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Mann has been there for 12 hours, in every scene, without delivering a single line--just reacting a lot to other people's improv. Now she's going to listen to four Graham Parker songs, over and over. Some of her improvising will involve pretending to fall asleep. But Apatow is jazzed, jumping up to fix the mike stand for Parker's bassist. Because as long as he's here, still shooting, he doesn't have to make any decisions.
A Visit to the Boneyard
Two months later, Apatow is in the editing room of the Apatower, his Brentwood office building. The walls are covered with blue index cards, neatly split into four sections. He's figured out where he wants to start and end in each section, but that still leaves a lot of choices. One wall, the "boneyard," has 20 cards, each representing a scene or shot that he's cut from the film, though he's not yet willing to remove them from the wall for good.
The subplot about Pete's struggling record label has mostly fallen out--including scenes with Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong and E from the Eels--in favor of footage that focuses on Pete and Debbie's marriage. Right now, the movie starts with Pete leisurely waking up his kids for his wife's 40th birthday, singing "We Are the World" and farting near their faces. It's an entire home movie before any semblance of a plot kicks in. "I kind of like easing into things," Apatow says. "That has a cumulative effect, and suddenly it's a four-and-a-half-hour movie." Nearly all of this scene will eventually be cut.
He takes a break to walk the puppy his wife bought his daughters without telling him. When it turned out the girls wouldn't take care of it, she was about to take it back, but he wasn't going to let that happen. Apatow is not so good at letting go of things. So now he's got his own puppy.
That dog is going to be in a lot of movies.