On the Cutting Room Floor

By Pete Bauer • Feb 28th, 2006 • Category: Comedy

One of the freedoms that microcinema avails the filmmaker is that one can make off-the-wall, unique stories that would not normally fit into the mainstream theater. On The Cutting Room Floor, written and directed by Jaz Garewal, is such a movie, with varying levels of success.

The story is primarily about a young and successful screenwriter, Nik Schiltz, played by Jonathan Northover, who unexpectedly dies with one unproduced screenplay. Several studios are eager to purchase his last screenplay, but the screenwriter’s widow has left very explicit instructions on how the purchase could occur… the studios must bid on the script without reading it first, they must shoot the script exactly as written within three months of purchase date and they must release the film.

Studios clamor for this unwritten script and the winning bid comes from Jonathan, played by Joe Jones, who was also the Schiltz’s mentor. Upon reading the script the studio finds itself with a horrible product. With no option but to shoot it, they decide to hire a new director, Baker Ildon, played by Sam Hoffman, and use him as a fall guy when the film is released.

And this is when things get pretty odd. Upon viewing the initial cut of the film, studio execs are disturbed by just how bad the film is, so they conjure up a Golem to enter the film and re-write it/re-create it. The Golem goes on a tear, killing numerous main characters, turning a teen comedy into a horror film. There are other odd sub-plots as well, such as that the director had secured a loan from Hamas to shoot his own movie and now Hamas wants their messages put into this studio film, and there are dim-witted white supremacists after the director’s wife.

Eventually there is a confrontation between the terrorist group, the supremacists, the studio heads, the director and others.

If that is at all confusing, let me state that the story is much more complex than that.

I’ll give Garewal credit for putting such an ambitious project on video, but it falls prey in a number of areas that most microcinema efforts struggle. With such a large cast, acting performances are hit and miss. You have high quality performances by Jones and Northover that are offset by average to amateurish performances by a number of other actors. Production values are hit and miss as well. Some locations are right on the money, while others do not meet the requirements of the script.

The biggest challenges, however, appear to be in the script, which appears to change focus from one potential movie to something completely different, then back. During the film, many characters refer to the high-priced screenplay’s biggest problem is that there are no main characters in it and that it lacked focus. The same could be said by the script for On The Cutting Room Floor.

I wish that Garewal would have picked one or two simple subjects included within the complex On The Cutting Room Floor story and created a finely-tuned screenplay from just those few elements. Make a film about the studios having to bid on the last script of a dead screenplay with extraordinary requirements attached. Or, make a film about a Golem entering a film and rewriting the story by killing off many of the main characters. Or, make a film about a struggling director who gets hired only so that he can be the fall guy when things go sour. Any one of those ideas would make a very interesting story. Putting all of those ideas into one film makes it difficult for any of the subject matters to be effectively realized.

Simplifying On The Cutting Room Floor would have made the scope of the story more focused and the film more successful. It’s an ambitious effort that falls short of its overall intentions.

Two Stars.

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