[Q] So Hitchcock, for example, his first assembly, it would probably be pretty close to the final screening length, would it?
Yes. Many directors, and I've worked with a few of them. Jerry Zucker was this way, and Fred Zinnemann was this way. They shot not a lot of film, and the first assembly of the film was very close to its final release length. So it's not that it's inevitable that you have big, sprawling things, it just requires a different approach of the material. And the reality of the timing process is that the timing is done by the script supervisor. And the dirty secret of this is that there is frequently double-entry bookkeeping going on, which is: the studio does need to see a timing by the script supervisor, but the script supervisor will shave things so that it comes out at a slow... at a small length. So that the studio doesn't shut down the film too early. 'What, three and a half hours long? You've got to cut something.' So you try to dance under the limbo bar, even though there's a little winking going on, which is, these timings aren't real timings. But the danger of that is that, as it is with any double-entry bookkeeping, you know that these aren't real, and then you have nothing to guide you because those weren't real. 'So what is the time?' 'Well, I don't know. Well, just shoot and see what happens.' And as a result, that's one of the contributing elements to making these films get super long.
