Here’s a take of a perfectly nice scene of Andy Garcia walking down the main drag of City Island, talking on his cell phone and then entering the famed City Island Diner. It appears unlikely to make it into the final version of the film so I decided to let it live on this blog for as long as this blog lives. (What about that? Will the blogosphere ever self-erase? I have no intention of closing this blog, but what do we know about the shelf life of blogs?)

One of the forever fascinating and frustrating things about filmmaking is that, no matter how much you cut the script before shooting–no matter how certain you are that you’re only shooting what’s absolutely necessary–you still wind up dropping large chunks of material once the picture is assembled. What makes this doubly frustrating for me is the time I’ve lost on these unnecessary scenes is especially precious when working on a tight schedule as we were (the whole film was shot in 28 days). Nonetheless, its “part of the process” and one that can only be avoided, I imagine, once you’ve made a good twenty or so movies and have a feel for what ultimately won’t be needed. All told, the deleted scenes thus far from the movie add up to about two days work–two days that could have been spent on other, more important things. On the other hand, the editing process is made even more fun by the surprise of finding what stays and what goes. The film has a way of talking back to you at this stage, and making its desires known…