In Search of Needless Perfection

Hooligans is what they are!

‘Tis the season to watch the “Emett Otter” outtakes. I’m not as much a fan of the short, honestly; it’s fine, but it’s no “Muppet Family Christmas.” But I will watch and laugh myself sick through the clip of the over two hundred takes in order to get exactly the right rolling out the door shot of the drum. They knew exactly what they wanted, and they were by-Gods going to get it. I can’t reliably remember what the finished product looked like, and I don’t think they would’ve gotten fewer laughs with, say, whatever they got for take eighteen or one hundred eighty.

Sometimes, you just don’t need the level of perfectionism you get in these things. Famously, Charlie Chaplin literally nearly died doing this. The shoes in The Gold Rush were made of licorice. He did 63 takes and went into insulin shock. I’m not sure anyone has ever known exactly what went wrong on most of them. But he knew what he wanted, and he kept going on the principle of get it right or die trying, literally. Stephen Spielberg has said that no film is worth dying for, and while the context there was extremely different, it remains true that we wouldn’t have gotten The Great Dictator had Charlie Chaplin kept eating shoes.

Stanley Kubrick’s goal in doing dozens of takes was apparently to drive all emotion out of his performers and get exactly the performance he wanted. Robert Duvall had no interest in working with him because of this; he apparently is of the opinion that this is showing off, not really directing. Kubrick essentially gave Shelley Duvall PTSD on the set of The Shining, doing take after take and berating her between times. I suspect this is because his vision of Wendy Torrance was very different from the book version and made her cowering and whimpering instead of determined to survive with her son. Either way, it was not acceptable.

But if he’d just sat down with Duvall and explained what he wanted, wouldn’t that at least in theory have worked just as well as nearly a hundred takes? I’d also be curious to see what take, say, twenty-five looked like. There’s a scene in Eyes Wide Shut that took him a solid year to film, and that’s just wasteful. At least the only person harmed in the Chaplin example was Chaplin himself, and the “Emmett Otter” example gave us that delightful outtake compilation.

I was discussing this with Anthony Pizzo and Bridgett Taylor the other day, and we agreed that, in the “Emmett Otter” example, there was a sunk cost fallacy happening. So okay, the first few takes weren’t exactly what they wanted, so they did a few more takes. Why not; it’s short. And after fifteen takes, the determination probably set in. They were going to get exactly the right movement from that damned drum. Exactly. What was that movement? No one remembers. At this point, what we remember is Emmett asking for spare change.