ABSTRACT
After perhaps months of sustained editing work on a film, a debilitating familiarity sets in. As you lose objectivity, your ability to make judgments on behalf of an audience departs. Every version begins to look the same, and all of them seem too long. You become obsessed with particular faults in your footage and curing them seems an overwhelming task. Not unusually, you want to hang on to a sequence or a minor character that the editor and others think is redundant. These aspects of the film are your darlings, and the director must kill the darlings if the film is to be consistent and work well.
