Primetime editor Daniel Garber reveals the film’s original ending before Skyler Gisondo (Decoy Dan) spoke up with an idea.
Having worked with Lance Oppenheim on documentary projects like Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld, editor Daniel Garber remarks that Primetime was a completely different kind of collaboration.
“I think this was a fundamentally different production experience for [Lance ]in that there were dozens of crew members around all the time and like, you know, movie stars,” says Garber. “I think that was a bit of an adjustment.”
But Garber says that Oppenheim handled it all in a way that was very similar to his documentary work.
“He didn’t feel like he knew what he was going to discover each day on set. And that sort of open mindedness to just the entropy and uncertainty of production is something that he brought over from documentary and that I think really helped unlock things on set that he wouldn’t have otherwise discovered, maybe. That was really helpful for me as an editor, too, in that I had all of this really interesting, alive material.”
For example, something that came together in the edit was Jeff Zucker’s monologue/clip montage of failed NBC shows, including the Friends spin-off, Joey, and what NBC was up against, like ABC’s mystery juggernaut, Lost.
“And I think that there’s just something about the specificity of those images and just how potent they are as these cultural signifiers that I found so exciting about incorporating into the film. There’s something that’s really enjoyable about watching even these tiny fragments of TV shows to just situate you within that media environment. It also just speaks to the way that this show about catching predators is now going toe-to-toe with Lost; it just kind of gives you a sense of the wide diversity of different shows that existed at the time and how much of an outlier To Catch a Predator is among those.”
To Catch a Rabbi: Chris Hansen’s Turning Point
Another memorable editing sequence comes when Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) confronts a rabbi while filming. It’s the first time we actually get a bit into our host’s head and the only time ever that one of the predators physically touches Hansen.
“It was a particularly challenging scene,” says Garber. “Thanks to David Bolen, our great cinematographer, it’s such a heightened scene, and it mixes all these different formats. I think it’s one of the most challenging scenes in part because it doesn’t have standard coverage at all. I didn’t have the option of just going back on, you know, master shots, matching over the shoulder shots or standard closeups. It’s just the DV cameras that sort of stand in for the To Catch a Predator surveillance cameras. And this very strange Sony Plumbicon tube camera that looks really surreal. And then these extreme closeups of their faces when Chris and the rabbi are facing off against each other. It just makes it almost impossible to put it together as a, you know, quote unquote, normal scene.”
Garber describes the fabric of reality rupturing for both the rabbi and Chris.
“And so I really do have to credit Paul Hsu, our amazing sound designer, for really taking it over the top with clicks and pops. I think what I like most about that scene is actually not my work.”
How The Primetime Ending Changed
In the final cut, Primetime ends on Decoy Dan (Skyler Gisondo), who finally receives his SAG card in the mail. But Garber says Oppenheim and the team originally wanted to end it on the previous scene, featuring the culmination of the raid at Bill Conrad’s house, with Chris repeating chat transcripts as the cameras all shut down. Since that was kind of a downer, Gisondo suggested a new ending.
“Skyler actually pitched the idea to Lance, who then pitched it to Ajon [Singh] (screenwriter). And then we just ended up shooting it in additional photography pretty close to the end of the editing process. There were different versions of it where Dan actually responds to the question, and we ended up just choosing to take away Dan’s response and just ending on this quizzical look where Dan is considering this question.”
Primetime is in theaters everywhere.
