The production suffered an unusually absurd post-production crisis, recounted by screenwriter Robert Bloch in his autobiography. The completed teleplay was initially reported to run twelve minutes too long for its network time slot, so Bloch painstakingly cut material from the script to bring the movie down to the required length. But when the filmmakers later viewed the rushes, they discovered that the film was now twelve minutes too short. The problem was especially difficult because most of the sets had already been dismantled, eliminating the easy solution of returning to the stage for conventional reshoots. With the broadcast date approaching, Bloch had to devise ways to put the missing twelve minutes back into the film, effectively reconstructing the movie in the editing and writing process after the physical production had already disappeared. The episode illustrates the peculiar pressures of the made-for-television system, where rigid network schedules and exact running times could force a writer to solve a production emergency with little more than existing footage, dialogue, and ingenuity.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
Robert Bloch's Twelve-Minute Editing Nightmare on The Cat Creature
The Cat Creature / 1970s
The production suffered an unusually absurd post-production crisis, recounted by screenwriter Robert Bloch in his autobiography. The completed teleplay was initially reported to run twelve minutes too long for its network time slot, so Bloch painstakingly cut material from the script to bring the movie down to the required length. But when the filmmakers later viewed the rushes, they discovered that the film was now twelve minutes too short. The problem was especially difficult because most of the sets had already been dismantled, eliminating the easy solution of returning to the stage for conventional reshoots. With the broadcast date approaching, Bloch had to devise ways to put the missing twelve minutes back into the film, effectively reconstructing the movie in the editing and writing process after the physical production had already disappeared. The episode illustrates the peculiar pressures of the made-for-television system, where rigid network schedules and exact running times could force a writer to solve a production emergency with little more than existing footage, dialogue, and ingenuity.
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