I watched the rough cut of Dawg Fight yesterday.
It's a totally different style for us, but works on so many levels.
When Sam Rega finished editing Limelight in the spring, he got right to work on the edit. Over the past six months I've stayed away from watching too much of the early cuts, as Billy and Dave worked through it with Sam. Towards the end of an edit a pair of fresh eyes is desperately needed. It makes it easier to slash and burn scenes when you don't have an emotional attachment to how they've evolved.
It's long, running about 135 minutes. The plan over the next couple weeks is to cut 35 minutes.
We set a 90-100 minute running time as our goal; sometimes we get there. Raw Deal was 100 minutes, Cocaine Cowboys ran 118 and could've been 10 minutes longer, Square Grouper and Limelight came in right around 105. ESPN said The U had to be exactly 102 minutes and 40 seconds, to fit into a two hour time block and allow for commercial breaks. That was the first time we worked with a preset running time and it certainly made it easier to cut; there was no choice, no scenes we could be precious about. We had to hit the mark.
We're still working out a release plan, but I can tell you that we'll premiere it some time in the first half of 2012.
If you've been anxiously awaiting this docu since we posted the first reel in March 2009, a couple months after we started production, you won't be disappointed.