Well, I saw the first cut today. Overall...not bad. The one drawback to
doing a screening like this is that you can't just sit back and enjoy/watch
the show. You have to look for problems, have to keep reminding yourself not
to get sucked into it and lose objectivity. You don't go to have a good time,
you go to find ways to give yourself grief.

Fortunately, it all seems to hang together nicely. There were a few
scenes and partial scenes that need to be cut, that're fun but don't advance
the plot. (It's a tad long, so we could use the cuts.) And a few shots need
to be restructured for clarity. But overall...it's good. (It's also one of
those situations where you've now seen something 15 or 20 times, and you lose
all sense of perspective.)

I imagine we'll have the revised cut in by week's end. Tomorrow our
tentative composer views the cut. Will advise as soon as I know how this
finally works out.

In the interim, some scenes were dubbed with bits of music, whatever they
had on hand...and it's amazing how much music adds to a scene. Just makes the
whole thing come alive.

Once we have the next cut in hand, I think I'm going to show it to a few
selective people, all of whom are very critical of my work, and invite them to
beat the crap out of it. The tougher we make it, the better the odds of
survival out in the world....