of humanity throughout time.
Think of the many memorable scenes (and their accompanying dia-
logue) in your favorite films. Here are a few to consider:
• Casablanca is full of great scenes, starting with the moment when

Rick’s (Humphrey Bogart) old flame, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), walks
into his nightclub, recognizes the piano player, Sam (Dooley Wilson),
and asks him to play “As Time Goes By.” Initially Sam refuses because
the broken-hearted Rick has forbidden him from ever playing that
song. But, when Sam finally relents, Rick hears the song and repri-
mands him for playing it, only to look up and see Ilsa. Later, Rick
36 DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-5
T H E S C E N E A N D A N A P P ROAC H TO DA I L I E S
reminisces, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she
walks into mine.”
• Star Wars is full of memorable scenes, but the most stirring is the
reveal when Luke Skywalker accuses Darth Vader of having killed
his father. Vader’s reply, “No, I am your father,” has become a classic
quote in popular culture, though the line is often slightly misquoted
as, “Luke, I am your father,” probably because the actual line doesn’t
make as much sense as a standalone.
• In The Godfather, everyone remembers the horse’s head in the bed
scene, preceded by the scene where Don Corleone (Marlon Brando)
promises, “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
• Chinatown also has a memorable scene of threat. It’s the scene at the
reservoir where the hoodlum played by the director, Roman Polanski,
cuts the nose of Jake (Jack Nicholson). “You know what we do to
nosey people?” he asks.
• In Field of Dreams, there is the moment where farmer Ray (Kevin
Costner) realizes the fulfillment of his dream as a team of baseball
legends emerge from his cornfield. The scene was preceded by a
vision accompanied by the famous line, “Build it and they will come.”
• And what about the mad as a hatter General Jack Ripper (Sterling
Hayden) with a cigar jutting from his mouth as he warns against the
communist conspiracy involving his “precious bodily fluids,” after
sending a B-52 to bomb Russia in Dr. Strangelove?
• The shower scene in Psycho is one of the classic horror scenes of all
time. And not a word is spoken, unless you count screams.
• Another great scene is the seduction scene in The Graduate and the
emblematic image of Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) framed in the arch
of Mrs. Robinson’s (Ann Bancroft) calves.
• The bullet time sequence in The Matrix (1999) showcases innovative
visual effects to reveal the ultrahuman powers of the film’s protago-
nist, Neo (Keanu Reeves). It’s accompanied by the memorable image
of the actor defying gravity as he bends backward to dodge bullets
sailing past him in slow motion.
If you can come up with one memorable scene, you’ll change the course
of movie history.
Writing the Scene

How we approach issues and events often determines their outcomes. Do
you sneak up on a goal or do you pounce on it? Having an approach is an
active pursuit. It involves placing yourself in the right position to meet a
challenge head on. Writers and editors encounter two basic issues in this
regard – the approach to the task itself and the approach to the material.
37
The question is often where and how to begin? Once you have commit-
ted to a direction, things tend to fall into place. With editors, it involves
finding the right shot with which to open a scene or, for that matter, the
entire film. This is not to say that everything from then on is easy or
straightforward, but the work travels along a revealed path and within a
clear context. The long-running series Downton Abbey (2010–2015) began
with a simple shot of a telegraph key clicking out Morse code signals.
Technology, progress, and communication became some of the guiding
themes of the series. In this case, the telegraph key carries the message that
the Titanic, carrying the heir to the Downton estate, has sunk. So begins all
the complications inherent in that, propelling the series forward.
Finding and committing to an approach can become the main hurdles
to overcome, since fear can accompany commitment. Is this good enough?
What if it doesn’t make sense? What if I head off in the wrong direction
or mess up once the journey has begun? What if I run out of ideas? What
will others think?
These and a slew of other concerns can impede a successful start and
hinder a smooth journey forth. But that’s why rewriting exists. Few
endeavors, whether in life or art, are perfect, and it’s important to know
that opportunities to change direction exist. Of course, the more experi-
ence and understanding one brings into the process, the more likely one
is to avoid trial-and-error type problems and build a solid foundation
from the start.
First, let’s examine the issue of the task itself. How do you begin, and
how do you proceed?
First Steps
In writing, the first pass may contain remnants of the process itself, the
priming of the pump, as it were. Often, we don’t start deep enough into a
scene, as in the extreme example of Lost Horizon, where not only scenes
but entire reels could be excised. In most cases, however, it may be a mat-
ter of eliminating just the first several lines or a single scene.
Here’s the opening of a scene from the Sundance selection Horseplayer
(1990), a film about Bud (Brad Dourif), an ex-con struggling to get his
life back together while being preyed upon by an artist and his girlfriend
who have conned him out of some of his money. In this scene, Randi
(Sammi Davis), the girlfriend, has been tasked with the mission of con-
vincing Bud, whom she had previously seduced, to give over some more
of his hard-won money.
EXT. L.A. RIVER – DAY
Bud pulls the Rambler to a stop on the bluff

above the river.
38
INT. RAMBLER – CONTINUOUS
Bud cuts the engine. Randi sits beside him;

she looks at Bud – rather nervously – as he
proceeds to stare silently at the river.
RANDI
So. You come here to
think, I guess.
Bud nods.
RANDI
What do you think about?
Bud gives the question a fair amount of

thought.
BUD
I don’t know. I really don’t know.
RANDI
ell, that’s cool. Just sort
W
of zone out, huh?
BUD
(earnestly)
I guess that must be it.
Randi laughs.
BUD
What?
RANDI
othing, you’re just – funny,
N
that’s all.
In screen time, this opening dialogue felt long and uninteresting. It seemed
more like a window into the writer’s process than a scene. It was the
windup before a pitch, the kind of noodling that writers do before finding
the best place to begin. This was the work of a very talented writer–director,
Kurt Voss. Yet it’s an issue all writers confront – where to begin.
After a long beat the dialogue continues, eventually finding the essence
of the scene.
RANDI
Look, I want to ask you
something.
39
BUD
Anything.
RANDI
I need more money.
BUD
How much?
RANDI
Two thousand dollars.
BUD
Huh. I don’t have it.
Randi almost seems relieved to hear it.
RANDI
Well, that’s okay –
BUD
But I can get it.
The scene continues from here, but at this point we’re engaged. Eventually,
Bud promises to get the money for Randi, and she leans over and gives
him a kiss as a sort of reward. During the editing process it became clear
that the dialogue in the first part wasn’t necessary. Why not start with the
crux of the scene, “I want to ask you something,” and build from there?
In order to do it, however, it was necessary to find a smooth transition
that allowed the dialogue to begin deeper into the event.
This scene was preceded by a scene that introduced the scheming
between the artist, Matthew (Michael Harris), and Randi.
MATTHEW
do try to get some more cash
…
out of him. Shoot for two grand.
RANDI
Two grand!
MATTHEW
Work him.
Matthew laughs.
40
Figure 4.1 Horseplayer – Randi and Matthew kiss.

Credit: Greycat Films.
Figure 4.2 Horseplayer – Randi and Bud kiss.

41
MATTHEW
fter all, I NEVER said you
A
weren’t an artist, too.
Randi can’t help but smile. Matthew leans

forward, puts his arms around her and kisses
her full on the mouth.
The fact that Matthew has given Randi a reward – the kiss on the lips –
supplied the idea for a different approach and a strong transition. Why not
steal the kiss between Bud and Randi, which originally occurred at the end
of the next scene, and use it as an associative transition, a match cut, from
the previous scene? The only maneuver that needed to be made in order to
achieve this was to reverse the action in the last shot of their scene. Instead
of their lips moving toward each other for a kiss, they would start with a
kiss and then separate. At that point, I cut to another angle which allowed
the dialogue to begin: “I want to ask you something.” Going from one kiss
to the other made for an elegant transition and supplied additional meaning
and subtext to the scene. We’ll talk more about types of transitions later on.
The First Draft

Professional screenwriters and editors are often up against deadlines, and
the inclination to linger excessively over a scene can be counterproduc-
tive. This is one of the benefits of deadlines. They spur the artist onward,
requiring them to maintain the flow of the work.
Flow is essential. It informs rhythm and spontaneity and all those good
things that foster creation. Keep writing, even if it doesn’t feel right. Push
forward. Don’t look back. You can return to the scene at a later time and
re-evaluate. When you do, you’ll be approaching it with fresh eyes, and
issues that once seemed insurmountable will take on new clarity.
As is widely acknowledged by writers, confronting the blank page can
be a harrowing experience. For film editors, meeting the mass of footage,
sometimes unrestrained and seemingly limitless, can feel daunting. Writers
may obsess for days over how to dive into a project. Editors comb through
take after take to find the right image with which to enter a scene. Where
to begin? What’s the first sentence? What’s the first image? These deci-
sions will determine the approach to all that will follow.
Once there, various issues can impede the creative writing process,
from self-doubt to the convenient desire to make a sandwich, take out the
garbage or do the dishes. No wonder some writer’s homes are so neat. It
takes a lot to stay put and keep writing.
Initially, the writer and editor should follow their intuition about the
project. For the writer, that initial spark needs to be nurtured and allowed
42
to grow. For editors, inspired by the images and performances, ideas can
come and carry them along in their path. Some ideas will solve produc-
tion problems, others will add new layers, and others will envision some-
thing entirely new.
For both writer and editor, the work doesn’t need to be perfect at this
stage. Perfection – or as near as one can get – will be found in subsequent
drafts and iterations. At first, the trick is to not get in the way. Don’t judge
too harshly, don’t overthink. And ultimately, the screenplay you’re writing
or the film you’re editing may surprise you as it takes on a life of its own
and eventually reveals what it is truly about. It’s hard to get to that point if
you are constantly stopping yourself, self-correcting, stepping out of the
flow.
But, whether the initial pass is good or bad, moving forward connects
you to the larger rhythm of the work. It circumvents the inner critic and
gives free rein to an unfettered imagination. Keep going, try not to pause. A
lot of it will be lousy. Doesn’t matter, keep going. Later, the critical faculties
will swoop in to clean it up. Occasionally, something stunning and unex-
pected crawls out from under the falling debris of words and film clips. But,
without advancing in this way, nothing happens. And deadlines lurk.
Schedules, budgetary limits, and even restrictions on tools can have a
beneficial effect. The painter Pablo Picasso once observed that “forcing
yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates inven-
tion. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imag-
ine in advance.”1
Keep at it. Roy Englert, the 99-year-old runner from Springfield,
Virginia, was asked how he manages to keep up the pace at an advanced
age. He advised, “Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving … and have
a little luck.”2
In Chinese calligraphy, artists often speak of movement and flow as
essential to maintaining spontaneity and completing the work. One can
take inspiration from the masters of this art. Expert calligrapher Xue
Longchun, from Hangzhou, put it this way:
When I write, I may have a general grasp of the whole work

in my mind, but I do not try to calculate every step or stroke.
As I understand it, a lot of calligraphy is simply the result of
completing the motions that your hand should trace. It’s not
important whether or not the form matches what you had imag-
ined or what someone else has asked for. What’s important is
that you haven’t missed any steps in those motions. It doesn’t
matter whether there is ink in a particular spot. What matters
is whether you completed your motions, even just motions in
the air.3
43
Figure 4.3 Calligraphy.

Credit: Public Domain Pictures.
Zhu Chengjun, who lives and works in Los Angeles and Beijing,
concluded,
Ultimately, you can’t necessarily control things precisely. If you

control precisely, if you completely follow what’s in your mind
and just execute that, then the work will feel too crafted. It’s pre-
cisely because a work has a certain amount of spirit, because it
has a certain amount of unpredictability, that it comes to appear
rich and lively. If you create a work based purely on your mental
plan, it will feel so constrained that is seems dead. That is not
good artwork. So, I believe that to have a complete image in
mind is not a good thing.4
Once, in recutting a film, I was struck by how precise the original editor’s
cut was. He had clearly thought out each move, followed all the princi-
ples of continuity editing – match action, maintain continuity, don’t cross
the 180° line, and so on – yet the film had a kind of dullness to it. It was
too perfect. And flat. That’s why I was there, to add some flaws, if you
will. The case was that the editor hadn’t taken any risks, hadn’t gone with
his gut. He was a fine editor, but, under the watchful eyes of the director,
who insisted on leaning over his shoulder throughout the first pass, he
felt constrained to follow the rules. In this editor’s case, he was hesitant to
make fast or sloppy edits because he had a reputation and knew he was
44
being watched. Any messy cut or misstep would have been registered by
the director, who believed himself a capable editor as well.
This is one reason why it’s best for writers and editors to initially put
the work together on their own, so they can follow their own impulses
and push forward in any spontaneous and immediate way they can.
Notes
1 Gilot, Françoise, and Carlton Lake. Life with Picasso. Doubleday, New York.
1964.
2 Minsberg, Talya. “These 90-Year-Old Runners Have Some Advice for You.”
New York Times. May 22, 2022.
3 The Huntington Library and Gardens. “A Garden of Words: The Calligraphy
of Liu Fang Yuan.” San Marino, CA. September 29 to December 13, 2021.
4 Ibid.
45
5
ANOTHER APPROACH
The chapter explores various ways to think about a scene, when an

editor’s or director’s approach reveals another way to envision the
script. Also discussed are obstacles that occur at the script level and can
be overcome during post production in a way that speaks to writers.
The Gift of Memory and Its Limits

In my film class at USC, showing the original dailies from a theatrical
feature is followed by a look at the final cut that was released in theaters.
Students are often startled by how different the final version is from the
dailies and, for that matter, from the original script.
One evening, while screening an example of professionally shot dailies,
I was struck by a remark made by one of the students. Everyone had been
asked to watch carefully as the different takes of a scene played out on
the screen. They needed to pay attention to each set-up, notice how the
coverage – the wide shots, medium shots, close-ups, two-shots, and so
on – had been organized in story order rather than the random shooting
order. This would help guide them when they were eventually called upon
to describe how they would edit the scene.
Those scene elements involved a young man and woman exiting a taxi
in a wide shot and climbing a long series of steps up to an apartment
complex. Because the dailies were organized in story order, rather than
shooting order, the taxi shot was placed first even though it was the last
shot of the night.
The next shot showed a view down a corridor where the couple, chat-
tering livelily, approach the camera and then turn left to enter another
flight of stairs toward the young woman’s apartment.
Then there was an angle from the top of the stairs looking back as they
climb the steps toward the camera and then turn past the camera into a
46 DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-6
ANOTHER APPROACH
two-shot at the door. At the door there was tighter coverage – two over-
the-shoulder shots, one on him, one on her – where they speak and then
kiss. And finally there was a last shot from below as he walks back down
the steps toward the camera.
Most people, when called upon to say how they would edit the scene,
describe it exactly in that order. At the door they have to make a decision
whether to go back to the two-shot somewhere between all the close-up
dialogue, but, other than that, it appears completely straightforward.
Anyone, it would seem, could recite how the scene should be put together.
Except this student.
On this particular occasion the student, when called upon to describe
how he would cut the scene, found that his memory failed him. Even
though he believed he’d paid careful attention and remembered all the
elements, he’d forgotten several set-ups.
In describing how he would put the scene together, he left out two
major components – the walk down the corridor and the angle where the
couple walk up the steps and the camera pans to follow them to the
apartment door. He also neglected to mention the final shot, the low
angle as the young man leaves. At first it seemed that he hadn’t followed
the assignment, hadn’t paid attention. He had left out three shots that
were essential to the script because they contained dialogue and moved
the characters forward. When he was reminded of the shots, he reacted,
surprised. “I really was paying close attention, but I completely forgot,”
he said.
Then we viewed the completed version that had been released in thou-
sands of theaters around the country. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out
that those three shots that he had forgotten were also missing from the
final version. It was exactly as he had described.
It appeared as if the film’s editor had also forgotten about some of
those takes when constructing the scene. Of course, he hadn’t but, in
reviewing the scene, the editor realized that those elements were not nec-
essary to tell the story. The dialogue that had occurred in the corridor had
been salvaged from that shot and placed on the couple’s backs as they
climbed the stairs from the taxi to the landing that would normally take
them to the corridor. The student’s mind, in recalling the dailies from
memory, had inadvertently edited the story by leaving out all the insignifi-
cant material. He saw the characters walking up the long flight of stairs
and going directly to the apartment door where the dialogue and kiss
occurred. It appeared that his mind had unconsciously edited the scene by
neglecting to remember anything that unnecessarily complicated it.
Intuitively, his mind didn’t care what was at the top of the first long
flight of stairs and had spliced it to the stairs leading up to the front door,
just as dreams create convenient spatial leaps.
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ANOTHER APPROACH
This reordering is a common phenomenon that we all experience,

whether we acknowledge it or not. We remember a wedding we went to
and the flower girl who threw the rose petals down the aisle, but we may
not remember what the bride’s mother wore. Our memories work selec-
tively, keeping what we find important, eliminating other items, and
sometimes even rewriting the experience so a relative who left early
appears to have been hanging around until the end.
Editors have the advantage of perceiving an actual object, the dailies.
Writers start with the blank page. In viewing the dailies, editors discover
what is necessary and what is superfluous. This is the best reason for
organizing dailies in story order – it frees the mind from its sorting func-
tions and allows it to think creatively, which opens a door to the uncon-
scious manipulation of time and space.
For Editors: In the days when all dailies originated

on film, the common ritual during the production
day required everyone to meet up at some point,
often around lunchtime, and gather in a projection
room or, if on location, a converted parking struc-
ture, ballroom, or local movie theater and view the coverage from
the previous day’s shooting. The rare production today follows this
process of gathering director and editor together to view dailies on
a theater screen. According to Andy Jurgensen, the editor of Licorice
Pizza (2022), director Paul Thomas Anderson preferred not only to
screen dailies with Jurgensen but actually to print and sync cellu-
loid dailies for projection on a theater screen. This mirrored the old
school format of the 1970s, when Licorice Pizza takes place. In this
case, the process carried through all the way to the release print –
cutting the 35mm negative to conform with the final cut and then
printing it and timing it photochemically.
Today, with the sophistication of video village and remote moni-
tors that can be viewed during each take, combined with tight
shooting schedules and even tighter budgets, this ritual rarely takes
place. Still, someone needs to make sense of the dailies. Even if digi-
tal files will later be sent to director, producer, and studio exec who
may not get around to screening them, the dailies need to be in
viewable form. And for editors it’s essential to work with well-
organized dailies.
For writers, the practice of writing a scene or story and then revisiting
it days later, perhaps by recounting it to a neutral party, or writing it
down as best recollected, or asking someone to recite the story as it had
48
ANOTHER APPROACH
been told to them, can produce a similar effect. The mind, more often
than not, finds the easiest, most essential, and direct path to the story.
To follow the path of least resistance is incorporated into the laws of
physics. In editing, the path of least resistance involves removing
pauses, superfluous action, and dialogue that doesn’t contribute to
character or clarity. Consider the Horseplayer example. Removing
excess dialogue enriched the scene in many ways. Scenes work when
everything that is not that scene has been cut away. In a genre like com-
edy, which our class exercise scene was based on, timing is essential.
Comedies generally benefit from a lively, energetic pace, and anything
that stands in the way, such as long walks up stairs or down corridors,
should be removed.
In the early 1900s, a graduate student studying anthropology at
Cambridge happened upon an experiment that revealed the failings and
virtues of memory. Like our example with the dailies, Frederic Bartlett
happened upon a story that had extraneous details, confusing ideas, and
excessive information. The story was a Native American folktale called
the “War of the Ghosts.” It is reproduced in the box.
Bartlett used this story to test his theory of reconstructive memory and
how events can be altered by a person’s own schema.1 He read the story
to a group of subjects whom he asked to recount the tale 15 minutes after
hearing it. Then he checked in with them days later and even weeks after
that. In one case, he encountered one subject on the street two years later
and asked to hear the story.
Upon recalling the story, the subjects left out most of the confusing or
nonsensical elements (leveling) and added some new elements (confabu-
lation) for clarity or interest. Story elements that failed to fit into the
schemata of the listener were altered to create a better story. The subjects’
minds, without knowing it, were editing the story to help it make sense.
And to fit their own cultural experiences. Just like editors confronting a
wide array of disparate material that constitutes the dailies.
For instance, here is one recollected version of the story, which is
clearer and more streamlined:
One day a young man was walking along the shore when a canoe
carrying some of his friends appeared. They announced that they
were going up river to join a battle. They asked the young man
to help them and he agreed. Farther up the river they met the
other warriors and engaged in a brutal fight. Many were killed.
But his side was victorious. As they were leaving, the young man
was shot with an arrow, but he managed to make it back to his
home. He was celebrated for his heroic exploits and for helping
to save his people, but eventually he died from his wound. The
story of his bravery is still told to this day.
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ANOTHER APPROACH
War of the Ghosts
One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to
hunt seals and while they were there it became foggy and calm.
Then they heard war-cries, and they thought, Maybe this is a war
party. They escaped to the shore and hid behind a log. Now canoes
came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw one canoe
coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said:
“What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are

going up the river to make war on the people.”
One of the young men said, “I have no arrow.”
“Arrows are in the canoe,” they said.
“I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not
know where I have gone. But you,” he said, turning to the
other, “may go with them.”
So one of the young men went, but the other returned home.
And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other
side of Kalama. The people came down to the water and they
began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young
man heard one of the warriors, “Quick, let us go home, that
Indian has been hit.” Now he thought: “Oh, they are ghosts.” He
did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot.
So the canoes went back to Egulac and the young man went
ashore to his house and made a fire. And he told everybody and
said, “Behold I accompanied the ghosts and we went to fight.
Many of our fellows were killed and many of those who attacked
us were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick.”
He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he
fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face
became contorted. The people jumped up and cried.
He was dead.
This final rewrite of the story shows how the mind, which is ultimately
the recipient of the stories we tell, also has a stake in processing those
stories in order to align them with what we know about character, plot,
pacing, and emotion. In Bartlett’s experiment, elements that didn’t follow
the throughline were rejected, and elements that helped add clarity were
50
ANOTHER APPROACH
added. Writers can take advantage of this natural editing process that
memory provides.
Beyond “Cut”
On set, calling “Cut!” signals the end of the scene and implies the end
of recording. But experienced cinematographers know to wait several
seconds, some as much as ten seconds, before pressing stop. This speaks
to an unspoken pact between DPs and editors, creating the opportunity
to discover a gem, find a solution, or rewrite a scene with unanticipated
footage. In the middle ground, after the slate and the call to “Action” and
before “Cut,” lives the anticipated realm of known material – the action
and dialogue decreed by the script. Before “Action” and after “Cut”
resides unknown territory. Many times it is unusable and ignored. But,
on particular occasions, that unscripted material can save the day.
In many cases, the best endings are those where the writer has given the
audience enough information that they could write the next moment, the
next day, the rest of a lifetime. But sometimes an ending, whether of a
scene or an entire film, is not satisfying. It wants something more.
Keep Rolling
A classic example of mining the footage that exists beyond the culmina-
tion of a take comes from the ending of The Graduate. Writer and direc-
tor had struggled with a proper conclusion to Benjamin crashing Elaine’s
wedding and, in the final moments, stealing her away from the altar. As
family and friends pursue them, Benjamin thrusts the church’s cross into
the handles of the door, effectively locking it from the outside. Then he
and Elaine run for a city bus and board it. Here’s how it played out in
the original script:
EXT. STREET IN FRONT OF CHURCH – DAY
Ben and Elaine running along the sidewalk. Ben

holds her hand and is pulling her. She still
holds her flowers. They run to a bus that is
just closing its doors.
SHOT – BEN
He bangs on the closed door of the bus. The

door opens. Ben climbs the step into the bus
and pulls Elaine up after him. The doors close.
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ANOTHER APPROACH
INT. BUS NO. 2 – DAY - SHOT OF BEN, ELAINE AND

DRIVER
Ben holds out a dollar bill.
BEN
How much?
DRIVER
Where do you want to go?
BEN
To the end.
The driver takes the bill and gives Ben some

change. Ben turns and pulls Elaine along to the
back of the bus. He pushes her into one of the
seats and sits beside her. Ben looks toward the
front of the bus.
BEN’S POV
He sees the driver and the passengers, all turn

around in their seats and looking back at them.
SHOT – BEN
BEN
Let’s go. Let’s get
this bus moving!
SHOT – THE DRIVER
He turns and starts the bus.
SHOT – BEN AND ELAINE
They are breathing heavily.
ELAINE
Benjamin?
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ANOTHER APPROACH
BEN
What?
She takes his hand.
EXT. STREET IN FRONT OF CHURCH – DAY
Through the window in the back of the bus the

church can be seen receding in the distance.
There seem to be a number of men dressed in
black running around in the street in front
of it.
FADE OUT
Ben and Elaine make their way to the back of the bus with Elaine’s wed-
ding dress trailing along the floor as passengers watch. The couple have
secured their devotion to each other and escaped from the confines of
family expectations. But what now? It was inconclusive. How do you end
a scene like this?
As it turned out, the camera kept rolling after “Cut,” and there was
born the breathtaking and truer ending – they took the leap, but they
have no idea what awaited them. The couple sit and stare toward the
camera as time passes. Beat, beat, beat. And, only after several long,
uncomfortable moments, the movie ends. More was said in this silent
moment than in all the scripted dialogue. Consequently, Ben’s and Elaine’s
lines were left out of the final cut, and it became one of the most memo-
rable moments in cinema.
For writers, this is instructive because it reminds us that it’s worth tak-
ing the time to come up with a strong button to a scene. This is particu-
larly true in sequences, where three scenes work together to fulfill an
idea, forming a beginning–middle–end design. In cases like this it can be
beneficial to leave the initial scene open-ended so it invites the viewer
into the next scene and the one after that, finally concluding with a big
payoff. At other times, however, its crucial to find a solid ending to a
single scene. Neglecting to do so is like telling a joke without a punch
line. A button can be large and dramatic, as in the photography scene in
Get Out (2017) where a seemingly friendly introduction turns into a
horrific reveal when the main character, Chris Washington (Daniel
Kaluuya) surreptitiously snaps a photo of another Black man (Lakeith
Stanfield) whom he encounters during a mainly white gathering at the
home of his girlfriend’s parents. Or it can be lighter and more subtle,
such as the ending of The Graduate. Either way, the impact on the audi-
ence should be substantial.
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ANOTHER APPROACH
Figure 5.1 The Graduate – Ben and Elaine in the back of bus.
Figure 5.2 Get Out – The smartphone photography scene.

Credit: Universal Pictures.
Discovering What to Lose

The job of a scene is to inform us about the character and to advance the
story. This is a good yardstick for what is included and what is superflu-
ous in a film story. Some scenes, rather than advancing the story and char-
acter, actually run contrary to our understanding of both. These should
not be in the film. A scene that contradicts the plot or the character’s
nature is even more dangerous than one that remains neutral.
In the case of another scene from Horseplayer, I realized after sitting
with the dailies for a while that the sequence I was cutting couldn’t work
as scripted. It stole all empathy from our main character, Bud, when he
kills another character whom we had come to like and who didn’t deserve
his vengeance. In the dailies, Bud, in a fit of rage, clubs his boss (Vic
Tayback) to death with a ceramic figurine.
54
ANOTHER APPROACH
After discussion with the producers and director, we agreed that it

wouldn’t work unless a different approach was taken. What if Bud didn’t
kill his boss, but instead changed his mind and put down the figurine in
defeat? And what if the boss, who had fired him and had been yelling at
him, gets the last word? Now we have a character who arouses our sym-
pathy rather than our dislike. Bud would be driven to the point of vio-
lence, but he can’t go through with it.
To accomplish this was a matter of cutting out the subsequent scenes
that showed Bud dragging his boss’s body to his car and driving the
corpse to the Los Angeles River. Since Bud had been fired, we wouldn’t
see the boss again, so it wasn’t necessary to establish where Tayback’s
character went. But the crucial moment was found in one take where the
DP hadn’t heard the director call, “Cut.” The actor, Dourif, broke charac-
ter, turned away, and put down the figurine. That one moment changed
the entire trajectory of the film.
Figure 5.3 Horseplayer – Bud threatens his boss with a plaster figurine.
A simpler but equally effective use of scavenged footage came from

Poison Ivy 3 (1997), a film about a young woman, Violet (Jaime Pressly),
who comes back with a single strong purpose, to revenge the treatment
55
ANOTHER APPROACH
of her mother by the well-to-do Greer family, including Violet’s former

friend, Joy Greer (Megan Edwards). In an attempt to seduce Joy’s father,
Ivan (Michael Des Barres), Violet swims topless one morning in the back-
yard pool as Ivan is about to leave for work. He notices her and watches
from his second-story bedroom window, intrigued. Eventually, his voy-
eurism is interrupted by the housekeeper, Mrs. B (Susan Tyrrell), who
offers him coffee.
MRS. B
More coffee, Mr. Greer?
Ivan turns to find her standing in the doorway

with the coffee pot in her hand. Taken by
surprise, he nervously responds.
IVAN
N-
n-
no, I’m fine. Thanks.
He stands rigidly until she turns to leave.
MRS. B
You might want to think about
cuttin’ down a little, Mr. Greer.
Mrs. B makes a face at Ivan’s odd behavior as

she leaves.
Ivan rolls his eyes, hoping to get out of the

house without further notice.
In Karen Kelly’s script, the scene ends there. During production, actor and
director added an extra beat that supplied a good button to the scene. In
the dailies, Ivan looks back out the window, pressing his lips together and
sighing when he sees he’s missed Violet. What we don’t see is that she has
left the pool, which would motivate his disappointment.
It is often helpful to mine the footage after “Cut” but it can also be
beneficial to view the footage before “Action.” In this case, the high angle
(Ivan’s POV) of the swimming pool, which would make an excellent con-
clusion to the scene, still contained the actress after “Cut.” But there were
multiple takes, and on one subsequent take the scene was slated before
Pressly re-entered the set and found her mark. The pool was empty, but
the water was still disturbed from her having swum in it during the previ-
ous take. This was the perfect shot to wrap up the scene and just long
enough before the slate rose into view and blocked the sight of the pool.
This became the end to the scene.
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ANOTHER APPROACH
Figure 5.4 Poison Ivy – Ivan gazes out the window toward the pool.
Credit: New Line Cinema.
Figure 5.5 Poison Ivy – Ivan’s POV of the empty pool.

Credit: New Line Cinema.
Instead of concluding on the interaction between Mrs. B and Ivan, the

edit was able to refer back to the main motivation of the scene (the
intended seduction of Ivan) and supply a complete ending: Ivan looks out
the window, sees the pool is now empty, and grows disappointed, but not
without first having his interest aroused. All this before Violet finally suc-
ceeds in seducing and killing him.
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ANOTHER APPROACH
The script’s point that he’s “hoping to get out of the house without
further notice” – an attitude that can’t easily be portrayed or shown – is
replaced by a clear reaction: disappointment. Additionally, the unneces-
sary and conflicting line – “You might want to think about cuttin’ down
a little, Mr. Greer” – was replaced by the actor’s short and grumbled
acknowledgment. After all, why would Mrs. B offer more coffee when
she thinks Ivan should cut down on his caffeine intake?
Between writer, director, editor, and actors, the scene came together,
and, in a rare instance, not one frame was changed from the rough cut to
the final release print.
Movies Move
In a presentation during the Academy nominations, Andy Jurgensen,
the editor of Licorice Pizza (2020), talked about his and the direc-
tor’s approach to various scenes. The film, influenced by Paul Thomas
Anderson’s experience growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the
1970s, follows the budding romance and adventures of Alana Kane
(Alana Haim) and Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman).
In the Tail o’ the Cock restaurant sequence with Tom Waits and Sean
Penn, the filmmakers had more coverage and more action than was
needed. “That [scene] was a lot longer and … [I] had to whittle it down
to the essence of it, which is a crazy kind of drunken whirlwind.” He and
the director didn’t want the scene to lag, so they found themselves con-
stantly trimming. According to Jurgensen, “You had all these different
perspectives. And you just didn’t want to get bogged down. You wanted
to keep it moving, keep it crazy and get outside for the whole motorcycle
part.” Yet, through all the wild escapades, the relationship between the
main characters, Gary and Alana, remained their North Star, the guiding
light to which everything ultimately related.
Figure 5.6 Licorice Pizza – The Tail o’ the Cock restaurant scene.
Credit: Universal/MGM.
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ANOTHER APPROACH
Jurgensen explains that the director didn’t want people to get ahead of
the movie. “He’s like, the audience is smart enough. Maybe they’ll be
confused a little bit, but they’ll catch up and it’s fine.” This specifically
refers to the surprise introduction of certain characters, such as the
appearance of the Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper) character. About mid-way
through the film, Anderson introduces Jon Peters, who takes the main
characters on a wild ride and then disappears from the movie, sort of as
one would experience in an adventure film. In that sense, this is a nostal-
gic urban adventure.
In the script, it wasn’t set up in the way scripts traditionally try to pre-
figure characters and their actions. This spontaneity, along with the
period songs, helped perpetuate the film’s madcap pace and rhythm.
In developing a character around the living legend

of Jon Peters, the writer–director Paul Thomas
Anderson consulted with Peters, who kindly
encouraged him to portray him as a jerk, a much
more fun and dramatic character than one who
was friendly and non-threatening.
Writer–director Anderson’s and his editor Jurgensen’s goal is a useful

guide for writers in general – come in late and get out early. Their aim
was to keep the momentum going, “Keep it moving, keep it moving.”
Note
1 Bartlett, Frederick. Remembering: An Experiment in Experimental and Social
Psychology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 1932. For a further
analysis of Bartlett’s theory, see Mlodinow, Leonard. Subliminal. Vintage
Books, New York. 2013.
59
6
WHAT WRITERS KNOW
The chapter explores principles that all good writers know: how an
understanding of story structure, character, mythology, dialogue,
and subtext informs the writing process. Editors benefit from
understanding these elements as well.
Writers hold the key to the kingdom. Without writers, there is no movie.
From the initial inspiration, whether simple or high concept, the writer
envisions characters, situations, and emotions, wrapping them in a well-
constructed plot. The characters must be ones that an audience can
identify with, because we all share similar desires, even if a character’s
expression of these desires is unfamiliar to the average person.
The character’s actions may be reprehensible or divine, but they have
an inner emotional logic. Their motives will conflict with those of other
characters, and along the way obstacles will be thrown in their paths. In
the end, there will be some sort of satisfying conclusion that relates back
to the issues that were raised in the beginning. And somehow it needs to
be brilliantly unique, briskly paced, emotionally fulfilling and endlessly
engaging. A tall order.
Storytelling isn’t just entertainment, though that may be its first order of
business. Without engaging members of an audience and safely moving
them from one place to another, there is little possibility of affecting their
hearts and minds. They are passengers, and you, the writer, the trusted pilot.
Stories, particularly film stories, require structure. While it may at first
appear formulaic structure, is the skeleton that everything else – character,
theme, action, dialogue, plot, and other elements – hang on. The individual
elements and the structure that contains those elements are inextricably
intertwined. And all these exist to perform the impossible task of perfectly
depicting the complexity of human experience.
Consider ideas. Ideas come from our experiences, memories, goals, fears,
desires, regrets and so on. These seemingly separate elements make up one
60 DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-7
W H AT W R I T E RS K N OW
whole – the thinker. Thinkers – we – do not exist without something to

populate our thoughts. We are the structure created by our stories. In that
way, we are not separate from our thoughts, though most of the time we
tend to assume that to be the case.
We struggle to change our feelings and actions, unaware that the entity
that attempts this change is the same one that creates the problems. That’s
the basis of film stories, whether it is obvious or not. Characters in films
suffer based on their emotional decisions rather than on clarity through
facts. Films work because they evoke those feelings. Films that preach
and intellectualize generally fail. If characters acted reasonably and ratio-
nally, all movies would be short ones. Instead, before the end of the tale,
some crisis has occurred that reveals the truth and makes it impossible
for the characters to continue in their habitual ways.
The stories that we tell are full of the same elements that churn around
in our heads. Stories are a way of trying to make sense of human
experience.
Movies are visual and auditory. In that regard, screenplays create story
by outlining a series of images, sounds, spoken words, even music, that
are connected through action that follows a particular throughline. Most
screenplays use the basic three-act structure that goes back to Aristotle as
he described it in his Poetics. All this is within the dramatic framework
that requires conflict in order to build drama. The first act is the set-up,
the second act develops the conflict by introducing further obstacles, and
the third act resolves the conflict.
Tasked with the awesome responsibility of caretaking the original writ-
er’s work, it is incumbent upon the editor to be thoroughly acquainted
with what most writers know. This will shine a light on the path of each
scene and act as a guide for the editor entering the sometimes dense
thicket of the dailies.
When editors sit down to construct a scene, they tell themselves a story.
The story may closely resemble the scene before them or it may deviate
significantly in order to fulfill the aim of the script. Either way, the inter-
nalized tale acts as a guide to solve the intricacies and lapses that can
exist in dailies.
Editing, as we’ve come to see, isn’t just putting the pieces together so
they make sense or achieve a compelling flow. Editing is rewriting and, as
such, belongs in the realm of story, character, and structure that pervade
the writer’s craft.
Structure
The first element that becomes clear is the need for structure. Some of this
has already been mentioned regarding the three-act structure that makes
up our stories. In the first act, a desire will be introduced. Along with
61
that, the inevitable problem arises (or is prefigured). Before the end of the
first act there will appear a turning point, a complication, or new piece
of information that sends the story in a new direction. In Casablanca,
it’s the moment when Rick sees Ilsa, his former lover who, he believes,
abandoned him in Paris. The end of the first act occurs when the main
character first decides how they will deal with the issue raised in the incit-
ing incident.
The second act is the longest trek and is broken up in the middle by a
new and profound conflict. By the end of the second act, a new turn pres-
ents itself. In Casablanca, Ilsa is about to shoot her former lover in order
to obtain the coveted letters of transit. Things grow darker. There are
premonitions of death. But something happens to show us a glimmer of
light at the edge of the glen. Everything will be better – until it’s not. The
world collapses in around us. Only in the last moments do we finally
arrive at our destination, and all is saved or, if not saved, somehow
resolved.
These are some of the basic steps along the way. Volumes have been
written and lectured about this, but it basically boils down to these ele-
ments. This is the first thing that editors must keep in mind – they are
working in a realm where maps have already been drawn. But just
because there is a map doesn’t mean the journey will be easy or
straightforward.
For some writers, carefully following all the rules and principles of
craft helps guide them as they commit ideas to the page. They may work
from detailed outlines and fill in the blanks as they go. Others have inte-
grated these concepts to the point that they intuit the next steps as they
move through the story without looking back. Still others find that con-
centrating too heavily on the rules at the beginning is distracting and
stymies the creative process. For them, the rewriting process is where they
will summon the most help in order to determine what is missing, what
is working, and what isn’t. Learning these principles gives you an idea
how to fix problems when you encounter them.
Editing has a set of basic rules as well. During the editing process, all
the principles of continuity editing tell us what works and what doesn’t,
but this also allows us to break the rules knowingly, when we are inclined.
To break continuity or create a jump cut trespasses on several basic prin-
ciples, but, when used well, these maneuvers can enhance a film. In the
1950s, filmmakers of the French New Wave first showed this to be the
case. The jump cut was born, creating ellipses within a scene that defied
the established conventions of time and space. In Jean-Luc Godard’s clas-
sic À Bout de Souffle, aka Breathless (1960), characters pop in and out of
frame, appear on one side of the room and, in an instant, on another.
62
Before the 1950s, a jump cut was considered an egregious error. After
Breathless, editors continued to show how effectively jump cuts can
work, and the technique eventually became a staple of filmmaking. Just as
a writer might use a sentence fragment, an editor will use a jump cut. But
both must be applied purposefully. Not by mistake.
We see the jump cut alive and well today in such films as Dune (2021),
where the editor, Joe Walker, capitalized on the editor’s ability to jump
time when showing process. To carry out every stage of a process can be
tedious, but, by selecting only the most telling moments, the editor moves
the film along and establishes a continuity of rhythm and emotion, even
when the shots are discontinuous.
Look back at the example of Jojo Rabbit in Chapter 1, where 10-year-
old Jojo puts on his uniform. The script outlines a series of jump cuts as
Jojo buttons his shirt, pins his badge, tightens his belt, and so on. These
are all actions that could be performed in a linear manner, but here quick
images jump the story ahead in an engaging way. Notice that, in the
script, the jump cuts appear as incomplete sentences, such as “Hair
combed.”
Understanding dramatic structure can take time. For most people, it
doesn’t come easily. Well-written stories make it seem simple, but, on the
contrary, it is quite complex. Yet, once understood, it becomes second
nature.
Many different screenwriting gurus exist to offer pathways and
instructions for the writer. Some of the best of these are Syd Field
(Foundations of Screenwriting), who designed a paradigm of the screen-
play, and Blake Snyder (Save the Cat), who mapped out the beat sheet
that writers can follow. But there are many others who have spoken
directly or indirectly about the structure of story. One of the best and
earliest to lay down the principles for modern dramatic structure was
George Pierce Baker, a professor of English at both Harvard and Yale, in
his classic book Dramatic Technique. Joseph Campbell, while not a
screenwriter, has shed light on the ancient and mythological origins of
story. In doing so, Campbell influenced many filmmakers, the most
prominent being George Lucas in his Star Wars series. For a fascinating
evocation of Campbell’s concepts, check out the interview series The
Power of Myth (1988) with Paul Moyer and Joseph Campbell at Lucas’s
Skywalker Ranch.
Campbell, a popularist, was influenced by a truly original thinker, the
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who revealed the concept of archetypal
stories that transcend current time and events. In the writings of Jung, it
becomes clear that stories resonate with us partially because they fulfill a
primordial need that connects us to all human beings throughout time.
63
This is the greatness of storytelling. It creates empathy for people and

places we may never know or see because we discover that their problems
are our problems, just framed in different traditions, different cultures,
different locales. If anyone ever says to you, “Art is nice, but it doesn’t
save lives,” imagine going through the Covid-19 pandemic without music,
without books, without video games, without films.
So, what are these stories that the brain and heart respond to, that take
us away to another realm that ultimately brings us back to ourselves?
People have tried to catalog all the essential stories and, though the
number may vary some, it appears that the basic stories are limited in
number. How we bring them to the screen varies in tone, execution, and
character.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Ben Hecht once asked a producer, who
was interested in engaging him to write a screenplay, “What kind of story
is it?”
The producer said: “It’s a love story.”

“Every story is a love story,” Hecht replied.1
If we consider the way stories work, there’s some truth in Hecht’s slightly
facetious remark. After all, your characters will fall for each other, they
will argue, they will break up, they will reconcile. They will follow a
three-act structure.
At first, there will be the courtship, the desire, the intention. Hidden in
the desire is not only the want for the love object (whether in human
form or in the guise of power, wealth, or fame), but also the deeper need,
the one that may ultimately destroy the lovers by bringing them into con-
flict. If you think about it, most relationships start off easily at the begin-
ning, but eventually life gets complicated as obstacles get in the way.
Everyone, we discover, has a motive, and one motive can conflict with
another, whether it is to have security, companionship, defuse a bomb, or
find happiness.
There are three main obstacles that characters encounter on their way
toward a goal. Sometimes those conflicts arise from their connection to
others (“Hell is other people,”2 Jean-Paul Sartre once espoused). Some of
those great stories are The Scarlet Empress (1934), Casablanca (1942),
Breathless (1960), Dr. Zhivago (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(1966), The Graduate (1967), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Out of
Africa (1985), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Farewell My Concubine
(1993), City of God (2002), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Get Out (2017),
and Black Panther (2018). Many of these films also won awards for edit-
ing and writing. What is your list?
At other times, stories may arise from an internal conflict, something
within the person that drives them to power or destruction or glory.
64
Citizen Kane (1941), On the Waterfront (1954), Lawrence of Arabia

(1962), 8½ (1963), Network (1976), Tootsie (1982), and Leaving Las
Vegas (1995) are some classic examples.
And sometimes obstacles come from the outside, from our infatuation
with nature that, as Rainer Maria Rilke observed, “so serenely disdains
to destroy us.”3 Check out Key Largo (1948), The Birds (1963), 2001: A
Space Odyssey (1968), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Jurassic Park
(1993), Twister (1996), Titanic (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000),
Contagion (2011), or Don’t Look Up (2021). Additionally, there’s the
supernatural, such as Dracula (1931), Topper (1937), The Wolf Man
(1941), Cat People (1942 and 1982), Heaven Can Wait (1943 and 1978),
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980),
Ghostbusters (1984), Dune (1984 and 2021), Prancer (1989), Ghost
(1990), and The Sixth Sense (1999).
If we think of all stories as love stories, it gives us permission to fall in
love with our characters, even the nasty ones. Because even the nasty ones
have qualities we recognize in ourselves when we’re not at our best, when
we’re greedy, vengeful, jealous, or deceitful. These stories are about the
eternal human need to make connections, to be guided by our hearts, to
solve the impossible problem, and along the way to discover the failings
of those connections and to rise above. These are the great stories that
weave through our consciousness.
Genre
Another aspect that writers attend to is genre. This is an overlay of our
love story structure. There are love stories where one of the lovers will be
betrayed and killed (thrillers). There are love stories where people laugh
and make love, misunderstand each other, and eventually marry (roman-
tic comedies). There are love stories where we are awestruck by the maj-
esty of something larger than ourselves (science fiction and Westerns).
Each has its own trajectory, its own archetypal structure. In this way, they
raise specific expectations in an audience. Not fulfilling those can under-
mine the viewer’s experience. This is not to say that these expectations
need to be or should be met in a typical or predictable way – a trope. As a
matter of fact, it’s better that the formula remains hidden in some unique
treatment of the genre.
Sense and Setting

In story, setting plays an essential role, whether it is the wizarding school
in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) and its subsequent sequels,
an Eastern European train station in Closely Watched Trains (1966), or a
charmed Colombian town in Encanto (2021).
65
Figure 6.1 Harry Potter – Establishing shot of Hogwarts.

Figure 6.2 Closely Watched Trains – The train station.

Credit: Criterion Collection.
66
Figure 6.3 Encanto – The family home.

Credit: Walt Disney Pictures.
The physical appearance of people and places will be determined by

the production designer, art department, and director. But by incorporat-
ing setting into a script, the story is enhanced by the environment’s influ-
ence. Just as with scenic descriptions in the script, however, adding too
many scenic shots can weigh the film down. Generally, it is better to evoke
the setting through the actions of the characters within the environment.
In that way, excessive establishing shots at the beginning of a scene are
usually avoided and will confine themselves to the rule of three. In other
words, one establishing shot may not be enough to evoke the setting, while
four or five will be too many and slow the story. Generally, three is just right.
The Rule of Three: A symmetrical writing principle

stating that items that occur in patterns of three are
more potent than in other configurations, such as
once, twice, or four times. The triumvirates of
beginning, middle, and end; cool, calm, and col-
lected; or friends, Romans, countrymen represent
classic occurrences of the principle. Omne trium perfectum = every-
thing that comes in threes is perfect.
The philosopher Ortega y Gasset made a fascinating observation when

he spoke about how the ancient hunter felt and experienced the natural
world by his participation in it.4 One is not separate from the other. In
67
the same way, films do well to fold descriptive shots into the overall flow
of the action. Writers can find guidance in how to evoke a setting and
sensation by viewing a well-edited film.
Check out the world building in Dune and the use of sensual details and
insert shots to convey a feeling for the world. Setting and certain visual
clues can create what editor Joe Walker, ACE refers to as “brain stemy
images,” that communicate faster than words “by appealing to some part
of the brain that’s old and not necessarily verbal, [but] sensory.”5
One example is when Lady Jessica Atreides is getting ready to depart
her home planet, transitioning from a world she knows to a new and
mysterious one. The idea of leaving takes on emotional weight in the
sequence where Lady Jessica’s son Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet)
prepares to leave, and we see the dangerous environment of Arrakis in
contrast to his familial home. His thoughts of leaving become mirrored in
images that lack continuity of action, location, and time. It becomes a
sort of tonal montage, in the Eisensteinian sense, where the collected
images impart a feeling, such as the shot of Duke Leto’s hand comforting
his concubine, Lady Jessica. Says Walker:
The shot of Lady Jessica waiting as the bull is being packed into
a packing case and she’s about to leave her home for all of her
life and step onto a planet where death and disaster awaits and
there’s a moment just focused on the back of her neck and you
feel her anxiety and then Leto’s hand comes in and reassures
her and it’s the hand on the neck which we all know what that
feels like … but also what it says about the trust between those
people … It’s finding a way in the edit to give those images the
best payload.
Figure 6.4 Dune – The comforting touch.

Credit: Warner Brothers Pictures.
68
In the script, this moment appears as only a few words.
INT. GREAT HALL – DAY
Servants lower a mounted bull’s head into

a case. Leto and Jessica look on. Around
them, the castle stands cavernous and
empty.
Paul close behind, observes his mother.
Servants come to say goodbye, weeping and

embracing them. The Atreides are beloved:
their household is a family. Jessica tears
up. Leto comforts her.
Paul joins them.
The bull head’s case is being closed.
These details, which were alluded to in the script by “Leto comforts her,”
are fully realized by the director and editor, giving the audience a deeper,
more primordial sense of the characters and their feelings. In a script,
when trying to evoke a sensual experience, consider adding a line or two
to allow the reader to fully envision an action, such as to comfort, arouse,
or excite.
Notes
1 Frank P. Rosenberg. Personal communication with the author.
2 Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit. Vintage International, New York. 1973.
3 Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. Translated by C.F. MacIntyre. University
of California Press, Berkeley. 1965.
4 Gasset, José Ortega y. Meditations on Hunting. Charles Scribner’s, New York.
1972.
5 Huffish, Steve. “The Art of the Cut, Ep. 135. ‘Dune’ Editor Joe Walker, ACE.”
27 October 2021. Anchor.fm/frameio-insider
69
7
WHAT EDITORS KNOW
This chapter explores the principles that all good editors know.
How an understanding of editing rhythms, genre expectations,
intercutting, subtext, and structure can inform the writing process.
Editors deal with the same issues as writers, with one prominent excep-
tion. They don’t start from scratch. They already have material waiting
for them in the form of a script and, eventually, dailies. As we will see,
the approach to that material comes with its own challenges – the need
to fashion elegance and perfection out of an abundance of choices. In
many cases, the material has experienced the best possible birth, been
well cared for, nursed by a parade of people from cinematographers to
actors to costume designers. Their efforts form a large collection of pos-
sible decisions, mistakes, wish lists, and redundancies. Out of all this,
editors must use their well-developed sense of story, structure, pacing,
and character to fulfill the script and craft the director’s vision. In the best
cases, they go beyond the director’s expectations.
Joe Walker points out that,
You’re trying always as an editor [to stay] in parallel or ahead of

the audience, slightly ahead, not too far ahead and never behind.
If you’re behind you’re dead. If they already know how the scene
is going to end, if they already know how the story is going to
end, if they already know how it’s going to resolve, then you’re
dead if you allow (the audience) the time to … figure it out.
Power of the Shot

Screenwriting and editing techniques, such as those devised by the Russian
film school of Eisenstein, Kuleshov, and Vertov, evolved simultaneously at
the dawn of the 20th century when the initial novelty of the movie cam-
era and its ability to capture reality in a single moving image captivated
70 DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-8
W H AT E D I TO RS K N OW
audiences. These simple, singular incidents evolved to the coverage of an

event from various camera angles. These different angles needed to be
spliced together to tell the story. The resulting juxtaposition of images
created by placing one shot next to another produced a stronger impact,
greater meaning, and more compelling timing than resided in a single
shot, a oner. Chopping up the images and fitting them together in creative
ways allowed for the manipulation of time, space, structure and rhythm,
the editor’s greatest impact on cinema.
Influenced by the editing process, screenwriting grew to map out the
proposed story through an outline of shots and scenes, sequentially imag-
ined. All this before the invention of synchronous sound. The stream of
images was basically all the filmmaker possessed in order to tell the story.
The first screenwriting book, The Technique of the Photoplay by Epes
Winthrop Sargent, appeared in 1911 and mirrored this new approach to
writing. It was not writing in the strict sense but a story told by successive
images.
Editing multiple angles allows for the selection of point-of-view. Well-
written screenplays establish a point-of-view that the editor will come to
reinforce through shot selection and by favoring one character over
another, often through more frequent appearances and closer shots.
Editing gives us glimpses into how each character sees or perceives the
event before them.
Sculpting the Story

Editing is rewriting, intended not to alter the narrative – though that
happens – but to select only the most salient features, shots that will tell
the story, while eliminating those that don’t – an economy of elements.
The editor, like a sculptor working with marble, chips away everything
that is not the story, removing all inessential elements.
Here, the editor is like a writer but a writer who has the luxury of a big,
sloppy first draft. Some of the great writers, such as Julius Epstein
(Casablanca), have taken the approach of initially getting the material
down on paper, no matter how messy or awkward. Epstein used to throw
everything into a first draft, so the initial manuscript amounted to almost
400 pages of screenplay, an unfilmable length. After that first pass, he
would put it aside for a while knowing that, when he returned to the
work with fresh eyes, the best material would clearly present itself.
Everything else he would cut out. In this rewrite, he discovered the essence
of his screenplay.
In a sense, editors are like Julius Epstein after he has written his initial
draft. With volumes of footage and a more objective eye than writer or
director at this stage, editors are free to discover the best performances,
the most informative camera moves, the tightest and most engaging con-
struction. Editing is indeed rewriting.
71
For Editors: Additional to the aesthetics require-

ments that make an expert editor, there’s a techni-
cal aspect that overlays the entire process, and each
year it becomes more complex. Editors, unlike
writers, producers, and even some directors, need
to be highly technologically adept. Daily, they work with high-
capacity hard drives, cloud storage systems, powerful computers,
and complex software such as Avid Media Composer and Premiere
Pro. But more than that, they, like writers, have to have a deep com-
mand of story. This aspect can be overlooked by those who imagine
editors to be like carpenters following a blueprint. To truly become
an editor, one needs to understand the writing and storytelling pro-
cess. That is where the true gift of the profession resides.
Structure is deeply imbedded in the screenwriting process and so too in

editing. Dramatic structure has evolved to some degree over the centuries,
but Aristotle’s three-act structure and conventions of time and space still
hold sway. Structure relates not only to the three basic acts that make up
a dramatic work (as well as the plot points and twists along the way) but
also, as editors often find, to each scene and moment of action, which are
mutable. Structure isn’t only mathematics, it’s music too. Editors will tell
you on occasion that they have taken the beginning and placed it at the
end or vice versa. They frequently move the puzzle pieces around for best
effect. Why is this even necessary? Often, scenes that play well in a script
and appear to be essential discover a new home farther down the road
or else disappear entirely. In some cases, a studio executive, producer,
or director may identify a particular scene as boring and encumbering
the film’s flow. They feel it should be cut out. But it contains essential
information. Something else is wrong. As editor Bruce Green, ACE, (The
Princess Diaries, Cool Runnings) points out, “When you go in and exam-
ine things, what you realize is that three scenes back there’s a scene that
there’s no need to have. And if you take out that scene, then everything
that comes after it plays faster.”1
This reflexive effect applies to writing too. Before removing or rede-
signing a scene that contains essential elements, examine the surrounding
sequences and determine if an earlier scene has influenced the perception
of the later one. Stories have a holistic quality. Changing one aspect inevi-
tably affects other parts of the whole.
In dramatic structure, something needs to capture the audience’s atten-
tion and concern, but determining the right position can be challenging.
What may have seemed like an engaging way to begin a film may prove
otherwise when the pieces are finally edited together. An opening hook is
72
essential and needs to be well suited, just as the ending needs to fall in the
proper place and have all the necessary beats, no more and no fewer.
The Hook: As the word implies, the hook grabs the

reader and holds them with an unexpected ques-
tion, problem, event, or statement.
Like the hook, the inciting incident captures the audience’s attention early
on and sets things in motion. It establishes the initial conflict, sending the
main character on a journey that will engage them throughout the course
of the story. The trick is to find the right event.
Establishing Tone
Sometimes, scenes that seem engaging aren’t. Pamela Martin, ACE, the
editor of King Richard (2021), described how she and director Reinaldo
Marcus Green “struggled with the opening of the film [as scripted]
because there wasn’t a very strong hook and [the audience wasn’t] fully
invested with Richard (Will Smith) quickly enough.”
In the script, the opening scene originally showed Richard collecting
used tennis balls from various tennis clubs so he could have enough when
he practices with his two daughters, Serena and Vanessa. “Then he goes
home, picks up his girls, goes to the courts, goes to work and then starts
pitching all the coaches” whom he wants to train his daughters. One by
one the coaches reject his requests.
EXT. PALOS VERDES COUNTRY CLUB – VARIOUS

SHOTS – MORNING

A majestic, rolling golf course. Pristine tennis
courts. Rich WHITE PEOPLE living the life.
INT. PALOS VERDES COUNTRY CLUB – MORNING
Inside, UNIFORMED STAFF vacuum opulent locker

rooms and clean the framed photographs that
line the club walls:
ANCIENT TENNIS GREATS. TILDEN. KRAMER. AUSTEN.

SHRIVER. All legends. All white. All viewed by:
73
RICHARD WILLIAMS (47). A tall, powerfully-

built
black man with broken teeth, a graying beard,
and a lifetime of rejection and resentment.
Richard stands in the pro shop in his TENNIS

ATTIRE, when a TENNIS PRO arrives with a
SHOPPING BAG.
TENNIS PRO
Grounds crew threw out most of
’em. Got a few here but they look
pretty dead.
RICHARD
They not dead to us.
Richard looks in the bag. It’s filled with

RATTY OLD TENNIS BALLS. Richard takes it
thankfully and without shame, heading out with
his bounty as we hear –
RICHARD (V.O.)
here I grew up, in Louisiana,
W
Seedy Grove. Tennis was not a
game peoples played. We was too
busy running from the Klan. But
here it is …
EXT. PALOS VERDES COUNTRY CLUB – VARIOUS

SHOTS – MORNING
Richard’s garbled Louisiana drawl continues as

he strolls the manicured grounds, collecting
stray balls as he goes. He plucks them from
trash as WHITE CLUB MEMBERS play.
RICHARD (V.O.)
… when I’m interested in a thing,
I learn it. How it works. How the
best people in the world do it.
That’s what I did with tennis and
the girls.
In the editing room, it became necessary to re-envision the script, moving

scenes around and restructuring the story. It was the biggest deviation
from the screenplay, but one that would eventually draw the audience
74
into the story of tennis champions Serena and Vanessa Williams and their
determined and ambitious father Richard, for whom the film is titled.
Since the collecting tennis balls scenes didn’t hold much dramatic
promise, eventually Green and Martin
decided to try this pitching the coach stuff up front and combine
it with the ball collecting which we used just very little of. …
That was key. Once we did that and opened the film in Richard’s
voice and saw the level of rejection he was facing from the very
beginning, it really brought about emotion for this man. And
you kinda rooted for him immediately as an underdog. And not
only that, then he goes home and picks up his girls and he goes
and works out on the court with them all day and then he comes
home and he barely eats. He goes to his job at night, you can see
how exhausted he is, and then he picks up the magazines and
keeps working. Like the guy just doesn’t quit and gets the last
rejection from the Vic Braden character which really spells it out
that he really has no business being in that business, not having
the training that everybody else has. … Once we got that we
were, “Oh my god, the first act is working.”
As discussed elsewhere, point-of-view is an essential aspect of storytell-

ing and here the use of Richard’s voice combined with the sympathy
garnered by the early scenes of rejection clarified the story and made
Richard into the kind of protagonist that an audience wanted to follow
and spend time with.
For writers, it’s important to be aware of what the first scene is telling
us. What tone does it set? Does it contain the main character? What does
it allow us to learn immediately about the main character? And is it
engaging enough to compel us to keep watching?
Figure 7.1 King Richard – Richard pursues coaches to tutor his daughters.
75
Figure 7.2 King Richard – Richard collects tennis balls.

While King Richard ran the risk of starting with events that were too
mild and unengaging, The Power of the Dog (2021) had the opposite
issue. Its beginning, as scripted, overpowered the more leisurely,
character-driven scenes that were to follow directly after. Again, tone,
pacing, and information influenced the film’s structure during the editing
process.
The film takes place on a Montana ranch (actually filmed in Dunedin,
New Zealand) in 1925. As it follows the lives of the head rancher Phil
(Benedict Cumberbatch) and his family, the story twists and turns, misdi-
recting us at times in terms of the characters’ true natures and a sense of
with whom the true power lies. In the original screenplay, written by Jane
Campion and based on the novel by Thomas Savage, the story began
with the castration of a calf on the ranch.
EXT – BURBANK RANCH/STOCKYARDS/PADDOCKS – DAY 1
A Montana ranch scape with a curious hill

feature, a sculptural outcrop that rises
up into a plateau. A man is looking at it.
PHIL BURBANK (40-
50) tall, lean with a wry
expression that softens into something
speculative as he stares at the landform,
seeing something that causes him to smile,
some kind of private amusement. He walks on
until he’s standing beside a GROUP OF COWHANDS.
Behind them a herd of Poly Angus steers mashed
six deep against a pole fence. Phil wears a
76
uniform of close fitting blue overalls and

worn wool chaps bare in patches. On his head
a hat so battered it’s hard to know if it’s a
cowboy or a sun hat. He’s quiet, his sharp see-
all eyes watch. A big calf missed at spring is
pushed out of the pack, Phil points to it.
PHIL
That’s him.
JUAN, MOUNTED COWBOY behind Phil gives fast

chase, a lariat hurled high in his right hand
snaps hard on the calf’s hindquarters and
drops catching the animal’s back foot. Phil
walks towards the struggling beast, a big
one with kick. THEO a BLACK COWHAND gallops
forward dismounting at speed, dust billowing
and helps throw the animal – a crushing thud.
TWO MORE COWHANDS run forward, together they
tie off the front and hind legs stretching
the calf out between the two horses’ saddle
horns. Phil still walking with an easy grace,
unsheathes his knife and straddles the bull
calf facing his tail. The Cowboys holding the
calf look serious, their eyes on the dirt.
Phil takes hold of the scrotum and slices off
the cup tossing it aside. The calf struggles,
next Phil forces down first one and then the
other testicle, slits the rainbow membrane that
encloses them and tears the testicles out, he
unstraddles the calf and takes the dangling
testicles to a small branding fire, tosses them
over the coals where they explode in the heat
like huge popcorn.
PHIL (CONT’D)
ou boys fooling with girls would do
Y
well to eat them.
Phil looks over at the Cowhands amused – no

takers. He flicks them out onto the dirt, a dog
carries one off to the end of the yard, the
veins and nerves trailing.
77
STAN
One more lost boy, Boss.
The chase is on again. Phil once more straddles

the bull calf cupping his testicles in his
blood-
stained, work toughened hands.
A startling and graphic scene. In practice, the scene as shot was so intense
that its placement had to be reconsidered during the editing process. Tone
is an aspect that writers, as well as editors, consider when constructing a
film’s opening.
Figure 7.3 Power of the Dog – Riding the range.

Credit: Netflix.
A rule of thumb that some writers use is “start with an emergency.” An

emergency can be anything from a fiery familial conflict to an actual life-
threatening emergency. Some filmmakers, such as Brian DePalma (Carrie,
Dressed to Kill), start their films with such harrowing events that the
audience is on pins and needles throughout the rest of the film, wary that
at any moment they’ll be confronted with another such traumatic event.
More recently, the television show Ozark (2017) used this approach in
the initial violent encounter between Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) and
members of a murderous drug cartel during a money laundering operation
gone wrong. In order to placate the cartel and save himself and his family,
Marty agrees to set up an even bigger laundering operation in the Ozarks.
During the inciting incident, the audience is immediately engaged by
the conflict before them but also by the immediacy of the action. Rather
than slowly ramping up to a critical event by mapping out the motiva-
tions and responses that led up to this moment, starting with a dramatic
78
encounter can pull us directly into the middle of the storm. In some cases,
the whys and wherefores aren’t immediately apparent, but the audience’s
attention is immediately piqued. They’re excited to hang in there to learn
the full nature of the incident. Along the way they have gained a sense of
the film’s overall tone.
In the case of The Power of the Dog, opening the film with a close-up
castration established a precedent and tone that were not consistent with
what followed. What followed was a rather restrained revealing of the
difficult main characters. The larger challenge was to build enough sus-
pense in the cutting that the audience felt eager to know more.
Later in the script, about midway through, there appeared another cas-
tration scene, but this scene was shot from afar. It happened more in the
background, upon the return of the young foil, Peter, from school. Since
this was a jump in time and a good place for a strong transition after the
story’s conflict had already been established, it became the ideal place to
insert the more graphic and disturbing castration scene that was origi-
nally intended for the opening.
As the film’s editor Peter Sciberras, explains it,
We had this great castration scene that didn’t feel right for the
front. It was tonally too big of a bang to start on … It also just
started with a real spike of energy and then it kind of just threw off
everything that came after it … It felt like it was going in a certain
direction and then it wasn’t going there in the first ten minutes.2
Ultimately, the boarding house meal sequence became responsible for

establishing Phil and his taciturn attitude. In this sequence, Phil rejects
the meal that Mrs. Lewis has laid out for him, makes a chess move and a
counter move on a board he has set up, and then saunters upstairs to the
bedroom that he shares with his brother George, whom he immediately
insults.
Phil walks towards the bathroom door and

continues playing (his banjo).
PHIL
Figured it out Fatso, what year we
took over the Old Gent?
GEORGE
Why?
PHIL
Hell, think about.
79
Inside the bathroom George sits placidly in his

bath making small splashes. His skin is milky
white except where his shirt was open and there
his neck and his hands are red brown.
GEORGE
You ever try the house bath Phil?
PHIL
No I don’t wanna smell like a piece
of soap, like a flower. I like to
smell like a man. What’s happened
to you brother? Don’t forget the
wilds or you’ll end up a house cat,
too fat to catch a mouse … Or are

you a mouse?
There was a lot more of Phil and his brother George, along with Rose
and Peter in the script, but that was taken out. Editor and writer–director
Campion removed a lot of extra dialogue from the script. “Just about every
dialogue scene had quite a bit of dialogue cut out … [to] boil it down to
the absolute essential.”
Removing other scenes made it possible to focus the story earlier, rely-
ing on the one big set piece in the red mill “to supply everything we needed
to know.” As discussed elsewhere, leaving out information can have the
effect of drawing the audience into the story, sparking questions in their
minds. In this case, the moment in the boarding house when Phil suddenly
refers to his brother George as “Fatso” ignites the audience’s attention
and curiosity to know what motivated that offhand and cruel remark.
From the Fatso moment onward, tensions build, primarily through the
use of images, dialogue, and pacing. Says Sciberras, “[Cumberbatch] just
gave you kinda nothing but everything at the same time.” He was disturb-
ingly disarming for the other characters to be around, and suspense grew
out of the anticipation of what he would say or do next. “It was a really
fun dynamic to cut with Phil especially … You just sit on [a shot] for a
longer time than you normally can. Just a shot that’s not doing very
much.” Much of the feeling was found in his looks. As writers discover,
sometimes a look can say more than even the most clever dialogue line.
Notes
1 Bruce Green, ACE. Interview with the author.
2 “Power of the Dog Editors Round Table: Peter Sciberras.” Moderator Dylan
Tichenor. Netflix Queue/Motion Picture Editors Guild. March 1, 2022.
80
8
TRICKS OF THE EDITOR’S TRADE
The chapter explores editors as magicians repurposing shots and

establishing setting. It looks at the intercut as a valuable tool for
creating rhythm and increasing tension and how it also serves writ-
ers, contributing to engaging scripts. Point-of-view is considered, as
tracked and adjusted in the editing room, as well as ways of deter-
mining and reinforcing a character’s point-of-view.
The Magician
Editors are like magicians. They make objects and people appear and
disappear. They control time. And they employ sleight of hand to guide
the audience’s attention through the shifting landscapes of film stories.
Editors manipulate perception over a seemingly endless and seamless
progression of cuts, giving the impression that the story unfolding before
them moves in an unbroken succession. The tricks that editors carry up
their sleeves include the use of the intercut, point-of-view, rhythm, pac-
ing, and the shifting of shots, as in the magician’s classic cup and ball
trick.
Repurposing Shots
Some stories are directly based on historic events, such as Schindler’s List
(1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), or The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020).
In all stories, the writer conceives of a space for the action to take place
and characters to populate that space. Dialogue that is untethered to a
locale eventually must find a place to land.
In structuring scenes, writers sometime dive in with characters and
their conversations before they know where they’ll place them. This
allows for the free flow of ideas, devising conflict and personality with-
out yet housing them in an environment. But environments have their
DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-9 81
own personalities and stories to tell. Without carefully conceiving of

how characters will interact with each other within a place, the writer
runs the risk of holding back important information from the audience.
Ultimately, the editor, who has the advantage of the dailies captured
within a geographic context, will strive to achieve clarity through these
physical elements.
Chase scenes, for example, rely heavily on geographic foundations,
and, in cutting those scenes, the editor strives to build clarity through
guidepost shots, wide shots, and point-of-view shots.
A simple example of the influence of environment appears in the court-
room scenes in The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020). As the writer–director
Aaron Sorkin described it in a Netflix special, a shot of the empty jury
box, which was in the writer’s mind when conceiving the scene, was not
stated on paper, and it took the editor to borrow the shot from a later
scene to bring clarity to the earlier one. Sorkin concludes, “really good
editors [are] co-authors of the movie.1
In the case of the Chicago 7, Sorkin noted that a shot of the empty jury
box was designed to precede the sentencing of the defendants, as indi-
cated in the script. During the editing process, it became clear that, in an
earlier scene, when Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton) was testifying with-
out the jury present, they needed a similar shot of the empty jury box.
Consequently, the editor, Alan Baumgarten, ACE, stole the shot and
placed it within the earlier scene.
Says Sorkin,
it didn’t occur to me writing it or shooting it … that we needed

to see the empty jury box so that we understood … it was impor-
tant that Ramsey Clark was giving his testimony without the
presence of the jury and it was important that the judge wasn’t
going to allow the jury to hear it. … I never put it in the stage
direction, never talked about it.2
This speaks to the importance of living the scene and conceptualizing

how it will be edited. Sorkin has spoken elsewhere3 about his tendency
to perform scenes as he writes them, acting out the lines, pacing out the
blocking, so he is already delving deeply into the scene.
In designing your screenplay, think in terms of what each shot says and
how it forwards the main characters’ wants. As outlined elsewhere, in
The Healthy Edit, one can design a shot list based on how the characters
move through a scene while trying to achieve a particular goal. It is not
enough to select shots purely for their attractiveness, uniqueness, or
breadth; they should be selected for what each one means in and of itself,
how it forwards the story and emotions. Its utility. In that case, it helps to
think in terms of the neutral shot, the shot that does not carry wider
meaning. A hand is just a hand, an eye is just an eye, and a knife is just a
82
knife. How these shots are sorted and arranged is what builds meaning
and tension.
Despite the attention given to all-encompassing shots, those shots that
tell many sides of the story in one move generally pale compared with the
simple, unencumbered, neutral shot. The uninflected image often pulls
the most weight because it works in conjunction with other shots. If the
writer puts dialogue aside for the moment and mentally builds a string of
images that each have a singular meaning, without asking any shot to
carry the full story, he or she will liberate greater meaning through the
juxtaposition of images. The third rung of the editing triangle.4 This
awareness came to the Russian filmmakers Kuleshov and Eisenstein in
the beginnings of cinema. This still serves editors to this day. Writers can
benefit from a similar approach. In conceiving a scene as if building a
shot list, the writer can walk step by step through the action and discover
the missing elements that might cause confusion in an audience. Upon
discovering these missing pieces, the writer can include them in the script.
Parts of the opening chase sequence in the screenplay of Baby Driver
(2017) read like a shot list, so one can easily imagine how the scene will
play out in the film. Notice also the use of intercutting:
WOOP WOOP. One BLACK & WHITE cruiser screams

the opposite way. It zooms past, then makes a
180 behind them.
Baby sees the Black & White BEHIND. A light

turns red AHEAD.
He floors it through the stop light. Other

drivers break hard round him. Cars crash, rear
end in time with kick drum hits.
The Black & White flies through the

intersection …
The Intercut
The intercut is a powerful tool of film editors that can greatly benefit writ-
ers. It involves the juxtaposition of images in a dialectical manner. At a
basic level, the intercut varies perspective and fractures time. It introduces
contrast by varying shots or scenes. Dialogue editing can be viewed as a
series of intercuts between one character and another engaged in conver-
sation. In action scenes, intercutting adds variety and accelerates the pace.
By intercutting shots of shorter and shorter duration, the editor can also
create rising momentum, increase tension, and build toward a climax.
Entire scenes can be intercut with other scenes, as each promotes a dif-
ferent idea, concept, or mood. At each intercut, one scene reinforces or
83
opposes the information communicated by the other. The power of this

tool is sometimes underestimated, particularly by those who hold alle-
giance to single takes to tell the story.
As Eisenstein observed, when looking at Chinese and Japanese picto-
graphs, the pairing of one image with another creates greater, stronger,
and even transcendent meaning. A subset of the intercut is parallel edit-
ing, which first occurred in the classic Western The Great Train Robbery
(1903). From our perspective today, it is hard to imagine a time when
parallel editing didn’t exist.
Parallel Editing: The process of maintaining two

different storylines running concurrently. This is
achieved by cutting back and forth between the
action in one location and the action in a different
location, presumably happening at the same time.
Prior to The Great Train Robbery, filmic stories proceeded in a com-

pletely linear and straightforward direction. With the introduction of an
intercut between the escaping robbers and the train station where the
hapless station master had been left tied up, and then back to the robbers
on horseback, the director, Edwin S. Porter, showed audiences action that
was occurring simultaneously in different locations.
As effective and enduring as the intercut remains, writers sometimes
neglect its importance. Scripted scenes tend to play out in full before
moving onto the next scene.
A striking occurrence of this happened in the romantic comedy Totally
Blonde (2001), starring Michael Bublé and directed by Andrew Van Slee.
The story follows a young woman (Krista Allen) who decides to grab the
peroxide – the film was originally entitled Peroxide Blonde – and change
her hair color from brunette to blond, believing that it will enhance her
romantic possibilities.
A young nightclub owner, Van (Michael Bublé) already has his sights
on her, but she thinks of him as just a friend. She’d rather hook up with
a hot-looking volleyball player, Brad (Brody Hutzler). Her friend Liv
(Maeve Quinlan) is left alone with Van when Meg runs off with the vol-
leyball player, so she decides to spend time with Van instead.
In the script, the scenes played out sequentially, first the long date between
Van and Liv, and then the equally long date between Meg and Brad. After
a while, these extensive scenes each began to wear thin. Even with some fun
dialogue and engaging situations, coupled with songs performed by Bublé
in his character’s nightclub, the film needed something to kick it up a notch.
It was a comedy, and comedies thrive on energetic pacing.
84
At this point, the editing deviated from the script. By intercutting the
two different dates, it was possible to increase the momentum, contrast
the two couples, reinforce the jokes, and further engage the audience.
Transition points, moving back and forth between the two dates, were
triggered by punchlines to jokes or physical movements, such as a kiss or
slamming down a shot glass.
The intercut is an important tactic for writers to keep in mind. Check
out some of the masterful uses of the intercut, such as the electrified fence
scene from Jurassic Park (1993).
In Jurassic Park, after a power failure shuts down a nearly completed
theme park, releasing its collection of cloned dinosaurs, a visiting
Figure 8.1 Jurassic Park – Climbing the electric fence.

Credit: Universal Studios.
Figure 8.2 Jurassic Park – Restarting the power grid.

85
paleontologist, Alan Grant (Sam Neill), finds himself fighting to save the
lives of two kids, Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex (Ariana Richards). At one
point, Grant decides that they must scale the giant electrified fence that sur-
rounds the compound in order to escape the rampaging dinosaurs and find
shelter in the visitors’ center. The power failure has deactivated the electricity
so Grant assumes the fence is safe to climb. What they don’t know is that two
other scientists, Ellie (Laura Dern) and Hammond (Richard Attenborough),
are working to restore the power – an awesome and frightening scenario.
Hammond radios the reboot instructions to Ellie. She locates the junc-
tion box and begins the process of flipping one enormous circuit breaker
after another, while Grant, Tim, and Lex begin to scale the fence. At this
point, the scenes cut back and forth between the fence and the basement,
where Ellie struggles to restore the park’s electricity. This intercutting
between Grant and the kids trying to make their way to safety and Ellie
and Hammond’s attempts to restart the power grid keeps the audience on
edge throughout the sequence. As the editing tightens, and each party gets
closer and closer to achieving their goal, the tension increases.
In the case of Jurassic Park, the writers, Michael Crichton (novel and
adaptation) and David Koepp, anticipated this tactic and wrote the inter-
cutting into their script.
EXT. JUNGLE – DAY
GRANT, TIM and LEX scramble through the jungle,

completely out of breath, exhausted. Grant
practically drags them up the last hill, but
they make it, and collapse at the base of
the big electrical fence that surrounds the
compound.
Grant looks up at the fence. It must be over

twenty feet high. He looks at one of the
warning lights on the fence. It’s out. He picks
up a stick and pokes the wire. No sparks fly.
Still not trusting the fence, he pokes it with

a finger. He lays both hands on a cable and
closes his fingers around it. Nothing.
GRANT
ower’s still off.
P
It’s a pretty big climb,
though. You guys think you
can make it?
86
TIM
Nope.
LEX
Way too high.
Far in the distance, the T-rex ROARS. Without a

second delay, both kids leap to their feet.
EXT. PATH – DAY
ELLIE and MULDOON step onto the path that leads

through the jungle toward the maintenance shed.
The gate CLANGS shut behind them, making them
both jump.
(Along the way, they encounter a raptor and barely get away from the
creature before they shoot a hole in the maintenance shed and enter.
From here, the action returns to the jungle.)
EXT. JUNGLE – DAY
A hand comes into the foreground and takes a

firm grip on the tight fence cable. Another
hand follows it, then a third.
GRANT, TIM, and LEX climb over the fence,

pulling themselves up by the tension wires,
crawling right past a “DANGER!” sign that tells
them this fence ought to be electrified.
CUT TO:
INT. BUNKER – DAY
MALCOM and HAMMOND hover over a complex diagram

of the maintenance shed that’s spread out in
front of them. Hammond clutches the radio in
his hands, almost praying to it. Finally, it
CRACKLES.
ELLIE (O.S.)
I’m in.
INT. MAINTENANCE SHED – DAY
87
ELLIE is at the doorway of the maintenance

shed, breathing hard from fear, listening to
Hammond’s VOICE on the radio.
HAMMOND (O.S.)
kay – straight ahead
O
there’s a metal staircase.
Go down it.
Ellie does, heading down into the room,

shining the flashlight ahead of her. There is
a maze of pipes, ducts, and electrical work on
both sides of her.
EXT. JUNGLE – DAY
GRANT and the KIDS are now near the top of the

fence. A warning light, next to Grant’s hand,
is still out.
The action continues back and forth for a couple more pages, with each
party trying to remedy the situation while unknowingly risking lives in
the process. The sequence’s tension continues to escalate as the scenes
intercut between two conflicting goals – Grant’s desperation to get them
all safely on the other side of the fence and Ellie’s attempts to turn the
system back on, which would electrocute the others, without her know-
ing it. It’s a perfect combination of conflicting desires, all woven together
by the juxtaposition of two different scenes.
This kind of intercutting requires clever transitions to transport the
audience from one place to another. The family saga Pachinko (2022),
based on the novel by Min Jin Lee and written for Apple TV by Soo
Hugh, uses intercutting to build a complex tale that follows a Korean
immigrant family over four generations. The episodes glide back and
forth across multiple time periods, starting in 1915 Korea (under Japanese
occupation) – where we meet the mother of the story’s main protagonist,
Sunja (Minha Kim) – and then leaping ahead to a corporate boardroom
in 1989 New York to meet Sunja’s grandson, Solomon (Jin Ha), ethni-
cally Korean but raised in Japan. In order to secure a promotion with his
Japanese firm in Tokyo, Solomon will try to convince a Korean woman
his grandmother’s age to sell her land for a hotel development. The sub-
titled episodes weave between the multiple languages employed in the
film, from Korean (in yellow) to English to Japanese (in blue). Although
unusual, this prismatic effect, achieved by intercutting time and place,
88
was also showcased beautifully in The Godfather: Part II (1974) and,

more recently, Cloud Atlas (2012).
In order to accomplish the highly complex embroidery of places and
times, while maintaining clarity for the viewer, Pachinko’s writer and
filmmakers designed a wide variety of audio and visual transitions. These
incorporated practical camera moves and audio pre-laps, as well as dis-
solves and straight cuts introduced during post production. In some
instances, a straight cut from a close-up of Sunja’s young face to a close-
up of her elder self served to transport us suddenly across time. In other
cases, the camera dollied past a wall, creating a practical wipe from 1915,
then emerging on the other side of a different wall in 1986 and then back
again to 1915.
Many of these transitions were conceived in the script stage, including
the one that bridges the opening scenes (below). Ultimately, it wasn’t used
since the filmmakers chose to begin in 1914 Korea – a more intriguing
and tonally significant place to start – rather than 1989 New York.
EXT. SIDEWALKS OF MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY -

DAY (1989)
The Greatest City in the World, looming with

skyscrapers that shoot up into the skies like
commercial cathedrals paying homage to Man’s
Prodigy. But here, on the ground, the MORNING
CROWDS flood the sidewalk. A sea of white faces,
washing over Wall Street like a prodigious wave.
But gradually, one face starts to stand out …
SOLOMON BAEK (28, Korean). Despite being the

only ASIAN in this canvas of WHITE FACES, or
perhaps because of it, this man holds his own.
His confidence – a force to be reckoned with.
And as he plows past our camera –
CHYRON: NEW YORK, 1989
We begin to glimpse another figure

approaching – A KOREAN WOMAN dressed in the
traditional hanbok. No one else in the crowd
seems to spot her. Only us, marveling at this
discombobulating figure who stands very much
“out of time” here. And as we PUSH IN on her
face, isolating her in the frame, the music
abruptly stops, and we –
89
SLOW DISSOLVE TO:

EXT. TAEJONGDAE FOREST, YEONGDO ISLET, KOREA -

EARLY MORNING (1914)
From that world of stone, concrete, and steel,

we jump to the poetic rustlings of green
treetops turning to fall orange, rendered in
delicate brush strokes. A world seemingly
devoid of any unnatural materials.
Here, we find the same woman from our

cityscape – YANGJIN (18) - halting suddenly to
stare at a tiny hut cloaked in trees.
In the final released version, the order is reversed. And titles were added
at the beginning to establish the historical context:
In 1910, Japan colonized Korea as part of its growing empire.

Under Japanese rule many Koreans lost their livelihood, forcing
many to leave their homes for foreign lands.
Despite this, the People endured.
Families endured.
Including one family …
From one generation to another.
As the titles fade to black, sounds of nature fill the screen, then cutting
to a young woman (who we’ll recognized as Yangjin, the protagonist’s
mother) standing in the midst of a forest, gazing toward a distant hut.
An audio downbeat heralds another, larger title: JAPANESE-
OCCUPIED KOREA 1915. Rather than following Yangjin’s walk to the
hut and then interrupting it with a cut to another New York City scene
ending with pre-lapped dialogue (“My mother was not a fortunate
woman …”), as in the script, the action jump cuts directly to the interior
of the hut:
INT. THE HUT, YEONGDO ISLET, KOREA - EARLY

MORNING (1914)
In the one-room abode, Yangjin is kneeled in

front of the MUDANG (the Shaman) – as old as
time itself – along with her CHILD ASSISTANT.
90
First forced into the realm of shadows by the

Joseon Dynasty and further marginalized for
being “too Korean” by the Japanese, the Mudang
now sits crouched small. But in desperation,
Yangjin offers her story:
YANGJIN
A
nd my birth was a great burden to her. She
died when I was very young, and my father – in
his grief – took to drink –
The dialogue is slightly revised in the released version: “My mother was
not fortunate. And my birth was a great burden to her. She died when I
was but a child. In his grief, my father took to drink …”
She tells how her father offered her as a bride to a kind boy with a cleft
lip in Dongsam. In her meeting with the shaman, she asks that a curse be
lifted, and several years later she gives birth to the story’s main female
character, Sunja.
The scene ends with, “I am with child. There’s a curse in my blood,”
leading to a slow dissolve, like ghosts churning over her image, that takes
us to the crowded New York City streets in 1989. The contrast is
striking.
We finally meet Solomon, tracking with him into a modern office build-
ing and upstairs to a conference room where he’s told by the higher-ups,
“Listen, there’s no easy way to say this. You’re not getting the bump.”
This motivates him to prove himself and win over his bosses by securing
a coveted piece of real estate in Tokyo, where one landowner is refusing
to agree to sell.
As we will see again and again, the value of intercutting is the essence
of film editing and, consequently, is an effective approach for the writer
to employ. Remember, a screenplay is not the final work. It is a story told
in pictures, and the writer’s job is to keep in mind the power of juxtapos-
ing images and scenes to add interest, nuance, and deeper meaning to the
story as it plays out.
Point-of-View
Who’s watching the scene? Why this character and not someone else? Is
there a point-of-view? Without a point-of-view, a scene feels untethered,
free floating. The action has fewer consequences and less at stake. Who is
this person who is witnessing the action?
Action scenes are particularly prone to this conundrum. In a presenta-
tion to USC’s School of Cinematic Arts,5 alum Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale
91
Station, Black Panther) made the all-important point that action scenes are
not only about exciting stunts, stunning effects, and thrilling action. Most
importantly, like everything else in storytelling, they are about character.
In trying to service the excitement of a battle, a chase scene, or other
dynamic action, directors and editors can get carried away with the spec-
tacle of a scene and lose track of the characters. It’s important to always
keep the main character in mind and remember the dramatic need that
drives them.
Editor Joe Walker echoed the primacy of character in relation to the
wildly visual and auditory experience of Dune. Here, a world that doesn’t
really exist becomes stunningly believable through accomplished produc-
tion design and careful editing. “It doesn’t matter how great the world
building is. If you don’t care for the central character then we might as
well go home,” said Walker.6
Character drives plot and influences the audience’s identification with
the story. Scenes need the human quality that connects the audience to
the events unfolding before them. Without insights into the characters,
the action becomes as dazzling, but ultimately as empty, as fireworks.
In Dune, a film of extraordinary action sequences, Walker understood
the importance of knowing when to let an actor’s moment play. The audi-
ence needs to be able to look into the character’s eyes and feel something.
Notes
1 “The Whole World Is Watching: Inside Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago
7.” Netflix. February 24, 2021. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q6eCLk0XLs
2 Promotional interview for awards consideration. Netflix.
3 Aaron Sorkin in conversation with Rob Lowe. American Cinemathque/Gwen
Deglise. March 5, 2021.
4 The editing triangle consists of selection, length and juxtaposition.
5 “Q&A with Ryan Coogler.” USC School of Cinematic Arts, Eileen Norris
Cinema Theater. June 6, 2018.
6 Huffish, Steve. “The Art of the Cut, Ep. 135. ‘Dune’ Editor Joe Walker, ACE.”
October 27, 2021. Anchor.fm/frameio-insider
92
9
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
The chapter explores time as a crucial factor in film: how it is cre-

ated in the script and supported by the final cut, and what happens
when time factors are neglected in the script. Montages, often dis-
covered only at the editing stage, can be designed while writing the
script and allow the compression of time and the minimalization of
non-dramatic sequences.
The act of making a cut alters time. Look at the high speed transitions
through time, multiple universes and life paths in Everything Everywhere
All at Once (2022). In film, time moves in many directions and at differ-
ent speeds. These varying velocities mirror our psychological perception
of time rather than following the linear clock time that we live by. The
artist Andy Warhol once made Sleep (1964), a film documenting the
poet John Giorno (who was also his lover) sleeping for 5 hours and 21
minutes. This represents an extreme example of a very slow passage of
clock time. Film time, on the other hand, gives the impression of time’s
passage without accounting for every second. It is time as feeling.
Thoughts of the past and future bring anticipation, stress, and joy to
human life. The burn one feels when performing intense physical exercise
can feel a lot longer than the delight of a kiss, a chocolate chip cookie, or
a warm bath.
Unlike animals, who Rilke reminds us “see the open with their whole
eyes,”1 humans, with our crowded minds, spend time in past regrets or
future worries. The mystic’s suggestion to “be here now”2 is often easier
said than done. In practice, it is hard to stay in the present, even though
that is the only reality. Movies create an artificial present that captivates
us for the duration of the film but then releases us back into our world of
concerns when it’s over.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-10 93
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
The essence of drama is conflict. Editors and writers build this conflict
into the construction of scenes. Those aspects that make life pleasurable
or painful are what bring stories alive, allowing them to thrive and find
satisfying, though not necessarily happy, conclusions.
There is often a ticking clock where the hero or heroine must achieve
a goal before time runs out. When that isn’t apparent in the footage, an
editor will introduce intercuts to add intensity or time pressure. Failing
that, they may request additional material in the form of pick-ups. In the
case of an action thriller that had a rather light-hearted and unfocused
beginning, we added a short chase scene at the beginning. The main
character was pursued by an unseen assailant who would eventually
reappear.
In another instance, for a teen comedy about a cheerleading camp, we
added scenes of competition in order to raise the stakes and make the
action more engaging. For writers searching for a way to up the ante, it
can help to add time constraints, pursuits, or competition.
Christopher Nolan’s films often talk about the confounding and mallea-
ble concept of time. In editing these films, he takes advantage of film’s abil-
ity to alter time, cutting back and forth through past, future, and present.
Memento (2001), edited by Dody Dorn, ACE, moves backward and for-
ward through time. Inception (2010) accelerates and then reverses the flow
of time. Tenet (2020) jumps forward and then back. And, even in the midst
of stated, and sometimes confusing, time bending, some of Tenet’s most
profound intrusions on time appear in traditional management of film time.
Film Time: How film editing alters the perceived

length of time in a way that is not controlled by
clock time.
Toward the end of Tenet, we see the digital readout of a bomb counting
down, a suspenseful technique that has occurred copious times in film
history, whether it is James Bond in Fort Knox handcuffed to an atomic
bomb that is about to explode – it is finally defused 007 seconds before
detonation – or the ticking clock in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too
Much (1956). What one discovers upon examining these scenes and oth-
ers is that clock time has little to do with film time. It may take a minute
or an hour for a second to pass by.
94
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
Figure 9.1 Tenet – A countdown.

For decades, editors consistently worked hard to maintain the rules

of continuity and object permanence. Today, with the accelerated pace
of cinema, it is hard to think of a film that doesn’t contain jump cuts.
Look at the loading of the tape recorder in the Trial of the Chicago 7 or
the armament montage in The Convent (2000). These actions reflect
activities that were described in the script and documented during film-
ing but were truncated in editing. As we saw in the first chapter, a writer
can take advantage of these editing techniques in the way that Martin
McDonagh did in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri or Taika
Waititi in Jojo Rabbit.
Writers do well to keep their eyes on the clock. Consider how altering
time, either by slowing it down, speeding it up, or rearranging the chro-
nology of events can further engage your audience.
Clock Time versus Film Time

Transition points ground the audience in terms of time’s passage. A cut
is the basic unit of transition. Within a scene, each cut posits a moment
in time. Time can move faster or slower through the scene depending
on the cutting style. A prime example of this is found in the adrenaline
95
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
injection scene of Pulp Fiction (1994), written and directed by Quentin

Tarantino and edited by Sally Menke. Here, what is ostensibly a count to
three – something that usually takes less than three seconds – transpires
in over half a minute owing to the intercutting of multiple shots. In this
scene, Vince (John Travolta) is about to plunge a hypodermic needle
into Mia’s (Uma Thurman) chest with the intention of reviving her from
a heroin overdose. Cut by cut, the audience is treated to shots of the
participants, the needle, the mark on Uma Thurman’s chest, and so on.
The variety of images adds to the suspense and extends the actual screen
time while still giving the impression that the action took place within
a count of three.
This approach was prefigured in the script and expanded upon by edi-
tor and director to take advantage of film time.
The injection is ready. Lance hands Vincent the

needle.
LANCE
It’s ready, I’ll tell
you what to do.
VINCENT
You’re gonna give her
the shot.
LANCE
No, you’re gonna give
her the shot.
VINCENT
I’ve never done this
before.
LANCE
I’ve never done this
before either, and I
ain’t starting now. You
brought ’er here, that
means you give her the shot.
The day I bring an
ODing bitch to your
place, then I gotta give
her the shot.
96
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
Jody hurriedly joins them in the huddle, a big

fat red magic marker in her hand.
JODY
Got it.
Vincent grabs the magic marker out of Jody’s

hand and makes a big red dot on Mia’s body
where her heart is.
VINCENT
Okay, what do I do?
LANCE
Well, you’re giving
her an injection of adrenalin
straight to her heart. But
she’s got a breast plate
in front of her heart,
so you gotta pierce through
that. So what you gotta do
is bring the needle down
in a stabbing motion.
Lance demonstrates a stabbing motion, which

looks like “The Shape” killing its victims in
“HALLOWEEN”.
VINCENT
I gotta stab her?
LANCE
If you want the needle
to pierce through to heart,
you gotta stab her
hard. Then once you do,
push down on the plunger.
VINCENT
What happens after that?
LANCE
I’m curious about that
myself.
97
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
VINCENT
This isn’t a fuckin’
joke man!
LANCE
She’s supposed to come
out of it like –
(snaps his fingers)
– that.
Vincent lifts the needle up above his head in a

stabbing motion. He looks down at Mia.
Mia is fading fast. Soon nothing will help her.
Vincent eyes narrow, ready to do this.
VINCENT
Count to three.
Lance, on his knees right beside Vincent, does

not know what to expect.
LANCE
One …
Needle raised ready to strike.
LANCE (O.S.)
… two …
Jody’s face is alive with anticipation.
NEEDLE in that air, poised like a rattler ready

to strike.
LANCE (O.S.)
…three!
The needle leaves frame, THRUSTING down hard.
98
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
Vincent brings the needle down hard, STABBING

Mia in the chest.
Mia’s head is JOLTED from the impact.
The syringe plunger is pushed down, PUMPING the

adrenaline out through the needle.
Mia’s eyes POP WIDE OPEN and she lets out

a HELLISH cry of the banshee. She BOLTS UP
in a sitting position, needle stuck in her
chest – SCREAMING.
This highly suspenseful scene uses in-scene (shot-to-shot) transitions to

build anticipation through the magic of film fime. But there are also
scene-to-scene transitions, which we’ll discuss in coming chapters.
Included in those are transitions that constitute a montage sequence.
Montages add another dimension of film time. Montages allow the
filmmaker to leave out excessive action and dialogue and get to essence
of the story. Occasionally, scenes that are fleshed out in a script become
montages in the editing room. Why is this? Because those scenes lack the
compelling aspects that make for good drama. Yet they need to be there
in order to supply essential information and to account for necessary
aspects of growth within the characters.
A while back, there was an energetic drone shot of a bowling alley that
garnered a lot of attention on Twitter. The camera weaves in and out of the
alleys, past bowlers, into the pin loading mechanism, and eventually into
the pins for a strike. It’s a clever, well-executed shot, but it quickly wears
thin without the dialectic that editing and the juxtaposition of shots engen-
der, let alone story with its inherent beats. Travel logs and tour videos can
also suffer from this issue. Instead, choosing the highlights and blending
them together in a montage often create a more compelling piece.
The slow growth of a relationship or the development of skills involves
scenes that appear in a script but are trimmed down in the editing room
when they lack enough emotion to supply deep engagement. In these
cases, why not start with a montage to begin with?
As a guide, the writer should consider which scenes are absolutely nec-
essary to tell the tale and then survey which of those lack conflict or other
dramatic elements. Watching someone exercise, learn to sew, or go out on
a date is generally not a compelling experience for an audience. But the
activity needs to be included to advance the story. A montage solves this
problem. Many scripts, however, arrive with informational scenes that
ask to be played out in their entirety. In the editing room, the editor will
discover that it is better to move the action along with a montage.
99
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
Figure 9.2 Pulp fiction – The adrenaline shot scene.

Credit: Miramax Films.
100
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
This relates to the ubiquitous dictum of show, don’t tell heard in every
writers class or group. Generally, the montage’s advantage resides in
showing rather than telling.
Consider the chess playing montages in The Queen’s Gambit (2020).
At a point, the audience, unless particularly populated with chess aficio-
nados, can lose interest. This is likely when the protagonist easily prevails
in every match, up until the final one. But well-edited montages commu-
nicate the same information without dissipating the drama or enjoyment.
In fact, the audience’s engagement is enhanced. Some montages may be
quite sophisticated, such as the one in The Queen’s Gambit “Fork” epi-
sode, incorporating visual effects, matte compositing, and upbeat music
to show the long path to arrive at a showdown between the two main
competitors, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Benny Watts (Thomas
Brodie-Sangster).
To jump directly into the final competition would have diminished the
stakes of the match and left the audience feeling cheated. Yet playing
through each of the previous competitions would have made for an
unwieldy and less involving show.
It is inspiring to note that the writer of The Queen’s

Gambit, Allan Scott, took 30 years, rewriting and
re-submitting his script, until it was finally pro-
duced and became the most viewed show on Netflix
at that time, with 62 million viewers.
In other cases, an encounter needs to play out step by step, as in the

challenge to Prince T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) in Black Panther
(2018). Here, each move is choreographed, starting with various tribes of
Wakanda voicing their support for the prince who will become king. But
there is one holdout, M’Baku (Winston Duke), who insists on a physical
challenge to the throne. As the fight escalates, our hero initially has the
upper hand, but the script rightly calls for the competitor to gain an
advantage, beating him with head and fists, until it is not clear who will
survive.
By the end of the scene, on the edge of a waterfall, the prince finally
prevails and shows mercy to his opponent. His bravery, strength, and
compassion make him the person whose story we want to follow. To have
structured this sequence as a montage, leaving out the details of the con-
flict, the nail-biting twists and turns, would have diminished the scene’s
strength and lessened Prince T’Challa’s victory and his accompanying
mandate to rule.
101
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
Figure 9.3 Queen’s Gambit – Chess competition montage.

Credit: Netflix.
102
THE ESSENCE OF TIME
Figure 9.4 Black Panther – The battle at the waterfall.

Credit: Marvel Studios/Walt Disney Pictures.
As challenging as it is for humans to face an unknown future or make

peace with a bygone past, film stories use this most basic of conflicts to tell
compelling stories. For the writer who juggles time, it’s important to
determine when to slow down and let a scene play out, when to jump
ahead, and when to move forward at an even pace. Whichever approach
best serves the scene, it will play for the audience not as a manipulation of
time but as the only possible way that the event could have transpired.
As we’ll see in the next chapter, one of the most powerful uses of time
occurs when creating filmic moments. Here, the characters are suspended
in time and gripped by intense emotion.
Notes
1 Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. Translated by C.F. MacIntyre. University
of California Press, Berkeley. 1965.
2 Dass, Ram. Be Here Now. Harmony/Crown, New York. 1971.
103
10
THE FILMIC MOMENT
Another aspect of the time equation is the creation of filmic

moments in the editing room. This chapter explores plot and theme
as catalysts for filmic moments and speaks to how writers create
powerful, emotional moments.
One of the great hurdles in screenwriting comes in creating emotion-

ally rich moments. These moments can arrive with or without dialogue.
They might be captured in a look, an interruption of time, an unex-
pected image. Many filmic moments are subtle, so the supporting images
might not present themselves immediately. They must be discovered or
ferreted out.
Filmic Moment: A period of time where the story’s

overall theme is heightened by a brief but intense
interaction between the characters, anchoring them
to the present. In these moments, time seems to
slow down.
At times, the creation or reinforcement of these moments depends on the

editor’s approach to watching the dailies and remaining receptive to what
is seen there. As mentioned before, there are two basic ways to evaluate
dailies. The first we’ll call the director’s approach, which is based on the
original shooting script. Through shot lists and blocking, the director
seeks to accumulate the footage that will answer the requirements of the
script. This consists of all the angles that best cover the action and dia-
logue. Along with this comes the actors’ skills in delivering the lines and
104 DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-11

THE FILMIC MOMENT
evoking a feeling. Ideally, the daily coverage will eventually satisfy every
requirement posed by the script.
The other approach is the editor’s approach. In this approach, the edi-
tor’s actions are based not on the wish list of the shooting script but on
the dailies themselves, which may be mirrored in the script supervisor’s
script. For the writer, it is instructive to follow the path of the dailies and
see how they have altered or reinforced the script.
Filmic moments can grow out of both of these lines of attack. In one,
the editor seeks out the moment; in the other, the elements are presented
to the editor. It could be a turn of the head, a roll of the eyes, the tilt of
a hand that imbues a once simple scene with deeper meaning. Or it may
be the excavation of a missing link, the neglected motivation for the
entire scene.
Some of the clearest manifestations of filmic moments occur in scenes
of attraction or loss. Each cut draws the audience deeper and deeper into
the intimate world of the characters, whether in public or private. The
characters’ experience of each other glides back and forth, allowing the
emotions to grow and eventually blossom.
Writer/director James Savoca (The Crooked Corner), feels that
it is my job to create the most exciting moments possible. A film

is made up of scenes, which are made up of moments. A scene
without an interesting moment will simply fall flat. A moment
is where we the audience engage with the characters. It is how
and why we feel for them. If you say to me “Casablanca” I don’t
think story, I think moments. I actually see them – the moment
Rick is left alone after Ilsa’s late-night visit. The burning cig-
arette, the fallen whiskey glass and Rick’s watery eyes. This
moment in time is where I connect with Rick and am forever on
his side, through the ups and downs, I watch and root for him
all the way.1
An example of a powerful filmic moment of attraction is found in the

subway scene of Steve McQueen’s film Shame (2011). Shame is the tale
of Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbinder), a Wall Street sex addict,
whose cavalier adventures are impinged upon by the arrival of his
sister Sissy Sullivan (Carey Mulligan) for an unexpected and extended
visit.
105
THE FILMIC MOMENT
Figure 10.1 Shame – Brandon and a stranger encounter each other on the subway.
Credit: 20th Century Studios.
106
THE FILMIC MOMENT
In this scene, Brandon is riding the New York subway alone when his
eyes connect with another passenger, a young woman seated across the
aisle from him. The scene begins with an out- of-
focus close-
up of
Brandon, then a cut introducing the slightly wider shot of the young
woman. They exchange looks.
She glances at him, then looks down and then up again in a coy, flirty
manner, her lips forming a faint smile. The camera lingers on her, longer
than a casual glance would invite. Her eyes flash again.
The next cut is also a sustained shot, again of Brandon, his expression
unaltered, Kuleshov-like. The only movement is the flashing patterns of
light on the tunnel wall outside the train’s window.
Then it cuts to another sustained, lingering shot on the young woman,
the smile spreading through her, cocking her head, all the while maintain-
ing eye contact.
Back to Brandon, his expression barely altered, shameless, serious. The
train stops. His head bobs slightly with the braking.
Back to the woman. She appears aroused, she shifts her head in an
inviting manner, her tongue tracing her lips, her eyes holding on him. Her
chest lifts in a sigh. Her eyes gaze downward, trancelike, as her head lulls
back against the wall. She seems taken away. The cut continues to hold
on her. She looks off dreamily. The train jerks, begins to move again.
Cut to: Brandon, holding his gaze, but now in a tighter close-up. Up
until this moment, their shot sizes and composition haven’t changed, but
now the angle has grown more intimate on Brandon.
The next shot reveals her hands resting in the crease of her short skirt
as it folds between her legs. One leg crosses protectively over the other.
The fingers twist slightly, then the camera tilts slowly up to her face star-
ing daringly at Brandon. Her lips part.
A cut returns us to the neutral close-up of Brandon, unwavering in his
gaze.
Then back to the woman in a slightly wider shot, a look of sadness
seems to eclipse her. Or maybe it’s resignation. Maybe both. She looks up
as if making a decision and stands, crossing to the center pole, her hand
grasping it and revealing – a wedding ring. The shot holds until another
hand reaches in and grasps the bar below hers. It’s Brandon’s hand, and
his dark cloaked form obscures half the frame. Still on the same shot, the
camera tilts up to find a two-shot, in profile, of Brandon and the woman,
with the subway car and other passengers in the background. Not a word
has been spoken. The music rises with emotion. Their eyes flit lightly
without ever looking at each other.
Then, as the train slows again, still in the same shot, the young woman
steps forward toward the exit. Brandon follows. The camera follows him
as he moves through the crowded station and up a flight of steps in pur-
suit of her. But she’s gone.
107
THE FILMIC MOMENT
Finally he stops, glancing around, having lost her. In tight close-up, he

looks this way and that, then finally returns to the stairs and heads back
down to the platform. The camera holds back and lets him meld into the
crowd.
This is a riveting filmic moment. Its true impact derives from both
visual and auditory influences: the order and size of shots, the timing and
length of each cut, the judicious camera moves, and the music. It’s instruc-
tive to see how this scene was originally constructed in the script.
INT. SUBWAY. DAWN.
BRANDON sits, looking over at the PRETTY SUBWAY

GIRL sitting opposite -
The train moves on, after a while stopping at

another platform.
PEOPLE get on, PEOPLE get off.

BRANDON’s eyes travel down over the PRETTY

SUBWAY GIRL’s legs and up -
She opens them a little, the dip of her skirt,

sinking deep between her thighs -
She looks up, senses BRANDON watching. She lets

her fingers fall in her lap.
BRANDON shifts a little in his seat to get a

better look through the crowd. Suddenly she
stands and makes her way to the train door.
Hand reaching out and clenching a metal pole
for stability, revealing a wedding ring.
BRANDON’s hand reaches for the pole too,

touching her as he stands behind her. There
is a gentle unison contact. BRANDON’s breath,
heavy on her neck. Both are frozen to the spot,
caught in a mutual moment.
NT. SUBWAY. MORNING.

I
The train door bolts open and the PRETTY SUBWAY

GIRL disembarks. BRANDON is blocked by a MALE
108
THE FILMIC MOMENT
PASSENGER as he gets out in quick pursuit of

the PRETTY SUBWAY GIRL.
BRANDON is several paces behind now, pursues.

She turns left into a stairwell.
It’s almost like fighting a downward river.

People are walking into his path as he
struggles to keep pace with the PRETTY SUBWAY
GIRL.
The tail of her coat vanishes at the top of the

stairs. A moment later, BRANDON reaches the
summit, to be greeted by a wrought-
iron gate.
He looks left at one staircase. People ascend.

He looks right at another staircase. Other
passengers ascend.
People come in and out of the turnstiles on

the right-
hand side. He has lost her. A sudden
moment of disappointment crosses his face.
He descends the staircase, dejected.
While giving a sense of the attraction and loss, the script also projects
a slightly predatory feel and lacks some of the mutuality of the moment
that captivates us in the final cut from the editor, Joe Walker, and the
writer–director. McQueen has a masterful command of timing as seen in
some of his other films, such as the highly disturbing hanging scene in 12
Years a Slave (2013).
In the script, the writer’s use of all capital letters each time he describes
a character’s actions, rather than the standard Hollywood way of only
using caps to denote sounds or introduce a character gives a sense of the
juxtaposition of images, as if we’re seeing cuts.
By the end of the film, Brandon has suffered the consequences of his
addictive personality and is again riding the subway when he sees the girl
from the beginning of the film. This time she is without a hat and her hair
is tossed down around her shoulders. Again, an unspoken moment passes
between them:
At this moment, the PRETTY SUBWAY GIRL stands

up, eyeing BRANDON as she makes her way to the
door, blocking BRANDON as the train pulls in to
her stop.
109
THE FILMIC MOMENT
INT. PLATFORM. SUBWAY. MORNING.

The train pulls away from the station and

disappears into the tunnel. We do not know if
BRANDON is still aboard or has succumbed to his
urges.
In the final cut, this moment develops similarly to their first encounter
in terms of shot selection, until we again see her hand with the wedding
ring grip the pole in the subway car. But, like the script, the wordless final
moment is left equivocal.
What can we take away from this? In dialogue scenes, it’s often impor-
tant to keep the scene descriptions to a minimum. But, in a scene like this,
the timing and order of images are crucial. In this case, a writer may
consider detailing the actual shots. Most scripts rely on sparse descrip-
tions, expecting that the director and, ultimately, the editor will make
those shot choices. In Shame, a more detailed description of the interac-
tion occurs. But one can see that even that could have allowed for more
details to reinforce the fiery aspect of the scene. The powerful filmic
moment that the director and editor achieved shows what other details,
albeit brief, might have been incorporated into the script.
The strength of the moments in this film mirrors those in our earlier
discussion of the looks in The Power of the Dog, where silent glances
build emotional suspense. In The Power of the Dog, these moments play
in a way that is reductive and repelling rather than attractive. In Shame,
the moments were created through glimpses and careful timing in order
to engender a sense of sexual attraction. In The Power of the Dog, the
looks create anxiety and dread. In both, dialogue is kept to a minimum.
As we can see, most filmic moments require the writer and, subse-
quently, the editor to slow down and let time and emotion expand. Rather
than dispatching the action with a few words, it is necessary to build line
after line, shot by shot, until the writer finds the emotion that the moment
seeks to engender.
Note
1 James Savoca. Interview with the author.
110
11
ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
The chapter explores extraneous artifacts of the original script, the

need for clarity in selling a script, how too much exposition can
dull the audience’s involvement, the redesign of dialogue to incor-
porate subtext, and dialogue strategies that writers can use from
the beginning.
Dialogue and Subtext

Films are not novels. Long and flowery dialogue or highly expository dia-
logue generally doesn’t work well in movies. The dialogue in well-written
scripts has a natural flow and simplicity throughout. A character’s dia-
logue generally does not go on for more than a couple of sentences before
switching to a response from the other character.
Dialogue is the essence of screenwriting and supersedes description.
Like special effects, which don’t have to be real, just look real, the same is
the case with dialogue. It doesn’t have to be real; it just has to sound real.
The most common dialogue scene consists of a conversation between
two people. It can be an argument, a decision, a seduction, a reveal. Two-
person dialogue scenes are deceptively simple to edit because the cover-
age, in terms of set-ups, can be minimal. Two over-the-shoulder shots and
a two-shot could make an entire scene without the audience feeling a
significant gap.
For more spice, a director might include singles – close-ups without
anyone else in the frame – and a wide shot. If there’s movement, such as
walking and talking, a tracking shot will come into play. With these sim-
ple elements, the editor can weave a complex tapestry of nuance, misdi-
rects, and emotion.
Action scenes, on the other hand, can consume the entire alphabet of
the alphanumeric scene slating system, requiring the use of double letters,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-12 111

ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
such as AA, BB, CC, and so on, to mark all the coverage. In this respect,
one might conclude that cutting action is more complex and challenging.
But is it? In action, it’s important to keep the viewer on track with what’s
happening, not confuse them with leaps in time and space (for greater
discussion of how geography, temporality, and guideposts influence
action, see The Healthy Edit), but dialogue offers an equal or greater
challenge.
In action, an editor can grab the master shot, plug in a bunch of detailed
coverage (such as medium shots and close-ups), throw some music and
sound effects on it, and have a serviceable rough cut of an action sequence.
This is not the case with dialogue. Dialogue, because it is so akin to emo-
tion and performance, requires exacting moves.
Every word, every eye movement, every pause and breath are exposed.
Likewise, in writing dialogue scenes, words that don’t ring true, that feel
clichéd, that overemphasize information rather than character, that
ignore the rhythms of language, fail to engage an audience. Dialogue is
hard. A simple confession, a lover’s disagreement, a boss’s manipulation
are, in a sense, more complex than an exploding building, an all-or-
nothing car chase, a sword fight.
Dialogue scenes can be laconic or energetic, they can play like a game
of chess or like a tennis match – quick volleys back and forth with little
room to pause or think. Consider the excellent two-person dialogue scene
in The Social Network (2010) where the main character, an ambitious
Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) from Harvard, is drinking with his
girlfriend from Boston University. Since it is the opening scene, the first
dialogue begins over the Columbia Studios logo, with Zuckerberg’s claim
that “There are more people in China with genius IQs...” This sets the
stage for repartee about the value of intellectual elitism and membership
in social clubs, of which Facebook will eventually become the most exten-
sive and democratic one in the world.
During the exchange, the two characters remain in place at the table,
until the end when they exit. Along the way, something devastating
occurs. We witness the disintegration of a relationship. In the end, the
girlfriend (Rooney Mara) gets the last word. “You’ll think girls won’t
like you because you’re a nerd. But I can tell you...” she concludes in a
tight close-up, used nowhere else in the scene, “...it’s because you’re an
asshole.”
Aaron Sorkin’s evocative writing, along with the tight editing by Kirk
Baxter, ACE, and Angus Wall, ACE, propels the scene to its fiery conclu-
sion. Interestingly, the scene contains few dialogue overlaps, with each
character given their due before cutting to the next. In writing a scene like
this, the writer uses a minimum of scene directions, nothing that inter-
rupts the rapid-fire delivery of the lines.
112
ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
The scene is stark and simple.
MARK
How do you distinguish
Yourself in a population
of people who all got
1600 on their SAT’s?
ERICA
didn’t know they take
I
SAT’s in China.
MARK
hey don’t. I wasn’t talking
T
about China anymore. I
was talking about me.
ERICA
You got 1600?
MARK
Yes. I could sing in an
a Capella group, but I
can’t sing.
ERICA
Does that mean you
actually got nothing wrong?
MARK
can row crew or invent
I
a 25 dollar PC.
ERICA
Or you can get into a
final club.
MARK
Or I can get into a final club.
ERICA
ou know, from a woman’s
Y
perspective, sometimes not
singing in an a Capella
group is a good thing?
113
ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
MARK
This is serious.
ERICA
n the other hand I do
O
like guys who row crew.
MARK
(a beat)
Well I can’t do that.
ERICA
I was kid –
MARK
es, it means I got nothing
Y
wrong on the test.
ERICA
Have you ever tried?
MARK
I’m trying right now.
ERICA
To row crew?
MARK
o get into a final club. To row
T
crew? No. Are you,
like - whatever – delusional?
The lines are terse. Almost poetic. And highly evocative – “Dating you
is like dating a stairmaster,” Erica declares later in the scene, just before
breaking up with Mark. Brevity in dialogue is generally to the writer’s
advantage.
How often does one encounter scripts where the dialogue isn’t a line or
two but a paragraph? Sometimes more than a paragraph where the writ-
ers felt compelled to pontificate and share their message through their
hapless characters? Generally, give your characters a break. Write dia-
logue that sounds like what real people would say. Part of sounding real
is allowing for breaths and for the other person’s reply. Dialogue that
sounds like a person at a party obsessed with their own words, droning
114
ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
on and on with little interest in the other person, is generally boring, and
it will feel that way for the audience.
When confronted with this kind of dialogue, editors will leave out lines
or break up the lines to allow for intercuts, pauses, and breaths. Splitting
up multiple lines by cutting away to another character helps vary the
dialogue’s rhythm. There are always exceptions, however, such as Howard
Beale’s (Peter Finch) long, angry tirades in Network (1976). But it took
the skills of an extraordinary writer, Paddy Chayefsky, and the engaging
performance of Finch to pull it off.
Consider some other excellent two-person dialogue scenes. A clever
scene that allows for entrances and exits, uses a variety of angles in the
editing, including wide shots, and incorporates multiple overlaps is found
in The Imitation Game (2014), where Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch)
encounters Commander Denniston (Charles Dance) in a job interview.
Here, not much is stated directly at first, yet we clearly understand the
underlying tension that flows through the scene and between the charac-
ters. In this and the following two examples, the power shifts over the
course of the scene, and a sort of victory is accomplished by our protago-
nists through subtext and insinuation, in spite of the challenging person-
alities they encounter.
Figure 11.1 Imitation Game – The job interview.

Credit: The Weinstein Company/Anchor Bay Entertainment.
INT. BLETCHLEY PARK – COMMANDER DENNISTON’S

OFFICE – LATER
A few minutes later, Alan sits alone in a

cluttered office. He stares ahead blankly at
the empty chair behind the desk. Waits.
115
ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
COMMANDER DENNISTON (O.S.)

What are you doing here?
Alan turns with a start.
ALAN TURING
The girl told me to wait –
COMMANDER DENNISTON
n my office? She tell you to help
I
yourself to a cup of tea while you
were here?
ALAN TURING
No. She didn’t.
COMMANDER DENNISTON
he didn’t tell you what a joke is then
S
either, I gather.
ALAN TURING
Was she supposed to?
COMMANDER DENNISTON
For Christ’s sake – who are you?
ALAN TURING
Alan Turing.
COMMANDER DENNISTON

(looking at paper on his desk)
Turing … Let me see … Oh, Turing.
The mathematician.
ALAN TURING
Correct.
COMMANDER DENNISTON
How ever could I have guessed?
ALAN TURING
Y
ou didn’t. It was written on your paper.
Another powerful two-person scene comes from Hidden Figures (2016).

In the courtroom, NASA employee Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe)
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ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
challenges and ultimately cajoles the judge into allowing her to attend
the local high school, which does not allow Blacks, so she can acquire an
engineering degree while taking “only night classes.”
INT. HAMPTON COUNTY COURTHOUSE – CONTINUOUS
A packed courtroom. NERVOUS DEFENDANTS,

LAWYERS. Way in the back corner, past the sea
of White Folks: Mary sits in “Colored Seating,”
tapping her foot. Finally, A COURT CLERK calls
her name:
A COURT CLERK
ary Jackson. Petition to attend courses
M
sat Hampton High School.
Mary hops up. Approaches the rail. A WHITE-

HAIRED SOUTHERN JUDGE looks up from his case
notes. Stops in his tracks when he sees Mary
is … black.
MARY
Good morning, your honor.
THE JUDGE
Hampton High School is a white school,
Mrs. Jackson.
MARY
Yes, your Honor. I’m aware of that.
The Judge flips through the case notes.
THE JUDGE
Virginia is still a segregated state.

Regardless of what the Federal Government
says or the Supreme Courts says. Our law
is the law.
He reaches for his rejection stamp. Mary blurts

out:
MARY

Your Honor, if I may, I believe there are
special circumstances to be considered.
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ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
THE JUDGE
What would warrant a colored woman
attendin’ a white school?
MARY
May I approach the bench, sir?
The Judge considers, waves the BAILIFF to let

her through.
Mary walks through the rail gate, stands in

front of him.
MARY
Your Honor, you of all people should
understand the importance of being

first.
THE JUDGE
How’s that, Mrs. Jackson?
MARY
ou were first in your family to
Y
serve in the Armed Forces. US Navy. The
f
irst to attend University. George Mason.
And you are the first State Judge
to be re-commissioned by three
consecutive Governors.
THE JUDGE
You’ve done some research.
MARY
Yes, sir.
Here, Mary makes her case, disarming the judge and achieving her
goal, which eventually leads her to an engineering degree and the distinc-
tion of being NASA’s first Black female engineer.
The direct confrontation of a two-person dialogue scene is one of the
most powerful devices in cinema. The challenge that editors often encoun-
ter is the need to keep it moving, without extraneous exposition or flow-
ery language, relying at times on reactions, rather than dialogue itself, to
reinforce the scene’s impact. For the writer, a simple, direct approach with
clever dialogue in small doses often fulfills the scene’s requirements.
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ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
Subtext
Good, meaningful dialogue contains subtext. Subtext reflects an aspect of
the way we normally speak, sometimes saying what we mean, sometimes
cloaking it in allusions, hints, or abstractions. This meta-communication
entices a listener and, in film, an audience to engage with what is said.
Dialogue that reveals too much or is too descriptive or reveals the char-
acter’s exact intentions lacks subtlety and therefore lacks engagement.
When one reads the work of inexperienced writers, one often finds that
the expository approach dominates. Characters explain too much. This
overexplaining, whether to relate events or to illuminate a character’s
feelings, diminishes the effect of the dialogue.
How do editors deal with overly wordy dialogue? Simply put, they cut
it out. Consider this – subtext in speech is a matter of omission, of exclud-
ing direct words or phrases. Of hinting around the subject at hand.
A character’s dialogue and personality can be improved at times by trim-
ming out a line here or there. In this way, editors foster subtext.
Another way to build subtext is through reactions. In editing dialogue,
the question of overlaps comes into play. In an overlap, we see one char-
acter’s reaction while the other character is speaking. This helps reinforce
the subtext. In light of this, writers should consider characters’ reactions
along with what they say. Let’s examine the dinner party scene from the
brilliant Mike Nichols comedy Birdcage (1996), based on the play La
Cage aux Folles, where each character has something to hide. Subterfuge
makes for excellent subtext.
In anticipation of their kids’ upcoming marriage, two families meet –
one, the privileged conservative Republican Senator Kevin Keeley (Gene
Hackman), his wife Louise (Dianne Wiest), and their daughter Barbara
(Calista Flockhart). The other is the liberal, gay, Jewish owner of a drag
club in South Beach, Florida, Armand Goldman (Robin Williams), his lover
Albert (Nathan Lane), and their son Val (Dan Futterman). A perfect set-up
for disaster. Albert has disguised himself as Val’s mother to give the impres-
sion of a typical American family so as not to alienate the Keeleys. Here’s a
glimpse at the ensuing tension reflected in the characters’ dialogue.
INT. ARMAND’S LIVING ROOM
Barbara, Val and Armand are rigid. Only the

Keeleys and Albert are at ease.
SENATOR KEELEY
… just so odd to me, this fuss
over school prayer. As if
anyone – Jews, Muslims, whatever,
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ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
would mind if their children

prayed in the classroom.
ALBERT
It’s insane.
Agador walks in with a bucket of ice, sees

Albert and collapses into hysterical laugher.
ARMAND
hank you, Agador Spartacus.
T
You may go.
Agador puts the ice bucket down and exits.
ALBERT
He’s very nice but he’s
such a problem! We never
know what makes him laugh.
MRS. KEELEY
At least he speaks English.
If you knew how many chauffeurs
we’ve run through in the last
six months …
ALBERT
If you know how many maids
we’ve run through in the
last six years. I could name
a dozen: Rodney, Julian, Bruce –
ARMAND
Oh, look!
(they turn)
You all need more ice
in your drinks!
He picks up the ice bucket and tongs, and

makes his way around the room, dropping
ice in their glasses.
SENATOR KEELEY
You know, I really have
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ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
such a good feeling about you

people. Not a lot of “clever”
books on the shelves, not a
lot of fancy “art” on the walls
just the crucifix and a lot
of good, warm, family feeling.
This is what Clinton didn’t
understand when he started in
on school prayer and gays in
the military …
ARMAND
And more ice for you …
ALBERT
Oh, now there’s an idiotic
issue – gays in the military!
I mean, those haircuts, those
uniforms – who cares?
VAL
Now, mom … you shouldn’t
be talking about things you
don’t know about. Please …
SENATOR KEELEY
Don’t patronize your mother, Val.
She’s an amazingly intelligent
woman. I think homosexuality …
ARMAND
And a lot more ice for you …
VAL
I’ll have some ice, dad.
SENATOR KEELEY
… is one of the things that’s
weakening this country.
ALBERT
You know, that’s what I
Thought until I found out
Alexander the Great was a fag.
Talk about gays in the military.
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ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
ARMAND
How about those Dolphins!
They stare at him. He drops the ice bucket.
Here, the simple drop of the ice bucket speaks volumes. In the editing of
the film, editor Arthur Schmidt built in additional reaction shots, often
wordless and usually focused on close-ups of Robin Williams’s character.
These silent moments enhanced the subtext and the tension created by
the sideways dialogue. In both cases, subtext asks the audience to fill in
the blanks.
The Sound of Silence

A worthwhile experiment is to substitute dialogue lines with silence.
Instead of playing lines that are too specific, the editor simply goes to a
reaction. The dialectic of drama, that conflict that drives the story for-
ward, forces the character into situations where they may be ill prepared
to respond. The situation is new, whether because they have fallen in
love, been attacked, or discovered a secret. Sometimes their dialogue will
evade, sometimes it will retaliate, sometimes it will yield. But, as it does,
it will inevitably leave out words (as words are thoughts), leave feelings
unexpressed, and attempt to manipulate the other character into feeling
or giving that which the speaker most desires.
Editors take guidance from this. They decide when to leave the speaker
and show the listener, the reactor. The reactor is the other aspect of sub-
text. These are the overlaps, what some refer to as J and L cuts, that pep-
per dialogue. By nature, the reactor is silent, listening, responding or
trying not to respond. The reactor clues us in to the underlying meaning
of the moment, the effect that words and actions are having on the speaker.
In directing a scene, the director often guides the actor through a series
of feels – what does the character feel, and what does the character want
the other character to feel? In trying to influence their counterpart’s emo-
tions, they are also considering what they would want that character to
say in response. When an actor is in touch with this, with what they
imagine engendering in the other, they have a greater possibility of mov-
ing forward truthfully. Not with the lines as written in the script, but with
the reality that the lines carry within themselves. These are tied to the
goals of the scene. These maneuvers are different from beats, those guide-
posts along the way that map out exact emotive actions that twist and
turn the scene at precise points as it progresses.
Discovering an overall feeling and intention affords a more general
approach that the actor can carry with them. What one actor determines
to be the feel may be different from how another actor or director would
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ASPECTS OF DIALOGUE
interpret it. The editor likewise considers the goals of the scene and crafts
the scene in anticipation of those moments. In many cases, especially with
experienced editors, the actor’s goals are intuited. After all, the film has
now taken a further step toward completion, leaving behind the tutelage
of the script and relying on the performances and shot design that have
been concretized in the dailies.
An effective directing exercise seeks to discover subtext in silence, in
reactions, as well as in dialogue. In rehearsal, the actor speaks their reac-
tion, filling in the silence with a narrative that reflects what the character
is feeling at that particular moment. This helps infuse a performance with
meaning and credibility while telegraphing a want or a need that may not
be immediately apparent. After the actor has vocalized the silence, they
can then go back to the scripted performance.
In this way, it’s helpful for writers on one end and editors on the other
to imagine how the subtext occurs within reaction shots. It’s reminiscent
of the way silent films depended entirely on action and response since
they were devoid of dialogue. Those that contained a smattering of dia-
logue (on title cards) still required body language and facial expressions
to convey feeling. In crafting a screenplay, writers can consider what
might be left out or communicated through an action.
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12
DIALOGUE AND
CHARACTER ISSUES
The chapter considers pauses and space, the challenges that ensem-
ble characters bring to the writing and editing process, how writers
and editors choreograph scenes with multiple characters, and the
use of improvisational dialogue.
Space
Other aspects of dialogue editing will also inform dialogue writing. In
constructing a film from dailies, the editor strives to remove all unneces-
sary pauses. Pauses feel like brakes on a vehicle that had been gliding
smoothly along. Everything slows. The narrative freezes. Not all dialogue
needs to move at the pace of our Social Network example, but in some
cases too much dialogue and too many pauses hinder the onward flow of
the story. This is an issue, for instance, with the use of black. At the script
stage, avoid the notation “CUT TO BLACK.”
In some cases, cutting to black can be suspenseful, leave us thirsting for
the next moment, but, in cases where it is carelessly applied, it erects a
blank wall where nothing is happening, thereby pulling the audience out
of the experience. This is particularly unnerving in short films where the
audience might even believe that the film is over as it fades to black. Black
is in a similar category as voiceover. It is something to be included as a
last resort rather than at the beginning stage of the process.
In life, filling in all the spaces may not always be preferable. Sometimes,
it is important to take time for oneself, step away from the distractions of
TV and social media, and immerse yourself in silence. Silence can return
us to ourselves. But in film, gaps, if they are not there to build suspense –
as in the slow walk downstairs to investigate an unusual noise in the
middle of the night – can diminish the energy and power of the story.
124 DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-13

DIALOGUE AND CHARACTER ISSUES
The task of moving characters from one place to another can produce
a lag in the narrative. In this case, writers and editors often find that they
search to supply dialogue to fill in the long pause. Imagine watching
someone just walking up or down a set of stairs. Unless it is a regal
entrance (as in Lord Grantham’s appearance in Downton Abbey) or a
particularly clumsy one (as in King Louis’s arrival at an elegant ball in
Start the Revolution Without Me), the mere act of physical transition
from one place to another is not very captivating.
Filmmakers use the term shoe leather to describe the act of someone
walking through a scene, moving from one dynamic moment to another
with a plateau of nothing in between. In real life, we’re accustomed to
seeing people walk or move or climb, so we don’t register it. But, in film,
too much attention falls on that moment unless the audience is involved
with additional information, such as dialogue. In this case, editors some-
times steal dialogue from other parts of the scene to carry over the backs
of characters in motion. In this way the silence is filled. The same can
occur with long pauses within dialogue. An editor might fill the silence
with a distant dog bark, a car horn, thunder, or any other myriad of
sounds.
There is another solution, as well, which writers can adopt – cut out
the shoe leather.
We are so accustomed to how people get from one place to another
that we generally don’t need to spend much time on it. The jump cut has
prevailed. Movies move and they move faster and faster because audi-
ences have become attuned to the language of cinema. In the writer’s case,
a simple “CUT TO:” in the transition line may do the trick.
The Ensemble
We’ve been discussing the most common type of dialogue scene – the
two-person scene. But some scenes contain many more players. It’s com-
mon in these circumstances to ignore at times those who aren’t actively
engaged, yet their participation needs to be acknowledged for the story’s
sake so they don’t suddenly disappear from the scene. Here, the challenge
for writer and editor is to keep everyone alive throughout the scene.
Cinema is full of ensemble stories – look at Grand Hotel (1932), The
Magnificent Seven (1960), or, recently, The Avengers (2012), Guardians
of the Galaxy (2014), and Justice League (2017). These are powerful
stories, and made all the more so by the participation of an ensemble cast.
As the Justice League’s logline states, “You Can’t Save the World Alone.”
But, in each case, it is also important to focus on particular characters.
In The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yul Brenner’s character stands out
among the rest of his colleagues. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is clearly the
driving (or flying) force in Guardians of the Galaxy, but each of the other
125
characters, from Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) to Groot (Vin Diesel), serve valu-
able roles as well. A danger in ensemble stories occurs when each member
seems the same, their personalities undifferentiated, diminishing the over-
all film.
Figure 12.1 Guardians of the Galaxy – An ensemble cast in outer space.

Credit: Marvel Studios/Walt Disney Pictures.
Additionally, dramas such as Downton Abbey or its classic predecessor

Upstairs Downstairs (1971) rely on a cast of engaging characters. War
movies, such as Saving Private Ryan (1998) or The Dirty Dozen (1967),
often assemble a crew of determined fighters. Some Westerns, though
ultimately focusing on the rugged individual, can recruit a gang of gun-
slingers to take on the villains, such as The Magnificent Seven, based on
Kurosawa’s ensemble samurai tale, The Seven Samurai (1954).
And horror, with a band of daring characters – often teens or students –
allows enough of these intrepid innocents to band together to confront
some supernatural terror. Yet the ending often reveals what every editor
and writer should understand – only one or two will make it out alive. In
The Convent (2000), a fraternity of students take a new pledge, along with
some sorority girls, a cheerleader, and a Boston terrier, to investigate a
40-year-old urban myth that surrounds a local convent. The convent has
been boarded up for decades following the terrible and mysterious events
that occurred there. As the college students pursue their adventure, they are
picked off one by one by the evil forces that inhabit the building. In the end,
only two remain – the good and innocent pledge and his sister.
In The Magnificent Seven, as magnificent as all the gunfighters appear,
it’s only a couple who survive, and only one rides highest in his saddle at
the end, Yul Brenner. Those survivors clue us in to the importance of
focusing on a central character so that their accompanying thematic pur-
pose doesn’t become lost.
126
In some cultures which give more status to the group than the indi-
vidual, this exaltation of the hero may appear less pronounced. But in
Western culture, as far back as the ancient Greeks, the hero has domi-
nated myths, stories, and fables. American films, in turn, continue to per-
petuate the hero myth into modern times and around the world.
The hero allows us to us to identify with an individual like ourselves,
but with skills and talents that we may have yet to achieve. In a sense,
ensemble pieces are more democratic in that they present a diversity of
characters, some of whom may resonate more closely with us than
others.
A recent example of a well-handled group scene is the business party in
The Rational Life (2021), a melodramatic Netflix series that takes place
in Shanghai. The series follows a professional woman, Shen Ruo Xin
(Lan Qin), who, in her 30s, is considered a “leftover woman.” Throughout
the series, she navigates the unfair societal pressures of her workplace
and personal life, torn between her affections for her bachelor boss,
Minjie (Calvin Li), and her young assistant, Qi Xiao (Dylan Wang). She
is invited by Minjie to attend a business party. As the dialogue scene
unfolds, it splits the characters off into multiple camps including Minjie,
the boss, with his male friends drinking at a table, and the women at the
bar with Shen.
As the men speak, they inquire about who the new woman is, while
the edits keep Shen alive in the background as she waits at the bar
where she is eventually joined by other business women. One young
woman, Mandy, interrogates her as to whether Minjie and she are boy-
friend and girlfriend, while also quizzing her on her credentials and
education. The glances between Mandy and her friends tell us that
they’re not impressed by Shen’s pedigree. “Mandy went to Princeton
University,” one says. “She has a master’s degree in literature. Look over
there. The one in the champagne- colored dress. She went to the
University of Melbourne. She studied art and music. She’s really good at
playing the cello.”
Mandy adds, “In our social circle, one’s background is important.
I remember Xu Minjie studied MBA at Columbia University.”
Shen eventually replies, “I’m not part of this circle,” and retires to the
restroom to collect herself. Upon returning to the party, she finds a dis-
traught Mandy who’s demanding to see the manager because the waitress
spilled wine on her dress. In fact, Mandy bumped into the waitress and
caused the accident. Shen Ruo Xin enters the scene amid cross accusa-
tions between Mandy, the waitress, and the manager as Minjie looks on
from his seat. She leads Mandy away from the altercation and helps set
things right. The editing and writing work to balance the many charac-
ters, keeping even those who aren’t immediately engaged alive in our
awareness by visual and verbal references.
127
Scenes involving multiple characters can be dynamic and richly tex-

tured, adding richness to a story, but it’s important not to lose track of the
characters – including those with little or no dialogue – once they’ve been
introduced. Like two-person scenes, these also require subtext in their
interactions as well as a need to give each of the primary characters some-
thing to do and to say.
Figure 12.2 The Convent – Breaking into the haunted convent.

Credit: Lions Gate.
It is hard to discuss dialogue without considering the characters that it

is attached to and the structure that it provides within a story. When con-
sidering how to focus a story, the issue of ensemble pieces comes into play.
A highly successful ensemble story, Downton Abbey, introduces us to an
entire estate composed of the upstairs gentry and the downstairs servants
including Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, his American wife Cora
Crawley (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern) and their butler
Carson (Jim Carter). We come to see that the privileged gentry are beset
with almost as many problems as those who work for them, though of a
different nature. And occasionally their issues intersect. No one is immune
to suffering, falling in love, experiencing loss or disappointment.
Each character’s involvement is essential, yet only a few will stand out
above the others. Consider again the earlier party scene example. Not
everyone needs to show up, but those who do need enough time to estab-
lish their issues and for the writer, director, and editor to explore them.
In Downton Abbey, a combination of fluid camera work and well-paced
editing guides the viewer through the complexities of characters’ lives
while keeping each encounter engaging and adding new layers to the plot.
128
Figure 12.3 Downton Abbey – A lawn party with the Crawleys and Carson.
Credit: PBS.
The challenge that editors face in structuring these sorts of stories is

informative for the screenwriter. In the recut of Joseph’s Gift (1998), a
film based on the Old Testament story of Joseph and his brothers, the
ensemble issue came to the forefront. The film stars Freddy Rodriguez
(Six Feet Under, Grindhouse), John Saxon (Nightmare on Elm Street,
Enter the Dragon, The Appaloosa), and the Bottoms brothers (Apocalypse
Now), as well as quite a few other characters who make up Joseph’s large
family, the Kellers. Upon first viewing the original cut, it seemed that it
had been constructed rather well. The cuts flowed seamlessly together;
one scene transitioned easily to another. But it was boring. Unengaging.
Weighed down by the number of characters. Even though the overall
material was well directed and well shot.
One of the first issues that became apparent upon viewing it again was
that it lacked focus. The viewer became mixed up in the crowded family
of characters. After a prologue that exposed us to a cataclysmic fire at a
Los Angeles garment factory, the story jumped ahead to a family dinner
at the Kellers’ estate. One by one, family members arrive until the tardi-
est guest – the youngest son, Joseph (Freddy Rodriguez) – appears. The
dinner begins, and the patriarch, Jacob Keller (John Saxon), announces
that he’s appointing Joseph to a plum position in the family business,
something the other children had to work for. Amid a chorus of protests
from his other sons, the father defends his decision and, holding up a
headline, reminds them of the tragic fire at a competing garment shop.
As in the Old Testament story, the jealous brothers conspire to get rid
of Joseph, in this case by taking him on a business trip to New York and
129
having him committed to a mental hospital. In the opening scenes, how-

ever, it was unclear whose story it was. The other family members played
important parts in Joseph’s sufferings, and it was important to meet them
and learn their motivations.
The first cut introduced many of them through wide shots at the dinner
table. In recutting, the first thing to do was to move into close-ups so we
could recognize them. But the most important editing move was to keep
returning to Joseph, showing his reactions, even if his lines of dialogue
were fewer than the other brothers. In the script, everyone was given
fairly equal treatment, and the camera and editing had followed suit.
Another discovery that helped in the re-editing of these early sequences
was something that was revealed much later in the story – Joseph has the
gift of prophesy. In this case, since this was a modern version of the story,
he foretells the collapse of the stock market, thereby proving his worth to
his boss, played by Robert Townsend, and convincing him that Joseph
should be running the company.
Figure 12.4 Joseph’s Gift – Joseph dreams a vision of disaster.

Credit: Alpine Pictures/TBN.
In the case of Joseph’s Gift, a perfectly effective entry point became

clear. It involved stealing footage from much later in the film – a simple
medium shot of Joseph asleep on the bedcovers of a neatly made bed in
130
the hotel he and his brothers visited on the fateful trip to New York.
What made the shot significant was that it could be played as a luxurious
bed in the upstairs bedroom of Joseph’s family estate, instead of the hotel
bed as originally intended. Since the shot was fairly tight there was noth-
ing on the walls or surrounding furnishings to give away the fact that it
was a bed in a hotel room and not in a family home. Adding this shot
before the dinner scene turned the scene that preceded it – the sweatshop
fire – into a premonition, a vision, a dream state rather than simply the
recounting of a terrible event.
Joseph, taking a short nap, daydreams while fully clothed and lying on
a neatly made bed before dinner, and sees beyond time and space. By cut-
ting into a tight shot of his sleeping face and adding the ticking of a clock
that morphs into the sounds of the sweatshop, I was able to transition
into the scene. Then, upon the brash sound of the alarm clock, I cut back
to Joseph waking up, ostensibly overcome by what he has just seen.
This footage allowed for the creation of a mini scene that could bridge
from the tragic fire at the illegal sweatshop to the dinner of the privi-
leged garment business family. It was the kind of scene that could have
been included in the original screenplay and greatly benefited the story.
In this case, however, the need for it only became apparent at the editing
stage.
The shot established our main character, as well as establishing his
unusual abilities. Its importance and effectiveness meant that the shot
couldn’t be used later in the film, but it turned out we didn’t need it.
There were other events and dialogue that encompassed the hotel room
scene with the brothers. Also, audiences don’t tend to have memories as
good as we fear they might. A shot that occurs several scenes before may
not register if used again, unless it contains a unique image. One sees this
often in terms of continuity issues, where a misplaced object or position
may not be noticed when it occurs a couple of shots later.
In this simple rearrangement, the story’s opening evolved from an
unfocused ensemble piece to the tale of a conflicted young man with a
peculiar talent, in search of truth and liberation from his abusive broth-
ers. By allowing Joseph to be the first person we focus on, and then com-
ing back to him again and again in the dinner and dessert scenes, I placed
him clearly in the audience’s sights.
It’s amazing the power of a single cut to alter an entire film. It can leave
out inessential or confusing information. It can alter time. It can draw a
connection between two previously unconnected ideas or feelings. It can
change meaning. It can alter story. And, in doing so, it shows us the pos-
sibilities that might have been realized at the script stage. This is why
every step counts.
A horror film that prospered on the drive- in circuit during the
pandemic, Murder in the Woods (2017), was written and directed by
131
Luis Iga as an ensemble piece. In it, a bunch of teens go to party and

spend the night at a cabin in the woods. What the director and editor
discovered upon viewing the film at the rough cut stage was that the
movie felt too even-handed in its treatment of all the characters. No one
stood out as the person to watch. Eventually, the audience came to learn
that the story’s primary conflict arose from a trauma experienced by one
of the characters. This awareness led the filmmakers to refocus on the
main characters, a particularly good idea since the others would be killed
off in the interim.
Of course, too much focus can telegraph who is dispensable and who
is not, and so it was important to give each character their due, while also
deciding whose story it was. In doing so, certain characters moved to the
forefront.
According to Iga,
Every film gets written three times, script, principal photography

and editing. Initially during the editing process the film seemed
to be more of an ensemble piece and the throughline of our main
character (Fernanda) wasn’t as clear. My producing partner/
writer and I, we went scene by scene analyzing what each scene
was about, making sure we could see her more and also see her
POV. We cut the fat that was not accomplishing this. We also
focused more on the love story between Fernanda and Jesse. We
were able to build a clear arc and see her grow from a goody-
goody scaredy cat to enjoying the party to falling for Jesse to tak-
ing control of the situation and becoming a leader. In addition,
we were looking for ways to have the audience ask more ques-
tions and to keep them guessing, so we planted the flashbacks of
Jesse as a kid throughout the film.1
Foreshadowing: Along with giving information

about a character’s current state, dialogue can
foreshadow events and emotions to come.
Foreshadowing, such as this, is an important part
of storytelling, particularly when the audience
encounters events, emotions or ideas that are out
of the ordinary. Foreshadowing is a great friend to writers and to
editors. It adds believability to a story and also imbues the audi-
ence with a sense of power that they initially don’t know they
have – insight. When the event or truth that has been foreshad-
owed is finally revealed, its satisfaction for an audience is one of
the great enjoyments within storytelling.
132
Improvisation
A writer will work for hours, days, years to fashion dialogue that reflects
the characters in a skillful and expedient manner. As has been pointed
out, the dialogue doesn’t have to be real; it just has to sound real. In fact,
it is better if it isn’t real, since real dialogue tends to expand to great
lengths, lack poetic or artistic phrasing, and drift from the subject at
hand.
That is the risk faced by asking or allowing actors to improvise their
own dialogue. Skilled actors who understand their characters may be
able to summon sentences that approximate what their characters would
say. Less skilled actors don’t come close. Either way, it is left to the editor
to pick and choose the best lines. In some cases, the improvisational
approach works splendidly, especially in comedies where you have a tal-
ented comedian who is accustomed to improvising. Robin Williams
comes to mind. Or Eddie Murphy. Or, recently, Bo Burnham. In other
cases, the editor must slice and rearrange words and sentences to create
the desired effect that would probably have been better achieved by stick-
ing to the script.
If one is to go the route of improvisation, it is a good idea to shoot the
dialogue as scripted and then allow for separate takes where the actor
improvises. As natural as good films appear, most arrive at that point by
careful attention to craft and timing. Without that, it takes the risk of
pulling the audience out of the picture.
An editor who is confronted with improvised dialogue has to address
several issues. First, improvised dialogue tends to run long, so words
must be eliminated and streamlined. Second, improvised dialogue often
lacks the meta-communication that a well-crafted line will contain. The
editor needs to find a way to create subtext by leaving out certain obvious
or on-the-nose speech. And third, the rhythm that writers bring to dia-
logue needs to be sculpted from the improvised, sometimes meandering,
chatter.
Julius Epstein contends that
most natural dialogue is awful. You can’t do that in novels, the

stage, screen, bar mitzvahs, or anything. You can’t use the natural
way people talk. You think people talk like Woody Allen talks?
They don’t. That’s what happens when you have improvisation.
You’re down to the lowest common denominator.2
To write dialogue takes great skill, requiring the writer to listen to the
way people speak and, also, the way they don’t speak. This is perhaps the
most important aspect of writing dialogue. In that way, the dialogue must
telegraph meaning without stating it.
133
Good improvisational dialogue must be linked to the character’s dra-

matic need, which can include evasive language as well as dialogue that
directly addresses an issue. Attending to the dramatic need helps bring
structure to less structured dialogue. But actors may not hold to that need
in the way a screenwriter would, so it remains incumbent upon the editor
to craft the improvised dialogue so it leaves out extraneous chatter and
holds to the writer’s main throughline and intentions.
Voiceover
This also raises the question of voiceover. In the documentary world,
where the conversational dialectic is usually non-existent, the question of
voiceover is often raised. The same applies to some narrative films where
clarification of details becomes necessary. Consider again the opening
voiceover in Pachinko.
Voiceover is the most direct exposition possible. Rather than cloak-
ing information in dialogue, voiceover states it directly. Sometimes that
works well, when narrated by the main character expressing their
point-of-view in an idiosyncratic way, such as the wonderful voiceover
in American Beauty (1999) where the main character recounts some
turning points in his tortured middle-class life leading up to his early
demise.
In The Shawshank Redemption (1994), the character of Red (Morgan
Freeman) narrates some of the action in a highly effective way. Yet, as
written, the director and editor realized that at times the voiceover was
superfluous and could be jettisoned. Even though it read well on the page,
once filmed, the need for some of the explanations faded away. Writer–
director Frank Darabont described how it was
a great example of something reading just fine in the script, but

really not working on film. When editor Richard Francis-Bruce
first cut this scene together, he added Red’s voiceover as specified.
The result was utter confusion. You were seeing one thing, listen-
ing to another, and completely unable to concentrate on either
since the two stories didn’t relate at all.3
Generally, it’s best to avoid voiceover unless absolutely necessary. When

considering voiceover, first try writing the scene, whether fiction or
non-fiction, without voiceover. Let the characters, interview subjects, or
actions speak for themselves. Then view it. At that point, if there are
information gaps that voiceover can solve, it might be the right time to
incorporate it.
134
Figure 12.5 Shawshank Redemption – The narrator, Red, and his fellow inmate
(Tim Robbins) in the prison yard.
Credit: Columbia Pictures/Castle Rock Entertainment.
For Editors: Voiceover is another form of exposi-

tion, of telling rather than showing. If the audience
wanted to have the story explained to them, even if
in lovely poetic language, they might do better to
read a novel. As such, screenplays need to provide
the building blocks to get to the next step. In the editing room, it is
often best to communicate information through images and dia-
logue before resorting to voiceover. This includes the documentary
genre as well as narrative fiction. Voiceover can be a crutch in a simi-
lar way as music. Put a terrific score on even the most lackluster film
and it will play better. In cases of music and voiceover, editing dry is
a better tactic. It requires the editor to bring the film as far along as
possible without any added help. Controlling the pace and rhythm,
providing smooth transitions, and promoting clarity fall first to the
editor. Once the film is working on its own, editor and director can
review it to see if there are gaps in information and emotion that
need to be filled in by voiceover and music, respectively. At that
point, the addition of these elements can lift the film to a whole other
level. It will feel organic rather than contrived and artificial. A writer
can take heed from this as well. Stick to the bare bones at first; get
the rhythm, clarity, and transitions right before looking elsewhere.
135
For Writers: Try this – write a dialogue scene, then

cut out any dialogue that specifically states what
the scene is about, anything that directly explains
the characters intentions, ideas, or motivations.
Discover the scene’s meaning through nuance,
implication, and suggestion.
Notes
1 Luis Iga Garza. Interview with the author.
2 Hunter, Lew. Naked Screenwriting. Rowman & Littlefield, Maryland. 2021.
3 Darabont, Frank, and Stephen King. Shawshank Redemption: The Shooting
Script. Newmarket Press. September 30, 2004.
136
13
WHEN “CUT TO” ISN’T ENOUGH
Most scripts use a simple phrase such as “cut to” or “dissolve to” to
denote a transition. Transitions can be shot dependent. This chapter
looks at how editors design scene-to-scene transitions and the writ-
er’s opportunities to prefigure transitions during the script stage.
Transitions
In the past, screenwriters often ended a scene with a CUT TO or
DISSOLVE TO direction. Today, the CUT TO is often assumed unless the
writer feels a need to emphasize a transition in a declarative way, such
as “I’m not going to sleep with you” CUT TO: They’re in bed together.
The notation DISSOLVE TO implies a more gradual and often lengthy
time transition. In a dissolve, the incoming scene slowly superimposes
itself over the outgoing scene until only the new scene remains. As a time
transition, it could span days, weeks, or years from the scene that pre-
cedes it. If one looks at films from the forties, the tendency to dissolve
from scene to scene predominated. But all those dissolves impinged on
the film’s pace. As audiences became more film savvy, by the sixties most
dissolves were left out by editors. Today, it is rare to see a dissolve transi-
tion written into a script, unless the writer is describing a montage.
Transitions relate to rhythm, an essential quality. Director David Lean
(Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter) began his career
as Editor David Lean. His films succeed partially because of his command
of editing and, specifically, transitions. Even his early endeavors, such as
The Passionate Friends (1949), contain elegant transitions. His later
works, such as Lawrence of Arabia, abound with stunning scene changes.
It’s important that transitions coincide in style with the tone of the film.
The famous use of wipes in the Star Wars films is one example. In many
cases, these tools are used to aid the script as it transitions from one scene
to another. Consider the clever transitions that were designed for the
romantic comedy Goodbye Columbus (1969) based on the Philip Roth
DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-14 137

novel. In it, a street scene shows the main character’s car driving away as
the camera tilts down to find the open hood of another car with steam
pouring out of the radiator. This scene transitions to a close-up of a
steaming pot of peas that his mother is holding in her kitchen. The two
images work as a sort of visual pun, tying the two scenes together. Later,
the main characters, Neil Klugman (Richard Benjamin) and Brenda
Patimkin (Ally MacGraw), tumble into each other’s arms and begin to
make love on the floor of Neil’s apartment. This cuts to a close-up of a
slice of rare roast beef that the Patimkin’s housekeeper is about to serve
at the dinner table. Another visual pun.
Figure 13.1 Goodbye Columbus – Steam transition (a-side).

Credit: Paramount Pictures.
Figure 13.2 Goodbye Columbus – Steam transition (b-side).

138
Food and sex are themes that run through the film. The father, Ben
Patimkin (Jack Klugman), eats his way through every scene, and the
image of the pot of peas in the lower-middle-class kitchen contrasts with
the luxuriant meal of the wealthy Patimkin family in the later transition.
In this case, transitions bring meaning as well as humor and rhythm.
In the comedy Mannequin 2: On the Move (1991), a young man, Jason
Williamson (William Ragsdale), begins his first day of work by reporting
to his dictatorial boss, Mr. James (Stuart Pankin), at a grand department
store known as Prince & Company. The boss is in the middle of firing the
assistant to his store’s flamboyant art director, Hollywood Montrose
(Meshach Taylor). Hollywood is preparing a grand production re-enacting
the tale of a mannequin known as the Enchanted Peasant Girl that has
been imported from the kingdom of Hauptmann-Koenig. Unbeknownst
to Jason, the mannequin is the petrified form of a cursed young woman
from a thousand years ago who will come to life when she meets her true
love. In the script, Jason waits patiently to introduce himself to Mr. James.
After a few beats of silence, James slowly

turns his head toward Jason.
JAMES
Now.
JASON
h … Jason Williamson. I was told to
U
report to you. New trainee.
JAMES
ell it seems we’ve just had an
W
opening on
Mr. Montrose’s staff. Follow me.
ANOTHER ANGLE
James walks briskly through the aisles. Jason

and the assistants have trouble keeping up.
JAMES
ou now work for Prince and Company.
Y
All I ask is that my employees give
the same time and dedication to the
store that I do.
JASON
What exactly does that mean, sir?
139
JAMES
I have no other life.
JASON
Well, then you’ll be happy to know
that I still live at home; I can’t
afford an apartment and I have no
girlfriend.
JAMES
Good. Keep it that way.
INT. STORE AUDITORIUM
A LARGE EMPTY STAGE is being used for a dance

rehearsal.
HOLLYWOOD (O.S.)
And … One … two … three.
Up on stage, sticking out from the wings,

we SEE a LONG BALLETIC LEG unfurl – like a
stripper starting her routine. The leg is
followed by a graceful arm, the hand waving a
colorful sash. Then, at last, we see HOLLYWOOD
MONTROSE, an exotically dressed, sunglass-
clad artiste TRILLING and WARBLING as he makes
his way down the runway. As he passes the
mannequins, each one suddenly … COMES TO LIFE.
The models follow him, strutting, bumping

and grinding in the unique Hollywood style.
Hollywood makes it halfway down the runway, then
stops. He turns, very patiently, to face his
Models – an exasperated preacher to his flock.
HOLLYWOOD
Ladies, remember your motivation!
Once more, you are frozen. Like ice.
Then, one magical day, you come to
life! You can breathe! Your legs
move! And I mean move.
He demonstrates, continuing down the runway in

a more outrageous strut.
140
HOLLYWOOD
Are we communicating? Just because
Hauptmann-
Koenig’s drab, doesn’t
mean we have to be. I’m going to
breathe some life into this

presentation.
Everyone, think Pizzazz!
Comedies generally require a peppy pace to fuel the laughs, so during

the editing process it became clear that some of the transitions and
extraneous dialogue were getting in the way of the spirited comedy. In
examining these two scenes, we realized that we could link the two
scenes by concentrating on Hollywood Montrose (who had become a
featured character after his successful debut in the first Mannequin,
1987).
Character names can be excellent transition points, and here it made
sense to springboard off the name Montrose as it occurs in Mr. James’s
line, “We’ve just had an opening on Mr. Montrose’s staff,” and then cut
directly to Hollywood Montrose, leaving out everything after the line.
This allowed for the deletion of the walk and talk between Jason and
James, eliminating five paragraphs of dialogue as well as removing the
initial, slower introduction to Hollywood in the next scene and the two
paragraphs of needless dialogue before hitting the point of the scene:
“Just because Hauptmann-Koenig’s drab, doesn’t mean we have to be.
I’m going to breathe some life into this presentation.”
Figure 13.3 Mannequin 2 – Hollywood Montrose directs.

Credit: 20th Century Fox.
141
If the script were transcribed as it was rewritten in the editing room, it

would read something like this:
After a few beats of silence, James slowly

turns his head toward Jason.
JAMES
Now.
JASON
Uh … Jason Williamson. I was
told to report to you. New trainee.
JAMES
Well it seems we’ve just had
an opening on Mr. Montrose’s staff.
CUT TO:
We see HOLLYWOOD MONTROSE, an exotically

dressed, sunglass-
clad artiste TRILLING
and WARBLING as he makes his way down the
runway.
HOLLYWOOD
Just because Hauptmann-Koenig’s
drab, doesn’t mean we have to be.
I’m going to breathe some life
into this presentation.
Everyone, think Pizzazz!
or Editors: When looking for what to trim out of

F
a film (and ultimately the story itself), editors look
for redundancy or points where the story mean-
ders, going off on tangents. Also hunt for scenes
that contribute little to the story and would not be
missed if they were removed.
The Power of the Dog, a story which has a fairly leisurely pace and
relies a lot on character, needed something to break it up and differen-
tiate the various moments. Ultimately, chapter breaks were introduced.
These did not reflect the structure of the original novel or the script.
142
It was an invention of the editing room. But it made a big difference in

the final cut. It allowed editor and director to cut to chapter breaks after
key moments of information were dropped, creating a cliffhanger-like
effect. That feeling was absent in earlier cuts that pressed onward with-
out chapter breaks.
The chapter break transitions became significant structural elements in
the film. Interestingly, the chapter numbers are displayed in Roman
numerals, a nod to Phil’s unexpectedly sophisticated background of hav-
ing studied classics at Yale when he was younger. Also, a voiceover was
added at the beginning: “I knew I had to save my mother,” a line with
multiple meanings that was not in the script but pays off at the end,
bringing clarity to what might otherwise have been an equivocal ending.
The line sets up the issue that Pete’s mother, Rose, is going to need to be
saved and it raises the question, from whom? And how will he accom-
plish that?
In summary, as a writer you should be mindful of how your story
moves from one scene to another. In some cases, a line of dialogue can do
the trick. In other cases, a question posed in one scene can become a
springboard to another scene, such as in Manchester by the Sea (2016)
where Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) inquires about the doctor who was
caring for his now deceased brother. This launches a flashback to the
brother’s hospital room where the doctor and Lee’s family are in
attendance.
Likewise, a declarative physical action can transport us. In Totally
Blonde, Michael Bublé’s character, Van, asks Liv, “You don’t have a prob-
lem with tequila, do you?”
She replies, “No” and, as he steps away to retrieve a bottle, she adds in
an aside, “It just makes me horny.”
This cuts to a tighter shot of their two shot glasses hitting the table.
Clearly time has passed, and they’re now drunk and playing Truth or
Dare.
In other cases, the writer can envision a camera move or an effect, such
as a dissolve or wipe, that will transport a character across time and
space. Consider the main character in Pachinko, whom we see alternating
between her life as a young woman and as an elderly lady, often triggered
by a camera move which was prefigured in the script.
143
14
FOLLOWING THE LINE
The chapter looks at how constructing too linear of a story can

diminish the audience’s involvement in the film, when to break
continuity or incorporate non-linear elements. Ways to engage and
engaging the audience by proposing challenges and puzzles.
Non-linear Trajectories
Many stories, and scripts, unfold in a linear manner. We go for a stroll
with the story as if walking down a familiar street. There are turns and
curves, but everything basically proceeds in a straightforward direction.
Non-linear devices, such as flashbacks, are kept to a minimum.
At times, there is something comfortable about a story well told in
linear fashion. This approach tends to reinforce Aristotle’s early revela-
tions about drama and storytelling in his Poetics. His conventions of time
and space specified that stories should take place within limited temporal
and geographic settings.
Novels, particularly modern novels, experiment with freeform narra-
tives and elastic structures. Though James Joyce’s revolutionary tome,
Ulysses, still confined itself to a single day in a single place, Dublin, its
free associational language, varied fonts, evocative imagery, and refer-
ences spanning The Bible, Hamlet, and The Odyssey make Ulysses a
unique and challenging read.
Film editors, who deal with time as it relates to rhythm and structure,
often discover that a purely linear approach to story can lack satisfaction
for the viewer. It can feel clichéd or anemic. Audiences want to be engaged.
One aspect of engagement is offering viewers the chance to think, to deci-
pher, to solve. In the same way that a scene told in a single take can lack
the thrill that intercutting engenders, straightforward, uninterrupted sto-
ries can diminish energy. In chopping things up, the film editor invites the
144 DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-15

F O L L OW I N G T H E L I N E
audience to participate at a higher level. Writers can benefit from this

editing technique by finding appropriate places in their work to fracture
the narrative.
An excellent example where the script’s linearity was disrupted by
director and editor to create a more discontinuous and compelling tale is
seen in The Limey (1999). The clever script by Lem Dobbs begins with a
rather novelistic backstory and fragmentary descriptions of Wilson
(Terence Stamp), a grieving and dangerous father out to extract vengeance
for the death of his only daughter, Jennifer (Melissa George). Dobbs has
emphasized his interest in highlighting scenes that included more detailed
backstory, including references to Wilson’s boss back in London.
E
XT. ARRIVALS TERMINAL. L.A. AIRPORT.
AFTERNOON.
WILSON steps out into the late sunlight and

the heat of the day. A slow-
motion moment
while he gets acclimatized. He wouldn’t
have ever felt quite this kind
of heat before. After such a rigorously
air-
conditioned interior. Or seen cops
wearing guns on their belts. Or black cops,
for that matter, with guns on their belts.
Or seen people as fat as Americans on their
home turf. Things someone from England
notices immediately, whether consciously at
first or not.
CUT.
EXT. MOTEL. EVENING.
Wilson’s not here for comfort. Shown to a

shitty room, round the corner of a typical
2nd-
level outside walkway. Airport close
by.
INT. MOTEL ROOM. EVENING.
He draws a curtain open across a window in

one strong easy glide. His moves are neat.
His expressions just as economical, not
giving much away. Outside the planes are
practically on top of us. The sunset colors
strange and chemical.
145
He’s only got one light bag. Unzips,

unpacks a few things. Change of clothes,
a travel kit, and some familiar items
(shaving foam/toothpaste/deodorant} bearing
unfamiliar British brand names.
Goes into the bathroom. Turns on the shower

in there.
Comes back to sit on the bed. Takes an

envelope out of his jacket.
ENVELOPE
Turns it over to see the return address on

the back.
CUT.
I
NT. TAXI. NIGHT.
Wilson in the back. Stares at the

impenetrable name on the driver’s posted
ID. Glances at the driver.
DRIVER glances back at his quiet passenger in

the rearview mirror.
CUT.
E
XT. SMALL HOUSE. NIGHT.
Wilson walks up a cracked little path to

the front door. Lower middle-
class street.
Two cars in the driveway, one behind the
other. Lights on inside the house – as he
rings the bell.
ED RAMA

Answers it. Hispanic. Late 30’s. Chairman

Mao on his T-shirt notwithstanding, an
easygoing sort of fellow. Not looking for
any trouble – anymore. But once did, and
able to handle himself if any shows up.
Which it has.
146
WILSON
Edward Rama?
ED
Eduardo.
(rolling the R)
Rama.
WILSON
You’re home, then.
He turns, waves away the taxi he’s kept

waiting. While Eduardo Rama waits for an
introduction.
WILSON
My name’s Wilson.
Accent speaks for itself. Hard, working-

class.
ED
Wilson?
Knows the name. But just now it’s unexpected.

He’s holding a hot TV dinner, hand protected by
a dish towel.
WILSON
ou wrote to me about my
Y
daughter.
The screenplay’s distinctly literary flavor is peppered with occasional

cinematic leaps in the form of brief flashbacks introduced here and there
to break up the pages of frontloaded dialogue. Other than that, the story
proceeds in a linear fashion.
The editor, Sarah Flack, ACE, and the director, Steven Soderbergh, took
it to a whole different level. Soderbergh, who has a keen understanding
of the genre, pointed out that he “didn’t want to stray far from the spine
of the film, which was [Wilson] and his daughter” and he found that “the
script, filmed in a straightforward manner, was too conventional.”1
So, director and editor broke the mold by deconstructing the script’s
linear narrative into a jagged array of images and dialogue pieced together
from various parts of the film. Doing this created an engaging and well-
paced story, consequently leaving out large swaths of dialogue, planning,
and backstory.
147
Figure 14.1 The Limey – Wilson in search of his daughter’s killer.

Credit: Artisan Entertainment.
148
This approach was partially influenced by the director’s exposure to

the works of the French New Wave, such as the films by Alain Resnais
(Hiroshima Mon Amour) and Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless).
For Editors: The poetic, less linear, discontinuous

films of the French New Wave had an early and
ongoing influence on American cinema. Films that
Hollywood studios would never have greenlighted
ultimately ended up influencing Hollywood film-
making, particularly in the realm of editing. Today, there is hardly
a film that does not employ Godard’s jump cuts to energize the
story and move the plot along. And Alain Resnais’s weaving of
images has found its way into many American films, including
Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998), starring George Clooney.
In this final rewrite of the film, moments glimpsed in the opening sequence
are only partially realized. The full nature of the images or dialogue is
revealed later or at the very end, including close-ups of Wilson on the
plane or Wilson’s voice over black, imploring, “Tell me … tell me … tell
me about Jenny.” Toward the end of the film, we discover that these early
moments are actually culled from the end of his journey, as he settles into
his airplane seat on his way back to England, or when he confronts the
antagonist, Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), respectively.
The final iteration of The Limey begins with the arrival of Wilson at
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). A rack focus reveals him in
close-up. Next, we’re with him in a taxi. Then we follow Wilson as he
enters a cheap hotel room.
Wilson pulls out an envelope containing a news clipping: Woman Dies
on Mulholland.
He turns over the envelope to reveal the sender and his return address:
Ed Roel (Luiz Guzman) -- known as Edward Rama in the original script.
This image jumps to:
Wilson in an airplane.
Wilson in a car, his hand lifting up a black and white photo of
his daughter Jenny.
A close-up (CU) of Wilson in the hotel room.
A home movie of his young daughter on a beach and staring
into the camera.
Wilson’s CU in the hotel room again. (The cut connects the
two images.) Then his CU on the plane, contemplative.
149
Daughter Jenny on the beach again. Followed by a grainy shot

of Jenny, a bit older and framed by a door. Wilson’s humming
plays over this section. This cuts to:
CU of Wilson in the hotel room with a cigarette, thinking.
Then the following cuts:
Jenny in the passenger side of a car while Ed drives.
The black and white portrait of Jenny, older. The camera tilts
up to reveal Wilson, studying it from the passenger’s seat.
Back at the hotel, Wilson in medium close-up (MCU). Then a
wider shot of Wilson smoking beside the hotel bed.
A night driving shot of Wilson in the back of a cab.
A wide shot as a car ascends the hill toward camera. The cam-
era pans to show Wilson exiting from the taxi in a residential area.
A medium close-up (MCU) of Ed Roel as he opens his front door.
CU of Wilson. His first words on camera: “Edward Roel.”
MCU of Ed Roel: “Eduardo.”
CU Wilson: “You’re home, then.” He turns, waves away the
taxi, then turns back and announces, “My name’s Wilson.”
CU Ed: “Wilson?”
CU Wilson: “You wrote me about my daughter.”
Both approaches take us to the same point (i.e., “You wrote me about my
daughter”) but in quite different ways, one more compelling than the other.
The fragmented editing approach continues throughout much of the film.
Later in the script, Wilson and Ed discuss getting Wilson a gun so he
can pursue whomever killed his daughter.
WILSON
I’ll be needing a
shooter.
Makes his fingers like a gun. And a clicking

sound.
ED
(comes quickly over)
You’re kiddin’ me, right?
WILSON
What do I do, then,
look in the bleedin’
Yellow Pages?
ED
(an urgent whisper)
150
These are not guys you can

just go run a number on, man.
WILSON
(looking around)
Thought perhaps there’d
be dispensing machines,
you know. Bung in your
coins, come out with a
.44 Magnum, fully-
loaded.
Ed throws up his hands, walks back to his

driver’s side door.
ED
Are you a resident
of California? You gonna fill
out forms, man? Do the
background check? Go through
a three-
day waiting period?
WILSON
Sod that. Gotta get back before
my probation officer wonders
where I’ve shived off to.
ED
Probation? Man, you
crazy. They shouldn’t’ve
let you outta your country,
much less prison.
WILSON
Traveling on a dodgy
passport, n’ all.
Walks round to come face to face with Ed once

more.
WILSON
Which is why I thought, save some
time, get what I need under the

table, like.
ED

(as if resigned and mulling
151
the problem over)

Under the table?
From here, in the script, the scene cuts to a gun show with hundreds of
tables displaying endless firearms, with several pages of dialogue between
Wilson, a gun dealer, and Ed. In the final cut of the film, however, the gun
issue is dispatched in a couple of quick cuts as Wilson acquires two guns, liter-
ally under the table, on a school playground, an irony that the director added.
Cut to a gun being passed under a table.
Back to his CU, then under the table as another gun is passed.
Medium shot of Ed in sunglasses outdoors with Wilson’s head framing
the left side of the frame.
Wilson pacing his hotel room.
CU of Wilson in the hotel room, pensive. He reaches down. A match
cut to his hand reaching under the table, handing over a wad of bills.
Another hand takes the money.
In a JUMP CUT, the hand passes back a plastic bag full of bullets.
CU Wilson in the hotel room, thinking.
CU Wilson outdoors, his eyes shifting back and forth.
Medium wide shot – two boys sitting on the opposite side of the table,
standing up. In a continuous match cut they leave in a WIDE SHOT over
Wilson’s shoulder.
It’s interesting to note the accomplishment of showing Wilson’s charac-
ter thinking. Something that is often a springboard to flashbacks, but
here is used at times as simply a contemplative moment.
The Limey, though well written, was full of long passages of dialogue
and additional scenes that are more captivating on the page than off. This
excessive exposition became apparent in the dailies and led editor and
director to find ways of propelling the story forward.
Figure 14.2 Top Gun – The volleyball game.

152
Recently, upon the release of Top Gun: Maverick (2022), the editors of
the first Top Gun (1986), Chris Lebenzon, ACE, and Billy Weber, looked
back at how they fractured a once linear scene from the original screen-
play. According to Lebenzon, the volleyball scene with Maverick (Tom
Cruise) was thoroughly scripted as a real game. “They kept score and
everything,” he pointed out. But the director, Tony Scott, who began his
career in commercials and music videos, “shot it like a commercial, and
they were angry.” Weber echoed this, adding,
The studio was so pissed off. The head of production, Charlie

McGuire, he said, “I’m gonna fire him” … because he spent a
whole day shooting this scene. … And then of course it turns out
to be one of the most famous scenes in a movie.2
One might ask, could a writer have conceived of such wild juxtapositions
at the writing stage? Perhaps not in the exact manner as these examples,
but, in adopting the editor’s approach to rhythm and momentum, the
writer can move into a realm where long conversations give way to imag-
ery and action and where straight lines become mosaics. As we have seen,
these are compelling options in telling a screen story.
For the Writer: Exposition in itself is not harmful.

In many cases it is essential to understanding the
salient points that allow the story to progress. But
it carries with it the danger of keeping the audience
at arm’s length. Instead of enticing them into the
story and inviting them to engage, it ignores their
capacity to empathize, to decipher, to question – all capacities that
pull us into a story and, for that matter, into life itself.
Notes
1 Soderbergh, Steven. The Limey. Director’s DVD commentary. Artisan. 1999.
Also see Jamie Kirkpatrick’s webinar, “The Third Rewrite: The Editor as
Storyteller.” Motion Picture Editors Guild. Nov. 12, 2022.
2 Giardina, Carolyn, and Aaron Couch. “Behind the Screen podcast.”
Hollywoodreporter.com. June 4, 2022.
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15
FORMULA BUT NOT FORMULAIC
This chapter considers genre as another significant aspect of audi-

ence involvement. Genre creates expectations in an audience. This
chapter explores: how to fulfill genre requirements; genre and myth
structure as the formula for successful stories; avoiding the formu-
laic aspect of formula; and how a writer and, eventually, an edi-
tor bring out the unique elements of a story while disguising the
machinery operating beneath.
Genre
The Oxford English Dictionary calls genre “a category of artistic com-
position … characterized by similarities in form, style or subject mat-
ter.”1 Genre comes in many flavors and colors, from comedy to horror to
action to thrillers. In films, genre relates to emotion, conjuring anticipa-
tion of what the audience will feel in the course of the movie. To evoke
feeling is the primary function of film. At its best, that feeling will also
bring understanding and insight.
Plot relates to genre. Genre is an organizing force that unites the story’s
premise and the characters’ actions. It triggers the beginning and resolves
the ending. Genre is part of the question, “What is the story about?” It
also sets up the emotional landscape of the story. Will we laugh, cry, or
scream?
Beginning filmmakers sometimes dismiss genre in an attempt to defy its
traditional origins. And genre, in a sense, is nothing if not conventional.
Each genre has its accompanying tropes. In the strict sense, genre posits a
variety of conventions that ask us to adhere to time-honored storytelling
values. Along with that are the accompanying expectations that those
conventions bring. Put simply, an audience for a comedy expects to laugh;
154 DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-16

an audience for a horror film expects to be frightened. Genre serves to

classify films and even delineate a path for the marketing of the film. The
first question distributors ask is, “What kind of film is it?” It’s a comedy
or a horror film or a fantasy or a sci-fi.
Yet, even with all the conventions, genre mutates over time. As soci-
etal expectations change, so do aspects of genre. Whether you are a
writer or an editor, it is essential to understand the elements that make
genre work.
Early in the writing process, writers need to discover what genre they
are working in and build toward that. While most writing guides dis-
cuss structure, dialogue, and setting, many neglect the essential element
of genre. Often, the editor becomes the final arbitrator and defender of
this element. The action film that is overloaded with dialogue, the com-
edy that is weighted down by complex plotting, or the thriller that tells
rather than shows have all ended up on the editor’s bench to be
retooled.
If one looks at genre in its most basic and primordial form, one sees that
it is the reflection of a myth cycle with its accompanying iconography.
Myths, those recurring tales carried through time that have archetypal
resonance with all humanity, are the basis for drama and, consequently,
for genre.
Genre determines character. Superhuman characters don’t appear in
thrillers because the basic character in a thriller is an average citizen
caught in something beyond their control, like Roger Thornhill, Cary
Grant’s character in North by Northwest (1959), who is swept into a
world of international espionage merely because of mistaken identity.
The thriller is a victim myth that transforms based on knowledge – the
realization that the safe person is really the most dangerous one. If the
protagonist were Batman or James Bond, the story and outcome would be
entirely different. In this way, the character’s dramatic arc is altered
depending on the genre. Characters in thrillers find themselves thrust into
perilous and even terrifying situations, only to experience an epiphany at
the end when they realize their power to save themselves. Comedic char-
acters, on the other hand, find liberation and a sense of freedom through
good-humored confrontation with societal mores and by challenging the
norm.
The film Fatal Attraction (1987) is a highly engaging and resonant
thriller that lost its way by the end of the script’s third act. Here, the
choice between diegetic and non-diegetic – show rather than tell – became
obvious. Salvaged during the post production process, the failing film
went on to become a major hit. It was written by James Dearden, directed
by Adrian Lyne, and edited by Michael Kahn, ACE.
155
In the original script, a married man, Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas)

has a brief tryst with a young book editor, Alexandra “Alex” Forrest
(Glenn Close), who obsessively stalks him after he tries to break off the
relationship. Eventually, Alex becomes violent, killing the family’s pet
rabbit and kidnapping their daughter. After the child is returned, Dan
breaks into Alex’s apartment and attacks her, choking her. When she
grabs a kitchen knife to fight him off, Dan manages to wrestle the knife
away from her and leave. He calls the police and reports the kidnapping.
Here’s how the original script ended.
EXT. COUNTRY HOUSE – FRONT YARD – DAY
The three men are walking over. Dan approaches

confidently.
DAN
Afternoon, Lieutenant.
Did you get her?
LIEUTENANT
(nods)
Mr. Gallagher, this is
Lieutenant O’Rourke, Detective
Fuselli. New York homicide.
They’d like to ask you a
few questions.
DAN
Sure.
He suddenly registers what the Lieutenant just

said.
DAN
(continuing)
Excuse me … Did you say homicide?
O’ROURKE
That’s right.
DAN
Why? What’s this got to do
with –? What about Alex Forrest?
Did you get her?
156
O’ROURKE
No, we haven’t, as a matter
of fact. You saw her last night?
DAN
Yes … I already told the
Lieutenant here. Why –
what’s she saying?
O’ROURKE
(drily)
She’s not saying very much, Mr.
Gallagher.
Fuselli snickers unpleasantly.
O’ROURKE
(continuing flatly)
She’s dead.
Dan is completely stunned. They all stop.
DAN
She what? She’s dead???
FUSELLI
That’s right.
O’Rourke stares back at him, saying nothing.
DAN
How?? How did she …
(suddenly awed)
You think I did it …? Oh, Jesus …
(You think I killed her) … Oh, Jesus.
At that point, Dan is arrested and taken away by the police. His wife,
Beth (Anne Archer), panics and hurries inside the house to call their
attorney. As she’s looking for the phone number, she spots a cassette tape
labelled PLAY ME. She plays the tape and listens as Alex confesses her
obsession with Dan and promises to kill herself: “When you push me
away you give me no other choice. I’ll cut deeper next time. I’ll kill
myself!” Dan is acquitted.
157
On paper, the dialogue is clever and engaging, the tension of the arrest
palpable. But the script missed the most important final beat. When the
film was test screened, audiences hated it. They felt cheated. Sewing up
the loose ends of an otherwise powerful thriller in a recorded message felt
incredibly diminuendo.
The star, Michael Douglas, has said that in a test screening, when Alex
Forrest took her own life,
the audience went, “No man, no, you gotta kill her.” … As bad
as I had been … once she went after the family all bets were off
… [The audience] wanted us to do her in. … That was the audi-
ence’s catharsis, isn’t to allow her to do herself in.2
At this point, the filmmakers realized that, to remain true to the genre,
Dan and Alex had to confront each other head on and, as in most thrill-
ers, one of them had to die. Rewriting, reshooting, and re-editing the
film’s ending led to a spectacular success.
Figure 15.1 Fatal Attraction – The cassette recording.

Writers can take a lesson from this. It’s not enough to establish strong
characters, a riveting plot, and clever dialogue. The story has to work
within the bounds of the genre.
Ritual Objects and Story

In my advanced editing classes I often ask students to bring in an object
to talk about. Not just any object, but one that means something to them.
158
Many speak with great candor when revealing objects that have reso-
nance for them. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when everyone was on
Zoom, students were even more profound in their sharing, whether from
the extra time they had to think about it or the more personal nature of
being online or the shared humanity of the pandemic experience.
In this exercise, the more guarded students might bring in a ping-pong
ball and talk about their skills at the game. Others spoke more openly,
showing a ring that belonged to a great aunt who had died, the linen trim
that was all that remained of a childhood blanket that still comforted
them, and so on. As they spoke about their particular objects, we could
see that the item, which might be tattered, worn, or tarnished, had been
imbued with deep meaning.
Genres carry their own object identification that promotes their themes
and meaning. Like Tom Cruise’s line in Jerry Maguire, “Show me the
money,” the writer and editor should heed the call to “show me the
object.” Consider this: what objects are associated with your favorite
genres? The romantic comedy, for instance, often ends with a wedding or
the promise of a wedding, carrying with it the object of a wedding ring.
The first wedding scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) is full
of comedic tension surrounding the best man’s last-minute discovery that
he (Hugh Grant) has lost the wedding ring. His subsequent dash to gather
the object before the vows end leads to a replacement ring that is surrep-
titiously solicited from the audience and placed on the bride’s finger. It is
ugly as hell. And funny. And the significance of the object is without
question.
Figure 15.2 Four Weddings and a Funeral – The ring.

Credit: Metro Goldwyn Mayer/Gramercy Pictures.
159
In the mystery film Where the Crawdads Sing (2022), a shell necklace
appears again and again throughout the story and, in the end, supplies a
powerful reveal for the film’s conclusion.
What about horror? One of the strongest, most persistent myths of the
horror genre is the vampire. Most people can easily identify the iconog-
raphy of that genre, including wooden stakes, garlic, crosses, mirrors,
smoke, bite marks, and coffins.
Also, consider two genres that share similar structures in the hero myth,
though at different ends of modern history. One – science fiction – looks
forward into the future with lasers, space ships, and distant planets, while
the other – Westerns – looks back to technologically simpler times with
six shooters, horses, and the rural frontier. These hot objects, or synecdo-
ches, are imbued with great meaning that resonates throughout the story.
Just as it’s important to reinforce the presence of characters in a scene,
even those who aren’t speaking, filmmakers discover the necessity to keep
alive the objects that reinforce the genre and the message. Many a time
I’ve asked for or directed pick-up shots to gather inserts of those impor-
tant objects. Though essential, the object might not be given its proper
due in the script and therefore is passed over in production. Even if these
items were incorporated, they were sometimes relegated to wide shots or
alluded to in dialogue, but never brought to the foreground where the
audience can see and feel the significance of these guiding icons.
Formula
In terms of genre, it’s important to distinguish genre formula from formu-
laic writing. Genre gives writers a guide for building powerful stories that
fulfill the needs of an audience. Consequently, genre creates particular
expectations in the audience. This sounds simple enough, almost obvious.
Yet the dynamics of creating scenes that satisfy these expectations can be
elusive. When genre issues aren’t fully dealt with at the script stage, they
emerge again during the post production stage.
The classic Christmas film Prancer (1989), written by Greg Taylor
(Jumanji) and directed by John Hancock (Bang the Drum Slowly), is
another example of genre’s influence. As a family film, which is also a
Christmas movie, Prancer needed to fulfill several expectations. First, as
a family film, there would need to be some kind of reconciliation at the
end, a sense of the strength and the enduring quality of family. Second, as
a Christmas movie, it needed to promise some sort of magic, such as is
seen in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), A Miracle on 34th Street (1947,
1994), or Elf (2003).
In Prancer’s case, the question of faith played a major issue. This is
posed by the poem that farmer John Riggs (Sam Elliott) reads to his
daughter Jesse (Rebecca Harrel): “is there really a Santa Claus?”
160
The poem’s reply is: “Yes …” In the case of Prancer, this tied into the
question of whether the wounded reindeer that Jesse finds and nurses
back to health is really one of Santa’s. Is it Prancer, as Jessie suspects?
The original ending as written left this open- ended. Prancer, fully
recovered from a gunshot wound, is driven out to the woods in the fam-
ily’s pickup truck by farmer John, accompanied by his daughter Jessie.
The final farewell scene is played between Jessie and Prancer while Jessie’s
father looks on from the distance.
She looks at Prancer for a long moment. We

finally see the resolve in her eyes.
She grabs the latch quickly, closes her eyes

and snaps it back. The door flies open and
Prancer LEAPS out.
He turns and runs gracefully into the pines

toward Antler Ridge. He looks beautiful.
JESSIE
Prancer!
Jessie runs after him.
ANGLE – JOHN
His instinct is to run to her. Stop her. But he

holds back.
EXT. FOREST ANTLER RIDGE – NIGHT – PRANCER

Runs down a long corridor of pines, jumping

fallen branches, bells tinkling.
JESSIE
moves after him as fast as she can.

HER MOVING POV OF PRANCER
He’s moving away from us. We can’t catch him.

He’s starting to fade from view. The snow has
stopped.
161
JESSIE
Running, trying to see him one last time.
PRANCER
Disappearing into the light at the end of the

corridor of pines. He’s gone now. His bells
are still audible, growing fainter. Now they’re
gone.
EXT. CLIFF ANTLER RIDGE (STARVED

ROCK) – NIGHT – JESSIE
breaks through the trees into a clearing. Move

with her to reveal that the ground drops off
here at a cliff. Just a few lights from the
town are visible from this angle. We’re at
Antler Ridge.
Jessie stops, looking around. Prancer’s nowhere

in sight. She looks to the left, the right.
Where could he have gone? His bell collar is
lying in the snow. She picks it up. John joins
her, points –
THEIR POV – THE HOOFPRINTS
lead over the edge.
JESSIE
walks forward, looks out over the cliff –
POV
No sign below of the deer.
MATTE SHOT ANGLER RIDGE – NIGHT
As John joins her we look over them, out over

the cliff and into the valley with the little
162
town of Three Oaks. How could he have gone out

there?
We’ll never know. Believe what you want to

believe. Jessie’s made her choice.
But as an audience we want to know. We’ve waited nearly two hours

to find the answer, yet “we’ll never know.” The equivocal ending in the
script led to a simple rewrite in the editing room. The answer to the ques-
tion that was posed at the beginning – is this reindeer really one of
Santa’s? – needed to be made clear.
By introducing some subliminal dissolves that effectively made Prancer
seem to disappear in the last moments of his run – if you blinked, you
missed it – and adding the sound of distant bells to the soundtrack, super-
imposing a glow across Jessie’s face as she looks skyward, and finally
presenting the cathartic reveal of a distant Prancer streaking across the
night sky and rejoining Santa’s sleigh as it crosses the full moon, we cre-
ated a satisfying ending that brought the film in line with its genre.
Figure 15.3 Prancer – Bidding farewell to Prancer.

Credit: Orion Pictures/MGM.
Sometimes it’s a challenge to find the correct approach. Especially these

days when mixed genres abound. During the editing of Don’t Look Up
(2022), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, director
Adam McKay and editor Hank Corwin, ACE, had to establish the true
genres and, consequently, the true emotions that the film would seek to
163
engender in its audience. On the surface, the subject matter is deadly seri-
ous and harrowing – the end of the world by a massive comet strike. But
it is also a comedy, a cinematic satire in the manner of Dr. Strangelove or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
Kubrick’s film, Dr. Strangelove, was originally based

on a serious novel, Red Alert by Peter George, about
nuclear annihilation. It was a warning to the world
about the consequences of nuclear mismanagement
and the foolhardy mission of putting trust in the
atom bomb and those who maintain it. The story’s
consequences were so horrific and so close to reality that the film-
makers found themselves making off-color jokes as they attempted
to construct a serious dramatic script. Ultimately, Kubrick’s sense of
humor won out, and the characters evolved into buffoons and mad-
men on a foolhardy mission in a dark, satirical comedy.
Similarly, Don’t Look Up is part comedy, part tragedy. Editor Corwin

explained, “I like to think in terms of collage as opposed to montage –
especially in this film. I don’t want to make scenes overly polemical. I
don’t want to make scenes overly political. I think the politics that are
really important are the politics of emotion and of will.” He and the
director worked hard to discover the correct tone of the film.
It was a moving target. Initially, I saw this film as a great sadness,

a real tragedy. I didn’t see this as a comedy. … If I had done that,
the film would have been very earnest and I suspect it wouldn’t
have been successful. Adam kept wanting to balance the tone.
We had to have levity. It’s a comedy, but everything must be plau-
sible. He had me constantly pulling back the comedy. I don’t
come from a funny world like Adam does. … I had to make
the scenarios more serious and somewhat plausible, even if they
were funny.3
This reinforces the need to discover the genre and determine the tone that
the writer wishes to affect. As in cases such as Don’t Look Up, comedies
deliver their messages through laughs and not through heavy polemics,
though a film like Triangle of Sadness (2022), with its theme of status
and societal inequality framed by crazed political discussions between
the ship’s alcoholic captain (Woody Harrelson) and a fertilizer tycoon
(Zlatko Buric), bridges the two.
164
Figure 15.4 Don’t Look Up. The scientists confront the inevitable.
Credit: Netflix.
In The Convent, another mixed genre film, director Mike Mendez’s

passion for horror, including graphic gore, at times vied with the comedic
aspect of the film. The opening scene of violence in the inner sanctum of
the convent, involving a baseball bat and shotgun, were originally shot in
slow motion which, as Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) discovered
years ago, makes violence appear all the more horrific. In our case, it
became clear that going in the opposite direction, that is, speeding up the
action, would give the events a sort of cartoon violence aspect with a
herky-jerky, Keystone cop-like action. This carried over into the later
zombie scenes where the once slow, dragging zombies – zombies can
wreak havoc on a film’s pacing – took on a frantic, crazed cadence. Aside
from helping propagate the comedy, it also picked up the pace and added
excitement to this horror comedy.
Documentary is another genre that poses challenges. Some documenta-
ries are constructed from random footage collected over the course of
months or years. It becomes the editor’s job to discover characters and
story while structuring, a clear throughline. Other documentaries benefit
from copious research which is incorporated into interviews, voiceovers,
and recreations. Here, too, the editor’s choices are instructive to the writer.
On a show for National Geographic, I found that the initial script with
which we were presented and which was used to initiate the interviews
and B-roll, morphed into a new creature with each iteration of the cut. As
the editing progressed, the newest versions were handed back to the writ-
ers so they could fill in the gaps or follow the new line of thought. The
original story was reworked in this way, many times. In the end, the final
script had little resemblance to the first draft. In that sense, it can be reas-
suring to writers to know that they shouldn’t expect the early drafts of
165
their work to resemble the well-wrought professionally edited final film.

But understanding the process will take them a long way toward getting
through the work successfully.
Notes
1 Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 1971.
2 Sirius XM. “Michael Douglas Remembers the Alternate Ending of Fatal
Attraction.” December 4, 2018.
3 Feld, Rob. “Hank Corwin Talks Editing and Collaboration in ‘Don’t Look
Up.’” CineMontage, Journal of the Motion Picture Editors Guild. December
20, 2021.
166
16
THE END IS THE BEGINNING
This chapter looks at the importance of endings, one of the most

frequently dealt with issues during the final editing stage. Where
do endings go wrong? What is the purpose of an ending? How do
writers and editors discover the proper ending? Is the beginning or
the ending more important?
Endings are hard, and “parting is such sweet sorrow,”1 as Shakespeare

observed. Endings are the final impression that the audience takes away
from a film or television show. In TV, some seasons wrap up dramatically,
while introducing a complication that will carry over into the next sea-
son, such as the second season of Sanditon (2019) with Rosie Graham,
Rose Williams and Crystal Clarke, or the beautifully crafted wrap-up to
the first season of Peaky Blinders (2013). One of the most famous endings
was the season conclusion of the show Dallas (1978–1991) where the
lead character, J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman), was shot. The tagline for the
next season became “Who shot J.R.?”
To better understand the ending, look to the beginning.
In crafting a screenplay, the approach to the beginning is paramount.
The reader’s attention is primed in those first pages. They want to know
several primary considerations – what is this story about, who is this
story about, and why should I care?
A magnetic character whose altruistic motives are misunderstood
could be a good start. Or a troubled and conflicted character with a good
heart. Or a myriad of other traits with which the reader can identify. It is
also essential that our character have a big problem, something nearly
insurmountable that needs to be solved. It could involve saving the world
or just saving a friendship, a marriage, or a community. It should be an
issue that resonates with the reader.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-17 167

Figure 16.1 Sanditon - Women of Sanditon.

Credit: PBS.
As mentioned earlier, some screenplays begin with an emergency.

Desperate events have a way of immediately catching a reader’s attention
and holding it.
Some screenplays start with a mystery, such as the phenomenon of
strange lights and unexpectedly animated toys in Close Encounters of the
Third Kind (1977).
These kinds of openings can launch a script that is hard to put down.
After the premise has been stated and the problem made clear, it’s up to
the writer to hold our attention through the long journey that is the mid-
dle and then wrap it up with a satisfactory ending.
Since screenplays are intended to be read, it is essential that those first
pages reach the reader’s emotional and intellectual core. Books, screen-
plays, and plays are often sold based on a gripping opening with well-
crafted characters.
This fact might lead one to believe that the beginning of a film is the most
important part. But consider this: if the film is successful and, through word
of mouth, social media, online reviews, and advertisements, you are driven
to buy a ticket or stream it, what becomes the most important aspect?
Certainly, everything that follows is important. You might be willing to
wade through an essential, yet less engaging, set-up at the beginning.
The set-up will prepare you for later plot twists and character discover-
ies. What you don’t want is to sit with a film for 45, 90, or 120 minutes
only to see it sputter out at the end. How unsatisfying would that be? And
the chance that you’ll recommend the film to your friends or write a favor-
able review or click five stars instead of two will depend on how the film
ends. Will the problem that was established in the beginning be resolved in
the finale?
168
Endings are one of the most frequently dealt with issues during the
final editing stage. Endings are hard. There are numerous tales of films
that struggled to find the right conclusion, including one of the greatest
films of all time, Casablanca. The writers, Julius and Philip Epstein along
with Howard E. Koch, were still crafting the ending while the film was in
production. This despite all the advice of writing gurus to know your
ending before you embark on the beginning. Yet what an amazing end-
ing. The final farewell between Rick and Ilsa is one of the most enduring
scenes in American cinema. But it was hard fought.
Where to Begin
Within the first ten pages, we meet the story’s main characters. The first
moments can be pleasant and attractive, but quickly a disturbance occurs
which pulls us out of our comfort zone. Like the opening of the Western
Silverado (1985). It begins with the gentle crackling of a wood-burning
stove inside a dark shack, moments before bullets explode through the
walls, disrupting the peace and awakening a sleeping Scott Glenn who
grabs his Winchester and returns fire, killing three of his assailants.
Or the interior of another cabin in The Shawshank Redemption, when
the door suddenly bursts open, and a man and woman in the throes of
passion charge inside and begin making love.
Or the silent universe, after the opening title crawl, at the beginning of
Star Wars, just before a huge space craft rockets overhead.
All these are gripping moments that immediately capture our attention.
And each leads to an ensuing crisis. A shoot out that launches our hero
on his way to Silverado, a sex scene turned into a homicide, and a battle
by rebel forces.
How you begin will affect the end. So, consider the beginning carefully.
And, be sure to follow it through to the end, rather than wandering off
onto another path.
But how do you craft an effective beginning? The great film The
Shawshank Redemption had an engaging and well-structured opening. In
it, the opening sex scene turns out to be an extramarital affair that sparks
the jealousy and revenge of a husband, Andy (Tim Robbins), who has
refused to grant a divorce. Drunk and armed with a .38 he approaches
the house in a jealous rage. When the couple is found murdered the next
day, Andy is identified as the killer and sent to a high-security prison.
In the original shooting script, the cabin scene is followed by a court-
room scene where Andy is found guilty and sentenced to two life sentences.
The courtroom and jury room scenes are interspersed with the film’s open-
ing credits. On paper it read great. The lovers wrestling in an impassioned
embrace, the jealous husband approaching the cabin, the revolver spilling
bullets as he staggers toward the sounds of lovemaking, the arguments and
cross examinations in the courtroom, and the final sentencing along with
169
the introduction of a new character, a prisoner named Red (Morgan

Freeman), who has been denied parole on multiple occasions.
All these scenes move along in an engaging, and highly linear, fashion.
By the end of the first seven pages, the main protagonists, Andy and Red,
have been introduced, and their conflicts have become clear. Red has been
denied parole again after 20 years, and Andy is about to serve two lifetimes
for a crime he may not have committed. Both have serious problems.
But what worked in the script did not work in the editing room.
According to the writer–director Frank Darabont,
The screenplay’s approach of playing as separate blocks of con-

secutive narrative proved somewhat protracted and boring when
viewed on film. Additionally, the written technique of dividing
up Scenes 5 through 8 (the trial) with “fade to blacks” to accom-
modate the titles seemed like a good idea at the time, but also
served to needlessly protract the sequence – indeed, it managed
to stop the narrative flow dead in its tracks. …
The solution I came up with in the cutting room, heartily
embraced by my editor and producer, was to reconceptualize the
two separate blocks of narrative into a single title sequence focus-
ing on the trial (really the point of the whole thing), with the
footage of the lovers used in a more sparing “flashback” manner.2
In doing this, director and editor improved the pacing by trimming down
the long lovemaking and cabin scenes, which accounted for two full script
pages at the beginning, and getting to the trial quicker, where extraneous
lines of dialogue were removed. Then, the titles were superimposed over
the scenes rather than interrupting the flow by going to black each time.
From a series of separate scenes, the material merged into a powerful and
well-paced opening title sequence.
Figure 16.2 Silverado – Inside the cabin.

Credit: Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.
170
The End
What is the purpose of an ending? How does the writer discover the
proper ending? Is the beginning or the ending more important? Where do
endings go wrong?
Hollywood was notorious for supplying unrelenting happy endings
for its audiences. Without a happy ending, a script generally would not
be green lit, and a film without a pleasing ending was considered
doomed to failure. The peddling of happy endings was interrupted in
the late sixties and early seventies when a desire for less fantasy and
more reality set in, influenced by a generation coming of age during
times of war and rebellion. Today, while most films still supply an
upbeat and hopeful conclusion, some are less optimistic in considering
the consequences of real life, such as Tár (2022) or All Quiet on the
Western Front (2022).
It is not merely the happy ending that today’s more sophisticated audi-
ences require. They have seen films of strife, inequality, violence, and
abuse. It is the satisfying ending that produces, perhaps, the greatest
effect. To create the best ending, the writer, director, and editor need to
understand the dilemma that was posited at the beginning of the film and
determine a satisfying resolution at the end. When the central conflict
becomes diluted or diverges in the course of the film, the filmmaker needs
to guide it back to the throughline and, in following that trail, discover
an ending that answers the questions, fulfills the emotional arc, and solves
the riddle of the opening.
Much of this is genre-specific.
In traditional Westerns, the lone hero to whom many have become
attached, who has proven worthy and even gained the love of others,
rides off into the sunset at the end. This exit, seen in Shane (1953) star-
ring Alan Ladd, The Searchers (1956), The Magnificent Seven (1960),
and a myriad of others, while bittersweet, reinforces the heroism and
individuality of the main character.
In romantic comedies, however, it must generally proceed the other
way around. The lovers, after all the misunderstandings and fights, the
disapprovals of friends and family, eventually acknowledge their love
and, most likely, marry.
Editors frequently encounter these issues. In my own experience, it
seems that in nearly half the films I’ve edited we had to re-evaluate the
ending as written. Extra beats were removed, promises were kept, and
heroes prevailed. Know your audience. Be aware of their expectations.
Fulfill those expectations in a unique way. For any film, there was only
one proper ending, and that’s the one that finally made it into the
theater.
171
Figure 16.3 Shane – “Shane, come back.”

How do editors evaluate endings? What measure can be applied to

determine the correctness of an ending? To discover the ending, look to
the beginning. Has the film answered the questions that were set up in
the beginning? Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard,
Double Indemnity) said you can’t get a third act if you don’t have a first
act.
Viewed another way, narrative films are about an existential question,
whether it is who will you marry, what is the meaning of life, what is
death, how do you find true happiness, what is the right livelihood, and
so on. Like all good inquiries, the answer is imbedded in the question
and how the question is posed. If you ask the wrong question, you get
the wrong answer. In film, the beginning, which posits the question,
must be related to the ending that answers it. The resolution. Along the
way, we experience the struggles in determining the final answer, the
conclusion.
Your main character’s want and need play into this. Perhaps the answer
will reveal that the initial need wasn’t a need at all but a want. In some
cases, your hero or heroine will achieve what they want, what they’ve
172
worked and fought for, only to discover that it’s not truly what they need.
Look at Up in the Air (2009), where the main character, Ryan Bingham
(George Clooney), believes that he needs to achieve the coveted
10-million-mile club. When he finally makes that crucial flight and the
pilot (Sam Elliott) walks back to his seat to personally award the honor,
Bingham realizes that it’s an empty victory. In his lack of attachment to
any human being, he has lost what he truly needs to make him human, a
deep and satisfying relationship.
In the Wizard of Oz (1939), the wizard is revealed, but, rather than
being the large and scary figure that our heroes have imagined, they dis-
cover he is hiding behind the mask of a machine.
In In the Heat of the Night (1967), a white cop (Rod Steiger) believes
he’s there to catch a murderer, but he’s really there to have his prejudices
challenged and torn down. The Black detective (Sidney Poitier), whom he
first rejected, discovers the murderer.
Figure 16.4 Crazy Rich Asians – The mah jong game.

In Crazy Rich Asians (2018), the main character (Constance Wu)

believes she must prevail no matter what, but, in the end, she forfeits the
mah jong game with her boyfriend’s mother (Michelle Yeoh), letting her
win, rather than jeopardize the man she loves. Yet this move allows her
to win in the end.
In Schindler’s List (1993), a successful industrialist (Liam Neeson)
believes he’s helping his business by conscripting Jewish prisoners (Ben
Kingsley et al) to work in his factory, but, in the end, he risks his life to
save them from execution by the Nazis.
173
Figure 16.5 Schindler’s List – Oskar Schindler and his Jewish accountant.
In the Green Book (2018), an Italian American opportunist bouncer

intends to prosper as the driver for a gay Black pianist on a tour through
the South, but he comes to feel for the man’s suffering and becomes his
close friend.
In Birdcage (1996), an uptight and homophobic senator from Virginia
ends up disguised as a woman and discovering the true value of family.
In One-Eyed Jacks (1961), an outlaw (Marlon Brando) determined to
increase his riches finds he must take on the unscrupulous sheriff (Karl
Malden) of Monterey who used to be his partner in crime. In the end, he
brings justice to the town and marries the man’s daughter.
Figure 16.6 One Eyed Jacks – Sheriff Dad gets an unexpected visit from Rio.
174
In the Sixth Sense (1999), a withdrawn young man who sees spirits
enlists the help of a therapist to cure him, only to discover he’s already
dead.
In The Sound of Music (1965), an unsuccessful nun wants to be free of
the convent and work as a governess for a large family of talented chil-
dren, only to marry their father and help save them from the Nazis.
In Beauty and the Beast (1991), based on the 1946 film by Jean
Cocteau, a frightening monster who was once a cursed prince agrees with
a request to return a girl’s captive father. But the girl ends up falling in
love with the beast and turning him back into a human.
Figure 16.7 Beauty and the Beast – Belle and the Beast.
Credit: Criterion Collection.
What we discover by the end is the value of the crisis. It breaks the mold,
bumps us out of the repetitious cycle that our habits have locked us into. By
the end of the film, we discover that the crisis was a blessing in disguise.
Some film scripts never quite find their ending, only to discover it dur-
ing the production process, as in Casablanca, or in the post production
process, such as in the constructed ending of the dark comedy The
Favourite (2018), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and edited by Yorgos
Mavropsaridis. In the original script, written by Deborah Davis and Tony
McNamara, the two tempestuous and jealous lovers, one the frail Queen
Anne of England (Olivia Coleman) and the other her close friend Sarah
175
Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), are divided over

Anne’s affections for her new servant Abigail (Emma Stone). Ultimately,
Sarah is banished, and the final scene leaves Anne and Abigail to their
fates with each other.
INT. ANNE’S APARTMENTS DAY
Anne lies in bed, she opens her eyes. Sees

Abigail sitting in a chair, reading by the
window, dropping a Madeleine into her mouth.
A rabbit wanders near her foot, she lifts a

foot and traps the rabbit under her foot. It
struggles for a moment. She lets it go with a
smile.
Anne slides herself out of the bed. Lands on

the floor, in pain. Abigail hears a grunt. Sees
Anne is on the floor crawling, in pain.
ABIGAIL
Anne.
Abigail rushes to her, takes her under the arms

to help her up.
ABIGAIL (CONT’D)
arling Anne. Let’s get
D
you in a chair.
Anne leans on the wall.
ABIGAIL
I’m sorry. I –
ANNE
I did not ask you to
speak.
ANNE (CONT’D)
My leg. Rub it.
ABIGAIL
You should lie down.
176
ANNE
You will speak when
asked to.
Abigail gets it, drops to her knees starts

rubbing.
ANNE (CONT’D)
am so dizzy … I need to hang on
I
to …
She grabs at Abigail’s hair, wraps a hunk

around her fingers, holding it hard. Abigail
winces.
ANNE (CONT’D)
Something …
Abigail rubs, looks over at the cage full of

rabbits across the room sitting staring at her.
Anne winces in pain stares at the wall. Closes

her eyes.
This is where the script ends. A rather abrupt conclusion after the audi-
ence has committed two hours to get to know Anne, Sarah, and the new
servant, Abigail, who, with her ambitions to return to her aristocratic
roots, has succeed in driving a wedge between the two lovers.
In the film, the final scene develops beyond the script page with a mon-
tage of Queen Anne’s 17 rabbits, each of which represents one of her lost
children. It blends, through various dissolves, with the images of Anne
and Abigail. Though the scene feels slightly surreal, it is grounded in the
relationship dynamics that have played out throughout the film, culmi-
nating in the sad dissolution of everything that was once cherished in the
queen’s life. After all, Abigail schemed to become the queen’s trusted ser-
vant and unseat Anne’s old friend, Sarah.
Where at one time she had both Sarah and Abigail vying for her loyalty
and affection, now she has neither, and the images of her other losses, the
rabbits, compound the regrets. While early on, Abigail won Anne’s trust
with her sympathetic acknowledgment of the rabbits and their impor-
tance to the queen, she now traps one under her foot. Though the film is
entitled The Favourite, reflecting the struggle between Sarah and Abigail
in their drive to secure the favored position with Anne, it’s ultimately
about Anne herself and how she’s grown tired of and felt betrayed by her
closest confidants.
177
Figure 16.8 The Favourite – Stepping on a rabbit.

Figure 16.9 The Favourite – Queen Anne, Abigail and the rabbits.
The Favourite’s editorial solution to an abrupt ending is one approach.

This is not to suggest that, as a writer, you’ll take this approach – though
writers do build meaningful montage sequences into their scripts – but that
you’ll attend to the importance of strong endings based on the dynamics
that proceed them. Reading one’s script out loud or, if the writer has access
to actors, doing table reads can give an excellent sense of what is working
178
and what is not. While, in the Made in Heaven example, it became clear
that the film was over when the two lovers met each other again on Earth,
the sudden ending in The Favourite needed a smoother and more consid-
ered transition to fade out.
Notes
1 Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. 1595.
2 Darabont, Frank, and Stephen King. Shawshank Redemption: The Shooting
Script. Newmarket Press. 30 September, 2004.
179
17
HINDSIGHT IS 20/20
The chapter reviews the influence that the final stage of the film-
making process has on the beginning of the process. How can the
editor’s final rewrite speak to the writer’s final draft?
Emotional Logic
As movies grew more realistic, audiences came to believe in characters as
if they were real people, not just masks of real people. In creating situ-
ations and characters, writers teach their audience the rules of a world.
One character is cunning and deceitful, another is shy and retiring,
another is warm and gregarious. As the story progresses, the audience
becomes intimate with these characters and learns what to expect.
Part of the joy and satisfaction of watching a well-told story is the feel-
ing that we know a character so well that we can anticipate how they will
react to any situation. Of course, people can change, and we all know the
danger of viewing relationships through memory’s veil, unwilling or
unable to see someone anew. This fresh perspective, which is healing to
humans and freeing to the psyche, often does not appear until the third
act in films. Until then, we may remain tethered to a preconception of
how and why this person acts in a particular way. When this is betrayed
without reason or revelation, the audience is thrown off course. Part of
the editor’s job is to steer the film in the correct direction, to hold to the
keel of the premise, and follow the story sextant to a desired location.
An example of this is in the second season of the excellent BBC series
based on a bestselling novel, All Creatures Great and Small (2022).
Tristan (Callum Woodhouse), the brother of the senior veterinarian,
Siegfried, is finally given the opportunity to range out on his own and
answer a house call without Siegfried (Samuel West) leaning over his
shoulder. His first assignment is a scary one – to clean and file the teeth of
a huge and aggressive prize horse on a wealthy estate.
180 DOI: 10.4324/9781003161578-18

HINDSIGHT IS 20/20
Upon arriving with his new vet’s bag, he’s confronted by the patriarch,
who is brusque and confrontational. Eventually, after placing his hand in
the jaws of the large-toothed horse and getting kicked in the shins by the
unruly stallion, Tristan manages to complete the dangerous procedure.
On his way out, Tristan encounters the daughter of the estate owner,
now riding the black stallion. But she is unaware of his inexperience.
They chat, she’s intrigued, and he invites her to his birthday dinner that
evening.
At the birthday dinner, Tristan sits at the table beside the girl and
drunkenly confesses his inexperience along with revealing the other sub-
terfuges that he perpetrated throughout the day to convince people of his
abilities.
At this point, knowing that the girl is the daughter of the taciturn and
skeptical estate owner, the audience anticipates that the revelation will
yield some sort of negative reaction, such as shock and dismay. But the
scene was not written for the girl to register any response.
Despite the fact that the dinner party’s table is crowded with diners,
the editor skilfully avoids returning to close-ups of the girl. Instead, the
other characters get the close-up treatment, and the girl is all but
ignored, featured briefly in a group wide shot. Clearly, if the editor had
included close-ups of the girl, it would have begged the question of her
reaction to these confessions of Tristan’s. Since the dialogue does not
follow through on what would have been the upsetting discovery that
the girl’s date is dishonest and inexperienced, the editor made the deci-
sion to avoid her close-ups. Instead, the girl has no reaction. Through
this neglect, we are asked to forget about the emotional dissonance that
was potentially there.
This is a case where the audience had witnessed the situation and had
developed a sense of the characters, but were unable to experience the
clear consequences of such a reveal.
Even highly successful films can make miscalculations, and generally
the overall power of the film overcomes those missteps. In this case, it is
instructional to see what could have been visualized in the script stage,
yet was not. Such as the missing jury box in The Trial of the Chicago 7.
These are subtle and less obvious challenges that filmmakers face and
writers must anticipate nonetheless.
Editing suites, directors’ sets, and writers’ rooms are crucibles. Heated,
complex, and sometimes intense. All the material, good and bad, high
and low, comes together in these spaces. There is something alchemical
about the process. And, like the medieval alchemists, who adopted
Mercury as their guide, messenger, and transformer, editors and writers
turn base substances into gold, a blank page into Casablanca, or
800 hours of footage into Top Gun: Maverick (2022).1
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HINDSIGHT IS 20/20
Figure 17.1 All Creatures Great and Small – The dinner party.
Credit: PBS.
During the Middle Ages, alchemy issued from the waking dream of
those who were yet to discover the world of science. They made up expla-
nations for the natural world because the rigors of scientific exploration
did not yet exist. They were artists more than scientists.
In the alchemy of film, the transformation from the writer’s waking
dream to polished script to final cut gives insights into how to take the
process to its highest level. The script remains the key to the kingdom.
By analyzing its passage through production and the final editing pro-
cess, we saw how the writer can focus plot and character in a film such as
Apocalypse Now, alter an audience’s sympathies with a single cut in
Horseplayer, or evoke sensory aspects of place as in Dune.
In The Power of the Dog and King Richard, we saw how the correct
tone with which to begin the story was discovered in post production. In
Prancer, Made in Heaven, and Fatal Attraction, we explored the elements
that make a strong and satisfying ending. By looking at Shame, we gained
insight into how writers can build the all-important filmic moments into
their scripts.
In Pulp Fiction and Jurassic Park, we experienced how the juxtaposi-
tion of shots can control time and build suspense within a sequence,
while a show such as The Queen’s Gambit finds ways to leap across time
through montage. And for the writer whose scripts labor under too linear
a plot, we looked at the fractured narrative in The Limey and Pachinko.
There are many more ways as well. These all rely on the insights and
creativity of the writer. When starting a new script, consider some of the
182
HINDSIGHT IS 20/20
Figure 17.2 Medieval alchemy and the magic of transformation.
approaches outlined here or, more likely, when rewriting, review these
chapters and find what resonates with your script’s particular issues.
Creativity and Inspiration

At times, one can wonder about the value of films in the larger scheme of
things. Life is grand, but it is also full of hardship and suffering. If cinema
is merely escapism, an entertainment designed to take us away from our
problems for a mere two hours, its value is limited. But film and television
stories can also give us an honest look at how life works. They can show
183
HINDSIGHT IS 20/20
us what it is to grow up, make friends, find a livelihood, fall in love, lose
people, have break-ups, die, and be reborn to new possibilities.
Film is as much visual poetry as it is visual music. All this is based on
rhythm. The beats of life. That is the purview of the editor, from the child
born of the writer.
Cinema’s power to influence and to heal has been seen again and again,
from the Great Depression to 9/11 to the recent Covid-19 outbreak. Film
is a place to turn to find commonality and empathy with others of our
species and, in some cases, other species as well. Maybe even an alien or
two. As the poet Erica Jong pointed out so beautifully, “People think they
can live without poetry. And they can. At least until they become fatally
ill, have a baby, or fall desperately, madly, in love.”2
Sure, as everyone will remind you, especially the producer when you’re
negotiating salary or a deadline, film is a business. Some people dislike
Hollywood because they dislike the dehumanizing aspect of business, of
something that puts profit over people. Yet, if it were only a business, it
wouldn’t affect human beings the way it has for over a century. And some
of the kindest, most generous, and most talented people I know are in the
film business.
Figure 17.3 A beach.

Credit: Author
184
HINDSIGHT IS 20/20
Writers earn a living by sharing their lives, or what they understand of

life, and telling it in the finest story possible. The best films allow us to
experience the joy of learning and discovery. Is there anything more
earthshaking for an audience than the epiphany of experiencing, through
a character with whom we identify, something that is true? But first, the
film must engage us.
Writers, directors, editors, and most artists confront, from time to time,
the fear that their creative impulses will evaporate, that they’ll run out of
ideas. But creation is an amazing force that goes beyond our ability to
fully comprehend it.
On a walk along the beach, we marvel at the endless grains of sand
below our feet and the profusion of stars above us in millions of galaxies,
each unique. There are so many creatures upon this Earth that it is impos-
sible to describe them all. This is creation, a generative process without
beginning or end. When we create, we tap into this special realm and
share dominion with something greater than ourselves, whether as a
writer at the keyboard or an editor at the editing console. The next step
is always the first step, that brave foray into the unknown realm of the
blank page. Along the way, the journey can be full of detours, missteps,
doubts, unexpected encounters, and startling revelations. Screenwriting is
rewriting. Understanding the process helps ferry you confidently along
that path. And, in understanding the distant realm of the editor, you can
utilize their techniques to elevate your script to new levels, making it even
more engaging and polished and original.
Notes
1 Variety. April 13, 2022.
2 Jong, Erica. A Century of Recorded Poetry. Rhino Records. 1996.
185
INDEX
Pages in italics refer to figures.
adrenaline injection 95–6 Beauty and the Beast 175

alchemy 182–3 Below Utopia 26
All Creatures Great and Small 180, 182 Benjamin, Richard 138
All Quiet on the Western Front 171 Birdcage, The 119, 174
American Beauty 134 Black Panther 101, 103
Anderson, Paul Thomas 48, 58 blank page 1, 35, 42, 48, 181
Apocalypse Now 10, 11, 12, 182 Boseman, Chadwick 101
approach: literary 7; in Apocalypse “brain stemy images” 68
Now 11; Tarkovsky 20; to Brando, Marlon 5, 11, 37
character development 21; through Breathless 149
coverage 29; blank page 35; to Brenner, Yul 125
dailies 36, 104–5; to writing a Brodie-Sangster, Thomas 101
scene 37; opening a scene 38; Bublé, Michael 84
commitment to 38; alternate Burnham, Bo 133
approaches 42, 46; challenges 70, Butters, Julia 27
163; Julius Epstein 79; “start with
an emergency” 78; intercutting in calligraphy 43–4
screenplays 91; in Pulp Fiction 96; Campbell, Joseph 63
direct 118; expository 119; actors’ Campion, Jane 76
feels 122; improvisational 133; Capra, Frank 3
linear 114; fragmented 150; in Casablanca 36, 64, 71, 105, 169,
Shawshank Redemption 170; The 175, 181
Favourite, ending of 178 celluloid: 35mm era 4; shot on 5;
Archer, Anne 157 Apocalypse Now dailies 11;
Aristotle 61, 72, 144 artifacts from 28; dailies in
Attenborough, Richard 86 Licorice Pizza 48
Avengers, The 125 Chalamet, Timothée 68
Avid Media Composer 72 character: in screenplays 10;
desires 12–3, 18, 20, 30, 82,
Baby Driver 83 88, 177; wants 18, 64, 82, 123;
Baker, George Pierce 63 development 20–1; likeable
Bancroft, Ann 32 26–7, 167; unsympathetic 24–6,
Bartlett, Frederic 49 54; memorable 36; empathy 54;
Bateman, Jason 78 sympathetic 55; in Licorice Pizza
Baumgarten, Alan 82 59; identifying with 60; emotional
Baxter, Kirk 112 logic 60, 181; emotional decisions
186
I ndex
61; obstacles encountered 64–5; in dialogue: editing 34; memorable

environments 67; shot selection 79; 36–7; excess 40–1, 49, 147, 152,
journey 73; lead 75, 79, 92, 167, 170; repositioned 47; in Power
169; point-of-view 81, 91, 134; of the Dog 80; untethered 81;
plotting 92; growth 99; interaction intercutting 83; pre-lap 90; revision
104; in Casablanca 105; dialogue during editing 91; minimizing
111–19; reactions 119; feelings 110; expository 111; two-person
123; shoe leather 125; ensemble 111, 116, 118, 128; realistic
125–32; in genre 155 112; brevity 114, 118–9; power
Chayefsky, Paddy 115 dynamics 115; subtext 119,
Chengjun, Zhu 44 122–3; pauses 124–5; stealing
Chinatown 37 125; multiple characters 125–9;
Clark, Ramsey 82 foreshadowing 132; improvised
Clooney, George 149, 173 133–4; voiceover 134–5; in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind 168 transitions 143
Close, Glenn 156 Diesel, Vin 126
Closely Watched Trains 65–6 Dobbs, Lem 145
Cloud Atlas 89 documentary 165
Cocteau, Jean 175 Don’t Look Up 163–4, 165
Coleman, Olivia 175 Doors, The 11
collaboration 8 Douglas, Michael 156, 158
Collider 26 Dourif, Brad 38
Columbia University 16 Downton Abbey 38, 125–6, 128–9
Conrad, Joseph 11 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to
continuity editing 30 Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Convent, The 95, 126, 128, 165 37, 164
Coogler, Ryan 91–2 dramatic conflict 64
Cooper, Bradley 59 Dramatic Technique 63
Coppola, Francis Ford 11 Duke, Winston 101
Corwin, Hank 163 Dune 68, 92, 182
Costner, Kevin 37
coverage 4, 28–35 editing triangle 83
Crazy Rich Asians 173 Edwards, Megan 56
Crichton, Michael 86 Eisenberg, Jesse 112
Cross, Tom 5, 6 Eisenstein, Sergei 6, 20, 70, 83–4
Cruise, Tom 152–3, 159 Elf 160
Cumberbatch, Benedict 76, 115 Elliott, Sam 160, 173
Encanto 65, 67
dailies: production footage 11; essence endings: in Fatal Attraction 155–8;
of filmmaking 28; approach to 36; in Prancer 161–3; related to the
well of coverage 28–35; memory beginning 167; happy endings
and 46 171; genre-specific 171; exit 171;
Dallas 167 existential question 172; in The
Darabont, Frank 134, 170 Favourite 177
Davis, Cindy 4 Epstein, Julius 71, 133, 169
Davis, Sammi 38 Epstein, Philip 169
deadlines 42–3 Evans, Bruce A. 13
Dearden, James 155 Everything Everywhere All at Once 93
Del Rey, Lana 21 exposition 153
DePalma, Brian 78
Dern, Laura 86 Fassbinder, Michael 105
Des Barres, Michael 56 Fatal Attraction 155–8, 182
187
I ndex
Favourite, The 175–9 Godfather: Part II, The 89

feels 122 Goodbye Columbus 137–9
Field of Dreams 37 Gosling, Ryan 27
Field, Syd 63 Graduate, The 32, 37, 51–3
file-based production 29 Grand Hotel 125
film editor: description of 2; insights Grant, Hugh 159
4, 35; coverage 5; understanding of Gray Man, The 27
7; symbiotic 8; script 12; skills 27; Great Train Robbery, The 84
coverage 29; surrogate 30; subtlety Green Book 174
32; lined script 32; missing pieces 34; Green, Bruce 72
basic issues 37; deadlines 42; taking Green, Reinaldo Marcus 73
risks 44; advantages 48; dailies 61; Guardians of the Galaxy 125–6
jump cuts 63; greatest impact 71;
like a sculptor 71; technologically Ha, Jin 88
adept 72; as magicians 81; clarity Hackman, Gene 119
82; powerful tool of 83; building Hagman, Larry 167
conflict 94; approach 104–5, 153; Haim, Alana 58
leave out lines 115; stealing shots Hancock, John 160
125; structure 129; arbitrator of Harrel, Rebecca 160
genre 155; issues 171; steering the Harris, Michael 40
film 180; purview of 184 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
film time 93 65–6
filmic moments 4, 103–10 Hauptmann-Koenig 139
final cut 1 Havlick, Gene 3
Finch, Peter 115 Hayden, Sterling 37
First Man 5, 7, 12 Healthy Edit, The 21, 82, 112
flashbacks 19 Heart of Darkness 11
flow 42–3 Hecht, Ben 21, 64
Fonda, Peter 149 Hemingway, Ernest 35
Ford, Harrison 22, 24, 25–6 Hidden Figures 116
foreshadowing 132 high-definition digital capture 4
Foundations of Screenwriting 63 Hiroshima Mon Amour 149
Four Weddings and a Funeral 159 Hoffman, Cooper 58
Francis-Bruce, Richard 134 Hoffman, Dustin 32
Freeman, Morgan 134 hook 72–3
French New Wave 149 horror 160, 165
Futterman, Dan 119 Horseplayer 38, 41, 49, 54–5, 182
Hutton, Timothy 13
Gasset, Ortega y 67 Hutzler, Brody 84
Gaughan, Liam 26
genre: story structure in 65, 154–166; Iga, Luis 131–2
setting 65; definition of 154; as an Imitation Game, The 115
organizing force 154; editor’s role improvisation 133–4
155; determining character 155; In the Heat of the Night 173
ritual objects 158–60; in Prancer Inception 94
160–3 intercutting 4, 81, 83, 86
George, Melissa 145 It’s a Wonderful Life 160
George, Peter 164
Get Out 53–4 J and L cuts 122
Gideon, Raynold 13 Jerry Maguire 159
Giorno, John 93 jigsaw puzzle 8–9
Godard, Jean-Luc 149 Jojo Rabbit 7–8, 95
Godfather, The 37 Joker 26
188
I ndex
Jong, Erica 184 McGillis, Kelly 13

Joseph’s Gift 129–31 McKay, Adam 163
Joyce, James 144 McQueen, Steve 105, 109
jump cut 125, 149 Mendez, Mike 165
Jung, Carl 63 Menke, Sally 96
Jurassic Park 85–8, 182 Mercury 2
Jurgensen, Andy 48, 58–9 Milford, Gene 3
Justice League 125 Milius, John 11
juxtaposition 6, 71, 88 Miracle in the Rain 21
Miracle on 34th Street, A 160
Kahn, Michael 155 Mirren, Helen 23
Kaluuya, Daniel 53 Momento 94
Keaton, Michael 82 Monáe, Janelle 116
Kelly, Karen 56 montage: basic 4; metric
Kim, Minha 88 montage 5, 99
King Richard 73–6, 182 Morrison, Jim 11
Klugman, Jack 139 Mosquito Coast 22–6
Koch, Howard E. 169 Moyer, Paul 63
Koepp, David 86 Mulholland Drive 26
Kubrick, Stanley 164 Mulligan, Carey 105
Kuleshov 70, 83, 107 Murder in the Woods 131–2
Murphy, Eddie 133
La Cage aux Folles 119
La La Land 5 NASA 116, 118
Lane, Nathan 119 National Geographic 165
Lanthimos, Yorgos 175 Neill, Sam 86
Lawrence of Arabia 137 Netflix 27, 82, 101–2, 127
Lebenzon, Chris 153 Network 115
Li, Calvin 127 Nichols, Mike 119
Licorice Pizza 48, 58 Nicholson, Jack 21, 22, 25, 37
Limey, The 145, 182 Nolan, Christopher 94
Logline 125 non-linear construction: verses linear
Longchun, Xue 43 144; in The Limey 145, 147–150,
Lost Horizon 3, 7, 12, 38 152; in Top Gun 152
Lotman, Jurij 10 North by Northwest 155
Lucas, George 63 Notorious 21
Lyne, Adrian 155 novelists 1
MacGraw, Ally 138 O’Steen, Sam 32

Made in Heaven 13–21, 27, 175, Ocasek, Ric 20
178–9, 182 On Story: Screenwriters and Their
magicians 81 Craft 4
Magnificent Seven, The 125, 126 One Eyed Jacks 4, 174
mah jong game 173 oner 20, 71
Man Who Knew Too Much, The 94 opening scenes: Jojo Rabbit 7;
Mannequin 2: On the Move 139–42 Apocalypse Now 11; establishing
Mara Tooney 112 character tone 25; King Richard
Martin, Pamela 73 73–6; The Power of the Dog
Matrix, The 37 76–80; start with an emergency 78;
Mavropsaridis, Yorgos 175 The Social Network 112; Joseph’s
McDonagh, Martin 6 Gift 130; voiceover 134; The
McDormand, Frances 6 Limey 149; Close Encounters of the
189
I ndex
Third Kind 168; emergency 168; Attraction 158; equivocal ending

mystery 168; first ten pages 169; 163
Silverado 169; The Shawshank rhythm: basic concept 4; as meaning
Redemption 169; Star Wars 169 and emotion 30; tricks of editors
Out of Sight 149 81; primary 135; effect of linear
Ozark 78 approach 144; mosaic structure
153
Pachinko 88, 134, 143, 182 Rilke, Rainer Maria 65, 93
pacing 4, 165 ritual objects 158–60
Pankin, Stuart 139 Robbins, Tim 169
parallel editing 84 Rodriquez, Freddy 129
Peaky Blinders 167 Roth, Philip 137
Penn, Sean 58 Rule of Three 67
Phoenix, River 22
Picasso, Pablo 43 Saldaña, Zoe 126
pictographs 84 Sanditon 167–8
Plato 13 Sargent, Epes Winthrop 71
Plimpton, Martha 24 Sartre, Jean-Paul 64
Poetics 61, 144 Savage, Thomas 76
point-of-view 4, 56, 71, 81, 91 Save the Cat! 26, 63
Poison Ivy: The New Seduction Saving Private Ryan 81, 126
55–8 Savoca, James 105
Poitier, Sidney 173 Saxon, John 129
Porter, Edwin S. 84 Scarface 21
Power of Myth 63 scenes: constituent parts of movies 36;
Power of the Dog, The 76–80, 110, memorable scenes 36–7; opening a
142, 182 scene 38; castration scene 77–9
Prancer 160–3, 182 Schindler’s List 4, 21, 81, 173–4
Pratt, Chris 125 Schmidt, Arthur 122
Premiere Pro 72 Schrader, Paul 22
premise 13, 14 Sciberras, Peter 79–80
Pressly, Jaime 55 Scott, Allan 101
Psycho 37 Scott, Tony 152
Pulp Fiction 96–100, 182 screenplay: not like novels 7; based on
logic of editing 9; sparse 10; rely
Qin, Lan 127 on structure 12; second act 17–8;
Queen’s Gambit, The 101, 102, 182 shooting script 32; multiple drafts
Quinlan, Maeve 84 35
Seven Samurai, The 126
Ragsdale, William 139 Shame 105–10, 182
Raiders of the Lost Ark 22 Shane 171–2
Rational Life, The 127 Shawshank Redemption, The 134, 135
Raynauld, Isabelle 9 Sheen, Martin 11
Reading and Writing a Screenplay 9 shoe leather 125
Red Alert 164 shots: shot length 6; creation of 32;
Reeves, Keanu 37 selection of 32; power of 70;
Resnais, Alain 149 reaction 122
rewrite: by editor 1; First Man 5; “show don’t tell” 101, 155
informs writer’s approach 7; Silverado 169–70
ill-conceived 22; missing pieces 34; Sixth Sense 175
through memory 50–1; sloppy first Sleep 93
draft 71; The Limey 149; Fatal Snyder, Blake 26
190
I ndex
Social Network, The 112, 124 Two: On the Move 139; transition
Sorkin, Aaron 82, 112 points 141; in comedy 141; chapter
sound effects 4 breaks 143; in Manchester by the
Sound of Music, The 175 Sea 143; in Totally Blonde 143; in
Springsteen, Bruce 21 Pachinko 143
Stalker 20 Travolta, John 96
Stamp, Terence 145 Trial of the Chicago 7, The 81, 95,
Stanfield, Lakeith 53 181
Star Wars 22, 37, 63 Triangle of Sadness 164
Start the Revolution Without Me 125 12 Years a Slave 109
Stone, Emma 176 Tyrrell, Susan 56
story: essential number of stories 64;
love story paradigm 64–5 Ulysses 144
structure 4, 8, 12, 60–3, 65, 72, 74, 158 unpredictability 44
subtext 111, 119, 123, 128 Up in the Air 173
Sundance selection 38
Symposium 13 Van Slee, Andrew 84
synecdoche 9 Vertov 70
visual effects 2
Tár 171 voiceover 134–5
Tarantino, Quentin 96 Voss, Kurt 39
Tarkovsky, Andrei 20
Tayback, Vic 54 Waititi, Taika 7, 95
Taylor-Joy, Anya 101 Waits, Tom 58
Taylor, Greg 160 Walker, Joe 68, 70, 92, 109
Taylor, Meshach 139, 141 Wall, Angus 112
Technique of the Photoplay, The 71 Walls, Tom 13
Tenet 94, 95 Wang, Dylan 127
Theroux, Justin 26 War of the Ghosts 49–50
Theroux, Paul 22 Warhol, Andy 93
Thorton, Billy Bob 27 Weber, Billy 152
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Weisz, Rachel 176
Missouri 7, 95 West, Samuel 180
Thurman, Uma 96 Westerns 160
ticking clock 94 Where the Crawdads Sing 160
tone 21 Whiplash 5
Top Gun 152, 153 Wiest, Dianne 119
Top Gun: Maverick 153, 181 Wild Bunch, The 165
Totally Blonde 84, 143 Wilder, Billy 172
Townsend, Robert 130 Williams, Robin 119, 122, 133
transitions: basic editing concept 4; Winger, Debra 14
in Horseplayer 42; moment in Winsett, Jerry 6
time 95; smoothness a priority Wizard of Oz, The 173
135; scene-to-scene 137; cut to Woodhouse, Callum 180
137; dissolve to 137; David Lean’s Writers Guild of America 35
137; in Goodbye Columbus 137;
as visual pun 138; in Mannequin Zaillian, Steven 4, 21
191

The Final Rewrite

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THE FINAL REWRITE

This book offers a unique perspective on crafting your screenplay from an

John Rosenberg, ACE, MFA, is a film editor, writer, and professor. He

1 The Final Rewrite 3

2 Best Intentions and Excellent Fails 13

3 The Well of Coverage 28

4 The Scene and an Approach to Dailies 36

6 What Writers Know 60

7 What Editors Know 70

8 Tricks of the Editor’s Trade 81

9 The Essence of Time 93

10 The Filmic Moment 104

11 Aspects of Dialogue 111

12 Dialogue and Character Issues 124

13 When “Cut to” Isn’t Enough 137

14 Following the Line 144

15 Formula but Not Formulaic 154

16 The End Is the Beginning 167

17 Hindsight Is 20/20 180

Experienced screenwriters know the importance of rewriting. The grue-

For Writers. As screenwriter Cindy Davis points

With the introduction of high-definition digital capture, the volume of

Jacks, directed by Marlon Brando, nearly doubled the anticipated film

For Editors. 35mm film runs at 24 frames/second

Coverage has a different meaning for screenwriters

Some scenes in First Man had improvised performances that deviated

“For example, (in) the opening X-15 [test flight] scene…there

CLOSE-UP: The drill gets closer and closer to

INT. JOJO’S HOUSE – MORNING

We open with QUICK DETAIL SHOTS of a young

-- A brown shirt buttoned.

He is dressed. We PULL to a CLOSE-UP,

JOHANNES BETZLER, (JOJO), a cute 10 year

The room is covered with NAZI POSTERS and

script. Conversely, a better understanding of scriptwriting will help edi-

Figure 1.2 Jojo Rabbit. Jojo gets dressed.

Figure 1.3 Students assemble a jigsaw puzzle – Multimedia University, Malaysia.

In her book, Reading and Writing a Screenplay4, Isabelle Raynauld

“…a screenplay should not simply recount a story, rather, it

Figure 1.4 Apocalypse Now – Captain Willard daydreams in a Saigon hotel.

Think of a logline. A good logline has multiple components. It intro-

For Writers: Screenwriting Basics. Think first in

Where do things go wrong in the writing and development stages?

Not Quite Heaven

For Writers: A premise, according to Merriam-­

While in Heaven, Mike searches out Emmett (Debra Winger, uncredited,

Emmett gets up.

You’re so impatient. You’re

Emmett turns and watches (some) dancers. Mike

The two men look at each other.

Figure 2.1 Made in Heaven - Mike meets Annie in Heaven.

Elmo turns around. Emmett, in his blue

INT. HOSPITAL ROOM – EVENING

The “ELVIRA MADIGAN” THEME FADES IN. Ally is

After a long time she gets up and brushes a damp

Life is what happens while you’re making other

During the editing process, we eventually added quick flashbacks, sto-

designed to telegraph a subliminal memory and a desire for something

Oners, or a scene shot in a single take, still require

The ending was changed many times, including shooting additional

Figure 1.4 Apocalypse Now – Captain Willard daydreams in a Saigon hotel.

For Writers: A premise, according to Merriam-

Figure 2.1 Made in Heaven - Mike meets Annie in Heaven.

We’re given no image of the amusing moment of the flip-flopping mop –

Today, with digital file-based production, dailies can arrive instantly in

vastness or isolation, where a close-up may suggest intimacy or intensity.

of her mother by the well-to-do Greer family, including Violet’s former