2 In a Row?
Posted on January 2, 2009
I once had a director who would demand two good takes in a row from an actor’s performance before he would consider the shot completed and adequately insured by a back-up safety take.
Mind you, not just two takes: two takes in a row.
Thus, just like any other shoot, after one or two flubs we would capture the first good, complete shot. Then, a few attempts later, we would acquire the second. Two good takes in the can: time to move on?
No. The first good performance was forgotten. It didn’t count until it was immediately followed by another equivalent take (I guess he had a short term memory, like a goldfish.) We had to continue in this repetitive cycle of torturous, Sisiphean misery until the actor had completed two good takes.
What made it worse was that the director was also the writer. He filled the script with the most impossible, dense jargon unimaginable.
So, after thirty or forty-five minutes of repetitive nonsense, the actor’s perky, lively, enthusiastic performance was reduced to an ash-crap load of flat-lined mush. But, that didn’t matter. As long as they got in two good takes in a row, those were the two takes that mattered!
(Thank god he didn’t complicate the shot with extra camera, dolly, jib, or actor blocking.)
That was the second unfortunate tragedy of this practice. The script notes assistant was instructed to only note the two good takes in a row. Thus, several, perhaps dozens of fabulous performances were ordered ignored by the editor from the script notes instructions.
Thus, we went into over, and often golden, time due to this ignorant and insane OCHD practice.
What a waste.
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