10 Great Movies That Were Almost Ruined By Bad Editing

With a run time of 3 hours, the biggest criticism Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street faced was that it was far too long. Had the first cut of the finished product been released, audiences would have had to sit through a whopping 4 hours of Jordan Belfort's (Leonardo DiCaprio) debauchery, with Scorsese's long-time editor struggling to cut the movie down to anything near a normal run time.

Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every Scorsese theatrical feature since Raging Bull in 1980, admitted that, while the endings of movies are always difficult, trying to wrap up The Wolf of Wall Street was one of her worst experiences in the editing suite due to the amount of improv that Scorsese encouraged during the shoot:

“The endings of movies are always horrendous, this was particularly horrendous. Cutting improvisation is really hard, because things don’t match, and you end up with some bad cuts sometimes. But we’d rather have the bad cuts and the great improv."

Some of the bad cuts she is referring to include Teresa closing the same door a total of three times in the scene in which she pulls Jordan out of the limo screaming, and Jordan's pen switching hands as he offers it to people and asks them to sell it back to him - this mistake is repeated with every new person he offers it to.

Schoonmaker is well respected in the film world, with a number of high profile directors having attempted (and failed) to secure her exclusive services, though when a shooting script that is already 162 pages long is extended to allow for ad-libbing, even the most cut-throat of editors would find themselves struggling. In the hands of someone less experienced, The Wolf of Wall Street would have wound up a major flop for team Scorsese/DiCaprio.