The Rough Cut by Douglas Corleone

Author:Douglas Corleone [Corleone, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448304479
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2020-06-28T23:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

I’m not a big fan of monogamy. Some people say that’s more a guy trait than a girl’s, but those people are sexist, and I’m not a big fan of sexism either. Was I surprised that Piper hadn’t been monogamous with Ethan? No, not from what I knew of her. From the few times we hung out, I knew Piper to be a free spirit, nice but a bit naughty too, a girl who liked guys and wasn’t afraid to go to bed on the first date. Was I shocked by whom she was fucking? Yeah. Not because I thought highly of him, or of injury lawyers in general, for that matter. I’d dated one back in New York, for six days, seven nights. On the seventh morning, he’d nailed my then-best-friend Ally, who was visiting from Portland – in my bed – while I was sitting through a three-hour lecture on Digital Imagery and Visualization.

In the editing room early the next morning, I return to footage I’ve already cut. The scene now runs seamlessly, beginning to end, with dead-on shots from all four cameras. In my existential outline, this scene constitutes the midpoint of my our film. At the midpoint, the documentarian typically introduces something like dramatic conflict, which is to say, not necessarily two alpha males clawing at each other’s throats. We don’t need, as in fiction, to witness our hero’s metaphorical death setting up a later rebirth, and this need not be the point from which ‘nothing will ever be the same’. We don’t need the players to go abruptly from reactive to active; we don’t need anything nearly as dramatic as all that.

But if you have the footage …

I press PLAY.

Onscreen, there I am, standing with Brody just a few feet away in the main room, where the scene took place.

‘I got rid of Nate for a reason,’ Church says, with a severity not often seen from him.

‘What’s this about?’ Ethan asks. He’s weary, he’s dog-tired, he’s spent.

‘It’s about pubic hair.’

‘What?’

‘The correct question isn’t “what?”. It’s “whose?”.’

‘Don’t play games with me, Nick. I—’

‘Your brother’s,’ Church spits out. ‘And it was found in Piper’s bedroom.’

Silence seems to suck all the air from the room.

Finally, Ethan asks, ‘What are you talking about?’

But, by then, he understands. We know he understands the out-and-out gravity of Church’s words from the close-ups we shot. We know he understands, because whereas a moment ago he looked like he’d just gone ten rounds with Tyson Fury, now he looks as if he’s just gone another twenty. I pause the footage right there. Zoom in on Ethan’s face. For the first time, I read total shock, a sucker punch straight to the gut. And something I had seen from him before, something easy to recognize and almost impossible to hide – I see fear.

Even though he and this moment are so far removed in time, there’s a pang in my chest every time I watch this scene.

Church says, ‘Jesse hacked into a private laboratory the prosecutor’s office uses to reinforce their own lab findings.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.