Scene 97, Take 9

Have you ever watched a movie and wondered how long it took to get the scene right?

Hollywood seems to have all the time and money in the world (compared to us lowly independent filmmakers). Which means, they can spend a whole day on one short scene...

Here are some examples of Hollywood flicks and some of their excessive use of takes:

In the movie Jezebel (1938, starring Bette Davis and Henry Fonda) there is a scene early on when southern belle Julie (Davis) uses her riding crop to hitch up her skirt. The footage that was used came finally on the 45th take!

Apparently the production manager of The Parallax View (1974, starring Warren Beatty) kept the slate used in the film for display in his office; it was marked "Take 98 – Warren stirs soup."

Wow! How come we never had the luxury for doing 98 takes of someone stirring his soup?! Oh, yeah. On Dear J, we had only 12 days to shoot principal photography...

We probably managed an average of two to four takes for each camera set-up on that film shoot. Sometimes less, sometimes a few more. Looking back at our continuity reports, it seems that we never went over nine takes for a single camera angle. (Turns out that the nine takes was for a two-shot of James and Paige in the empty courtroom in Scene 97... See photo).

{{ photo :: Scene 96. James and Paige (Joseph Halsey and Maya Serhan) talk in the empty courtroom. }}

Note: This was taken from a past post from our other blog.