Editing: The Importance of Letting it Land

I always have a book or two in my bag so that down times on set are never wasted. Meryl Streep knits. Stallone writes screenplays. I read. Everyone does something.

Recently I had the pleasure of reading producer/screenwriter Phil Rosenthal's book You're Lucky You're Funny, a smart and hilarious page-turner about the creation of the hit comedy Everybody Loves Raymond. Included are lots of advice about acting, writing, navigating the sometimes shark-infested waters of Hollywood, and a great piece of advice on editing, which I

decided to share here because I had a conversation on this very thing with a young filmmaker a few days ago. Editing dialog in a film should serve as a guide to the audience on the emotional subtext of what is being said. I called it "including the reaction." Rosenthal calls it "clarity" and "letting it land."

He said it better than I did. Here it is:

"Clarity. At any point along the way the clarity can be muddled, and then the joke, or even the point of your story, is muddled. The shot has to be framed correctly so that we can see Marie next to Frank as he says his line. Then in editing, if you don't stay on that shot for the correct amount of time, or you don't cut to it at the right moment before the line, the clarity could be lost...

"....Pat (editor Pat Barnett) makes a rough assemblage for me....Right away, if the first moment feels wrong to me, we stop and examine all the possibilities. Let's cut it, show me another angle of that, show me all four angles. What was Robert doing while Marie was saying that? Give me the B camera for this line, then go to C, then go to X, and back to A, then back to B. That's how you put together a show--making the moments clearer and clearer with each one of the choices.

"You make it clear by taking out the extraneous, which hones the focus. You know how long to stay on a shot to maybe get an even richer laugh out of it, because the look on an actor's face in close-up is so hilarious that you want to stay there. Don't cut away so fast after this joke; let it land. Ray could say something funny, and if we cut away too fast, it doesn't land, it doesn't have a second. Sometimes the actor's face is great right after the line, and because of that it seems to come from a real person. They really say it, there is some thought behind the line, and the scene is not just joke, joke, joke, joke. It's talking, and it's coming from people. This makes all the difference, and it should go by you, the audience, seamlessly, because you're involved in the story. "

Rosenthal is talking about comedy, but I think this is true whether comedy or drama. The audience needs to see and feel the emotional undercurrents. Otherwise it's all just words.