The Making of a Mr|Tots Broadcast, Part Two – Editing

This is the second installment of a five-part series on the production of a single Mr|Tots show from start to finished. Part one – writing – was posted on July 5, 2008. Parts three through five (music, casting, performance) will be posted over the next month and a half.

Continuing from our last installment, wherein I discussed the process of adapting Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep into a radio drama, I would like to now guide you through the editing process, in which the rough script is combed over and prepared for air. Although occasionally painful, this is a necessary step in the production of a good piece of radio theater.

Whether the piece is original or adapted, it is very rare that the first draft is ready to be performed hot off the printer. For a variety of reasons, each script must be painstakingly reviewed and revised, often by multiple Mr|Tots members, before we are comfortable putting it on the air. The Big Sleep is no different. Taken primarily from William Faulkner’s screenplay, the challenge with this particular piece is its length. The average original Mr|Tots script tends to run somewhere between twenty and forty pages. Adaptations, however, are often much longer, with Derek Long’s seventy-eight page adaptation of North By Northwest currently holding the record. The reason, in my opinion, is two-fold.

First, there are restrictions placed on the adaptation by the method of storytelling utilized by the original author. There are some scenes that seem like superfluous padding which nevertheless contain morsels of critical information, and therefore cannot be excised. These small scenes tend to add up and cause a script to swell beyond the writer’s intentions.

Second, each script contains within it certain elements that the writer adapting the piece for radio refuses to lose due to some bizarre affection that even he cannot explain. For a good example, witness our Season One adaptation of Casablanca, in which I couldn’t bring myself to lose even the minor interactions between background characters. Why? Because I just couldn’t, that’s all.

With The Big Sleep, length was always going to be a problem. It’s a painfully complex story, and my original draft came in at over eighty pages. Clearly something needed to be done. My first step is always to go through the script line by line and determine what can be cut, sometimes down to a sentence. This sort of trimming and pruning process can sometimes remove two or three pages from a script without fundamentally altering the content of the story. It’s a must for anyone trying to write something that can actually be performed on the air.

Sadly, it’s never enough, and there are entire scenes that almost always have to be lost. In the case of The Big Sleep, there were two major scenes that I removed from the script. In the original film, there is an extended scene at the midway point where Marlowe is called before the district attorney and asked to justify his actions to that point. What follows is a long section of exposition where Marlowe summarizes the entirety of the events that have already occurred, thus allowing the audience to catch up. In my radio adaptation, this scene has been cut because I don’t believe that it is worth stopping the entire production for a recap that stretches over five pages, especially when it’s impact on the story is minimal.

The second thing that was cut concerned a subplot that introduced the minor character of Canino, in which he confronts and kills another minor character. The purpose of the scene is to connect Marlowe to Joe Brody’s girl Agnes, but ultimately I felt that such a scene only slowed down the story, and that the same point could be made much more expediently. As a result, much of Canino’s story ended up being left out.

Finally, a writer has to put his or her own stamp on the work, and that sometimes boils down to making tiny unnecessary changes that nevertheless alter the story. For me, the changes concerned the ending, which I will not reveal here. I will say that in the original script, there was a romantic tag that I believe undermined the darkness of the story and betrayed the essence of the Marlowe character. That tag has been excised and replaced with something else, which I hope you will enjoy.

In our next installment, I’ll be guiding you through the process by which music is selected for a broadcast. Best until then.