Melissa McCarthy, her hands tied behind her back, writhed on the dingy basement floor of an abandoned power plant in Budapest — grunting, shrieking and, despite her best efforts, laughing. "Let me try that again," she said, attempting a straight face. McCarthy was shooting Scene 114 in "Spy," an action comedy that was, in April 2014, partway through its first week of production. A few feet away was the director Paul Feig, who likes to feed actors new lines of dialogue from just outside the frame. Feig gave McCarthy a breakthrough ensemble role in "Bridesmaids" (2011) and later cast her opposite Sandra Bullock in "The Heat" (2013). In "Spy," McCarthy is the star, playing an unlikely secret agent called Susan Cooper. In Scene 114, Susan has been apprehended and dumped in the basement alongside another captive, named Aldo — a disconcertingly libidinal ally who keeps hitting on Susan despite their dire circumstances. The scene builds toward some exquisitely clumsy physical comedy, as Susan commands Aldo to help untie her, even though he is also in knots, inaugurating a grabby ballet and creating numerous opportunities for Aldo to say sleazy things.
Continue reading the main story"Action," Feig called out, beginning the umpteenth take of the untying sequence. Aldo, played by Peter Serafinowicz, shimmied up behind Susan and, pressing his bound hands enthusiastically against her backside, got to work. "The knot and your hands are about to enter my colon!" McCarthy, as Susan, protested. Feig, breaking in, suggested a response for Serafinowicz: " 'Trust me, if I was that close to your colon, you would be screaming in ecstasy.' "
Some 72 hours later and 6,200 miles away, the editor Brent White was at a production facility in Burbank, Calif., guffawing as he watched footage of this exchange on a 22-inch reference monitor. White is not a particularly funny person, but he has one of Hollywood's most finely attuned, and highly valued, senses of humor. His first comedy job came in 2000, cutting the treasured but short-lived NBC sitcom "Freaks and Geeks," which Feig created. White's career coincides with the rise of improvisation as a technique central to Hollywood comedy-making, and his adeptness at giving shape and rhythm to wild excesses of off-the-cuff material has put him at the front of his field. White's résumé encompasses some of the best-loved feature comedies of the last decade, starting with "Anchorman," in 2004, which he cut for the director Adam McKay, who subsequently hired White to edit "Talladega Nights," "Step Brothers," "The Other Guys" and "Anchorman 2." Most of these films, like "Freaks and Geeks," were produced by Judd Apatow, who, in his capacity as a director, has hired White to assemble nearly all of his features: "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Knocked Up," "Funny People" and "This Is 40." Apatow could have used White for his forthcoming comedy, "Trainwreck," but Feig, who last hired White to cut "The Heat," swept in first and locked him up for "Spy." As Feig put it, "Judd and I fought over who'd get Brent, and I won."
White wore glasses, a tan plaid shirt and loosefitting bluejeans; faux-snakeskin trim on his beat-up Converse All Stars gave his ensemble its lone, discordant element of flash. Manipulating an editing program called Avid, he skipped backward from the sequence in which Aldo unties Susan to an earlier sequence in the same scene, in which Aldo praises her abilities. It was an important point in the development of her character, and one that the film played momentarily for its inspirational quality before taking a funny turn into fatalism. As scripted, the pep talk ends like so:
SUSAN: "I did do a good job, didn't I?"
ALDO: "Very good, yes. You will get them next time." Pause. "Unless we die here. Then you will not."
Serafinowicz delivered this kicker well, blasé as he pulled the rug out from under the feel-good moment. But Feig, sensing a bigger laugh afoot, set the actors loose to explore. Serafinowicz tried yet another tonal swerve, this time from the macabre to the pervy: "Unless we die here. In which case it would be my very great honor to be the last man to ejaculate on you." Over subsequent takes, he modified this come-on: " . . . it would be my very great honor to die inside of you"; " . . . it would be my great honor to be the last man to touch your bosom"; and so on.
White sat forward and got to work. "I cut right behind the director," he explained. "The day after they start shooting is the day I start editing."
Photo White keeps index cards that form a storyboard for "Spy." Credit Damon Casarez for The New York TimesWhite's artistic challenge begins as an organizational challenge. As he watched a dozen or so takes, rooting for truffles, he consulted a digital copy of the script that was open on one of his computer screens. Immediately to the right of Aldo's lines were several blue dots, each one indicating an alternate reading that Serafinowicz had given. Before footage makes its way to White's desk, two assistants watch it all, transcribing every last bit of improv into this digital script. This meant that White could simply click on a blue dot and summon up the corresponding footage of Serafinowicz vamping.
Improvisation has inflected feature comedy as far back as Keystone Studios, and it has been a genre staple since the late 1970s, when improv troupes like Second City and the Groundlings became unofficial Hollywood farm teams: Think of John Belushi spontaneously impersonating a pimple in John Landis's "Animal House" or Bill Murray, in Harold Ramis's "Caddyshack," making up his "Cinderella story" monologue as he goes. But it was the innovation of contemporary directors like Apatow and McKay, building on the work of forebears like Ramis, Barry Levinson and Christopher Guest, to push things further, shooting hours and hours of footage each day and encouraging entire ensembles — as opposed to just Belushi-esque lone wolves — to meander "off pencil," keeping the cameras rolling and seeing what happens. "I've always been a big proponent of getting as many options as you can get," Apatow told me, explaining that this inclination stemmed from his experience as a co-creator of "The Ben Stiller Show," in the early '90s: "Ben did an enormous amount of improvising every day — shooting a sketch, then doing another 30 minutes of stuff he could have said."
When Apatow and McKay began directing movies, they used a technique that others have adopted: They shoot a scene once or twice as written, then subject it to a number of improvised variations in which the actors deliver lines of alternate dialogue ("alts") that either they devise or the director supplies. With this way of working, scripts become radically provisional, and bursts of improv become much more than roadside attractions — as was the case in, say, "Good Morning, Vietnam," where manic montages of Robin Williams riffing repeatedly ground the story to a halt. Mike Sale, an editor whose credits include "Get Hard," "Bridesmaids," "Naked Gun 33⅓" and "Tommy Boy," says that improv was nowhere near as pervasive early in his career as it is now: "The model was get a really tight script and hope you had enough jokes that worked for 90 minutes." Today, directors who embrace the alt-heavy approach include Nicholas Stoller ("Forgetting Sarah Marshall," "Neighbors"), Rawson Marshall Thurber ("Dodgeball," "We're the Millers"), Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (the "Jump Street" franchise) and on and on.
White began developing his particular approach "back on 'Freaks and Geeks,' " which featured a good amount of unscripted play from the actors, albeit less than the films he has since cut. He pointed at the blue dots on his screen, which, thanks to his assistants' labor, he said, indicated "anything that's unique or the same" in the performances. Gesturing at another window, he added, "Here are all the options: off camera, on camera, two shot, one shot, wide shot, on their back. I can go through it all. I'm not scanning through a take backward and forward, looking for something." He's heard of other editors implementing methods similar to his, and he said that colleagues sometimes call him for tips, but he believes that his way of working remains rare. Early last year the editors of "22 Jump Street," Keith Brachmann and David Rennie, found themselves buried beneath reams of improvised footage and realized that they couldn't complete a rough assembly of the film "in a reasonable time," Brachmann told me. So they brought on White as a cleanup man, and for 10 weeks he helped them to dig out, and burnish, laughs. If Lord and Miller had had his back-end infrastructure in place on "22 Jump Street," White suggested, they most likely wouldn't have needed him.
The rise of Hollywood improv was helped along by the rise of high-quality digital memory, which is far cheaper to burn through than film and which can sustain a single take of 25 minutes or longer. (The once-standard film-camera magazine would last 11.) For "Anchorman," White worked on digital transfers of the actual film McKay shot, which allowed White to glide through footage to assemble a digital final cut. (Assistants, following his lead, would then make the literal cuts to the film print.) By the mid-2000s, comedy directors with new digital cameras like the Alexa and the Red avoided film altogether, becoming even more limber on set. Brachmann, one of the lead "22 Jump Street" editors, who also worked on "Being John Malkovich" and two Nancy Meyers comedies, says: "Back when we shot on film, it was an actor saying, Let me try one line, and the director saying, Go ahead. An hour was a typical good day's worth of material. Whereas now it can be up to six hours, because there's this ability to shoot enormous volumes of material and shoot it more quickly." Zene Baker, the editor of "This Is the End" and "The Interview," said, "These days, I'll get 20 hours that I have to cut down into a three-minute scene."
Improvisation creates spontaneous magic, but by definition it's slapdash and unrefined. As Mike Myers once recalled the comedian Dave Foley saying, "Most improv could do with a rewrite." In this sense, Brent White is a master rewriter, giving more felicitous form to Will Ferrell's shaggy riffs, Steve Carell's inspired non sequiturs and Melissa McCarthy's profane runs — he manages to make the funniest people on the planet funnier. "He has the ability to wade into unstructured material undaunted, to not get lost worrying about the technical challenges and just tap into the rhythm of the scene," Brachmann said. Paul Feig calls White "the most talented editor I've worked with." Mike Sale is even more effusive: "I'd love to have his career," he said. "Brent's a genius."
Stationed at his console, White can tweak and amplify laughs much the way a music producer uses Auto-Tune to alter and improve vocals. "Avid allows us the time to try out a bunch of different ideas, because you can do it so quickly," he said. "It allows us to finesse the timing of the joke and the content of the joke, to adjust the rhythm and the size, in a way that has actually made movies funnier."
Photo Clockwise: "Anchorman," 2004; "The 40 Year Old Virgin," 2005; "Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby," 2006; "Knocked Up," 2007. Credit DreamWorks/Everett Collection; Universal/Everett Collection; Sony Pictures/Everett Collection; Universal/Everett Collection.Illustrating this point, he dialed up the footage in which Aldo made his remark about Susan's "bosom," then apologized for his ludicrous flirtations: "It's a compulsion! I will try to stop."
"Just stop talking. Stop talking, and I bet that would help it," Susan replied. After a beat, McCarthy moved to the next plot point: "You know what? I'm not going down like this. I need you to untie me."
"Bosom — what?" Aldo blurted.
White laughed at this unscripted burst of Tourette's-style lecherousness. The exchange was rough, but promising. "I'll cut a version of the scene where I use 'bosom' as a thread," he said, tapping at his keyboard and summoning forth all those takes in which Serafinowicz had used the word. At the bottom of White's Avid interface was a jagged waveform, representing the scene's audio. White says that even with the sound off, he can intuit whether a scene is funny by simply looking at this waveform. "If I see a long stretch, I want to tighten it up," he said. "That's literally the way I look at the material — especially with Will Ferrell. There are moments where he's thinking what the joke is, then he knows what the joke is, and then he's saying the joke. Making the leap from one to two to three. What I'm doing is tightening up that leap for him: improving the rhythm, boom-boom-boom."
The impulse toward ultratight pacing, abetted by technology, has resulted in a wave of comedic performances that unfold at almost superhuman registers, even as, paradoxically, their improvisatory aspects create an air of laid-back naturalism. Zene Baker, the "This Is the End" editor, says, "Just as an example, go back and watch 'Happy Gilmore,' " the 1996 Adam Sandler vehicle. "It's still hilarious, but I bet by today's standards it will feel slow to you. The laugh-per-minute ratio is certainly different." David Rennie, whose résumé includes "Home Alone 3" and "Office Space," says that not long ago he was watching a classic comedy, from 1978, and, "just for fun," recut a scene. "I tightened it up, took out a few frames and felt the comic timing was better," he said. "In our time frame today, it doesn't take as long as it used to to process a gag." (Rennie asked me not to name the film, which is exalted: "I'll sound so pretentious.")
This movement toward a greater density of laughs is perceptible not only across decades but across the last few years. During the famous saying-grace scene that Brent White cut for "Talladega Nights" (2006), actors fire looks and lines across a dinner table with pleasantly disorienting rapidity. The pacing is even more heightened in "This Is the End" (2013), when Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel, two improv ninjas, debate the virtues of a gluten-free diet: Zene Baker fills the screen with quick, alternating close-ups as Rogen's lines abut and even overlap Baruchel's. "I was watching the dailies, absorbing how they talk to each other, and they have a good rapport, but their actual rhythm was a bit slower," Baker said. "I like natural-sounding but fast-paced dialogue, so I decided, These characters are old friends, they can finish each other's sentences, and I can have fun with this." The result is cross talk far denser than the performers mustered on set, and the effect is not only to convey the characters' intimacy but also to keep the audience breathlessly behind the beat, barely processing one laugh before the next arrives — a steroidal update, in a way, on the screwball repartee of Howard Hawks, who famously pushed his actors to speak in rapid, overlapping dialogue in "His Girl Friday" (1940).
Other midcentury directors, such as Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, shot talented actors delivering scripted lines without a lot of cuts: tight performances captured within a single "master" shot. Today, with certain exceptions — Woody Allen most prominently — comedy directors tend to shoot many takes from many angles, providing themselves with an abundance of footage, known as coverage, that they will sort through later on, in editing. They often give notes about favored takes to their script supervisors, who sit beside them on set and pass these along to the editor. White's bosses are no different, although their particular strategies can be novel: "Judd has used a stenographer on set," White says, "and he'll highlight things in their transcript that he likes."
Continue reading the main storyIn the absence of notes, White's instinct is that form should follow funny. "I'll say, 'That's funnier than this, that look between the actors is better, their interaction is better here than there,' " he explained. "That's how I decide whether I'll use the close-up or the two-shot." Having identified the "funniest joke in a run," he makes it his North Star. "I reverse-engineer the scene to make sure I can get to the joke. Then it becomes bridge-building. How do I get to this thing from this other thing I like?" Stitching together connective tissue between keepers, White will send his director multiple options, then recut the scene upon receiving feedback. A movie begins to take shape in tiny, tentative increments. "These directors don't want one version of the scene," said Melissa Bretherton, an Apatow-camp editor and, on "Spy," White's right hand. "They want six." White noted that Apatow, when shooting a film, will sometimes "have something he wants to say, but he doesn't know exactly where it goes in the movie. Does it service the end? Does it go early? So he'll shoot the same exact scene, the same exchange, with the actors in different wardrobes, so that I can slot it in at different points."
White sculpted his "bosom" option for Scene 114. "There's a thing that happens when actors vamp, which is that they repeat themselves," he said. "So if I can pull out the repetitions, I can strengthen the performance." He toggled between takes appraisingly. Certain ones Feig had marked with a "VG," for "very good." Others were unusable: Serafinowicz cracked up; McCarthy's head was turned the wrong way. White liked a particular take except for the way that McCarthy said "stop talking" twice in response to Aldo's "compulsion" apology, so he simply deleted the phrase's second appearance, cutting to a reaction shot from Serafinowicz to hide the excision. Things still felt slow, so White tried several configurations of the dialogue, snipping and rearranging words like a manuscript editor with a red pen, then finally scrapped the second half of Aldo's apology outright, along with the first half of McCarthy's reply. Now the characters talked, amusingly, right past each other:
ALDO: "It's a compulsion!"
SUSAN (disgustedly): "You know what, I'm not going down like this. Just untie me!"
ALDO: "Bosom — what?"
"See how I pulled those together?" White said happily. "Compulsion to bosom, that's the connector." Working microscopically, he'd transformed a tossed-off ad-lib into a solid, streamlined laugh. He leaned back and let the exchange play through again: Boom-boom-boom.
White is a Mormon from Orem, Utah, "down the canyon from Sundance," he says. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, he had screenwriting ambitions, with tastes that leaned toward dramatic material; he acknowledges that his faith squares improbably with his career in raunchy comedies. "I'm the one who went off to join the circus," White says. As a Mormon, "you're not supposed to see R-rated movies. And when I was at B.Y.U., it was constantly talked about: How do you make movies in this faith?" When White was cutting "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" — a film he interprets as being "about family values: monogamy, chastity" — he amended the title for his kids' benefit. "I told them it was called 'The 40-Year-Old,' " he says.
Photo Clockwise: "Funny People," 2009; "This is 40," 2012; "The Heat," 2013; "Spy," 2015. Credit Universal/Everett Collection; Universal/Everett Collection; 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection; Larry Horricks/20th Century Fox.When White was 24, he got a job at Sundance Institute, a production-side sibling of the film festival, where he helped cut workshopped scenes from potential indie dramas. While there, he applied to Columbia as a screenwriting student; the school initially rejected him, then wait-listed him, then finally accepted him. White says that his background in drama helps him to home in on the emotional reality of the scenes he cuts today, even if those scenes include preposterous lines about bosoms and colons: "The early things I did were really serious and dire, and what was great about that was that it was always about the reality of the situation. That's one of the things I bring to the table — the idea that the joke only lives if it lives in a real environment, a real situation."
One of White's mentors at Sundance was Dede Allen, who cut "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Bonnie and Clyde." Allen instilled in White an unfussy approach. "You run into editors who say, 'I can't make that cut, the glass of water is in the wrong place in that take,' " White said. "But I'll say: 'Who cares? The performance is strongest in that cut!' Why would you match the glass and take on that worse performance? 'Matching is for sissies' — that's one of the things Dede would say all the time." White argues that as audience members, we "look at actors' eyes most of the time, so as long as they're engaging, you're going to be connected to that person, and whatever happens elsewhere in the frame is less important." Increasingly, White is able to have his cake and eat it too, paying digital-effects houses to swap out an unwanted portion of a frame with one more desirable, say, or superimposing an actor's head at the bottom to fabricate visual continuity between shots.
An opportunity to work with Allen, cutting Robert Redford's "The Milagro Beanfield War" (1988), arose at the same time that White was mulling Columbia's acceptance letter. He consulted the dean, who told White that experience on a Hollywood movie was too valuable to pass up. "So I took the job," White says. He stayed in Hollywood, working his way up the ranks, occasionally returning to Sundance. In 1999, he saw a tape of the "Freaks and Geeks" pilot. White put the word out; an editing slot on the series came open, and Feig hired him. After NBC canceled that show, White followed Apatow, its producer, to the pilot for a never-to-air Fox sitcom called "North Hollywood," starring Jason Segel, Amy Poehler and Kevin Hart. "It was supposed to be 20 minutes long," White recalls, "and Judd shot, like, 90 hours of material. I worked really hard trying to get it down to time, and the 45-minute version was funny and smart, but Fox needed it in that half-hour window. We cut it to time, and it just didn't work."
That experience demonstrated how the formal demands of a mainstream sitcom — and, by extension, of a mainstream movie — can sometimes work against the silly, free-range humor that raw improvisation generates. Adam McKay says it's hard to determine, when he's cracking up on set, "how the jokes will morph as they go into the context of the film. Because you get all this funny stuff, but then, guess what, you've cut the movie together, and the love story is playing way stronger than the other thing you thought would play strong, and that just changes all the jokes. We had a scene in 'Step Brothers' that was so funny — undeniably the funniest stuff we'd ever shot. And it just didn't work at the screenings, because of the story rhythm." The scene, which involved Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly sleepwalking, came late in the film, at a point, McKay eventually surmised, when the audience had insufficient patience for such a pure flight of fancy. This notwithstanding, White believes that even though "there are all these great things we wind up taking out, the best jokes will survive — it's the Darwinism of jokes."
White's duties oscillate, as a job grinds on, between those of a gem carver and those of a bricklayer — it's one thing to perfect a single joke, quite another to assemble a series of these into a movie that stands up straight. Shooting for "Spy" wrapped on June 21, at which point White and his team moved to a larger postproduction house on Burbank Boulevard. For two months, Feig and White hunched over the footage, "hammering away," as White put it, and on the morning of Sept. 2 they watched a pared-down version of the movie that ran 2 hours 15 minutes — not quite short enough, but getting there. White sat behind Feig, taking notes on the film and watching Feig watching.
By the end, Feig was disappointed. "We sucked the air out of it," he said. Mel Brooks has stressed the importance, while editing a film, of carving out "the sit-down places for the audience to stop laughing." Along similar lines, the editor Ralph Rosenblum once recalled that while shaping the "Annie Hall" gag in which Alvy sneezes into a pile of cocaine, he had to prolong the scene by "five or six seconds" to make room for the enormous laugh the bit provoked at test screenings. Even if comedy pacing circa 2015 is much more compressed than in the 1970s, the principle holds: Feig and White realized that in trimming "Spy," they'd done away with too many sit-down places.
White swiveled in his chair to consult a bulletin board covered with eight rows of index cards, numbering 86 in all. "This is the whole movie," White explained. Each card briefly summarized a scene, or a cluster of scenes, from "Spy." Card 070-073, for instance, read: "Susan gets new clothes, goes to casino, is greeted by Ford. Ext. Fancy shopping street — Rome/in Casino." The index cards formed a road map for "Spy," and, to a degree, a jigsaw puzzle, too. " 'Spy' is a very linear movie," he said, "but in one of Judd's movies" — shaggier, more discursive — "I'd be going, What if I put this scene here, this information here? Moving the index cards around to see what works."
The first of several public test screenings for "Spy" was scheduled for Sept. 25. Feig and White planned to show the movie at a multiplex in Woodland Hills, Calif., because they'd had success there in the past and because it was far enough from Los Angeles to ensure a less industry-heavy crowd. Another favored screening locale for Apatow and company is a particular megaplex in a mall in Orange County, which they think offers a better indication of how Middle America will react to a movie. "A joke that kills when you play it for your comedy-nerd friends might fall flat when you put it in front of actual people," Feig said. White recalled, with pain, an early screening that Warner Bros. conducted in Kansas for "Arthur," the 2011 Russell Brand vehicle, which White edited and which ultimately flopped. The audience-approval scores were disappointing that night, and White returned to California aboard the same private jet as several studio executives. "It was so quiet on that plane — horrible," he said. "You knew they'd decided, then and there, We're not gonna spend any more money on this movie."
The Woodland Hills screening promised something more practical than a sense of how "Spy" would fare in the wild: A microphone placed at the front of the theater would provide White with a recording of the audience's laughter, against which to edit future versions of the film. If a joke didn't send the crest of the waveform sufficiently high, it would either be tweaked or replaced with an alternate joke and demoted to the film's "B-cut" — a version composed of jokes that hadn't killed but that Feig wasn't ready to trash. Some test audiences would unwittingly watch the B-cut, and if certain jokes went over great, "then I'll steal them and drop them into the A-cut," White said. Last year, Paramount Pictures went as far as to give the "Anchorman 2" B-cut its own limited theatrical release: Overseen by Bretherton, White's deputy, it told the exact story as the official release, but with 763 different jokes slotted in. This way of working depends on new technologies but reflects time-honored practices. The Marx Brothers vetted "A Night at the Opera," long before they ever got to the set, by precision-engineering its material on the vaudeville circuit.
Feig and White started to address the notes they made that morning. While White manned his keyboard, Feig, dressed dandyishly in a navy pinstripe suit with fluorescent floral-print socks and shiny brown wingtips, commandeered a leather swivel chair and fidgeted with different things: a plastic stress toy, an antique walking stick (Feig collects them), a Chinese fan, a mug of tea, his lower lip.
Starting from the top, White sifted through several takes of a pre-title scene in which Susan has the unenviable task of firing her boss's gardener. White began splicing together different alts, then — intent on pumping some air back into the film — experimented with a long, awkward pause that terminated in a wonderfully abrupt smash cut. This transition appeared nowhere in the script, but the director was pleased.
"Sometimes," Feig said, "you just create a joke out of nothing."
Correction: April 15, 2015
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the Utah city where Brent White grew up. It is Orem, not Oram.
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