So when we finished shooting the film, everyone went back to their respective corners of the universe. Work had me going to Boca Raton less than a week after we wrapped, so I hit up Vic, Rob, and my parents to take care of most of the closing arrangements of the shoot. Vic nicely returned the stuff to South Carolina and Charlotte. A lot of driving for someone who doesn't like to drive (thanks). My

parents took the camera to Atlanta (thanks to them, too), and Rob sent the film off to the lab. I gave Rob a call from the airport in Palm Springs while waiting for my rental car. Rob said that the lab needed a production company name for their paperwork. Being under duress, I told him to just make one up. When I returned two weeks

later, I asked Rob what he had told them, and he said "Big Shoe Productions." So there it is. The story of how Ever got its name is just as lame. Long before shooting, Rob and I were driving somewhere in Durham and Rob was asking me what the film was going to be called. I didn't really know what to call it, and went off on some typical tirade about how important the name was and how split up I was about these different choices. Rob, long tired of my typical tirades, said, "It doesn't really matter, just pick some working title so I know what to call it. You can pick the real title later." At that moment, I looked up at a road sign, I don't even remember where we were, but there was the word 'ever'. Later, Dawn, Luis and I were watching some of my cuts, and there is the moment where Coco says, "Don't leave me....Ever." We all just sorta looked at each other, knowing we have all just decided this was more than just a working title. Nobody said a word, but from that moment on, Ever was the real title of the film. About three months after shooting had stopped, Rob's girlfriend Chris, who is also a filmmaker, was asking me about the film. I confessed I hadn't done anything since the shoot. At the time I felt I was being lazy, but in retrospect, I really just had no idea what

the next step was. Chris asked me if this was one of those things I started but wasn't going to finish. I said no way, and in typical Brett form, the next day I was all about making phone calls to get editing equipment like my deadline was tomorrow. The next day I had a lot more questions than answers. At this point I knew more about film, I still didn't know jack about film editing. So the next week was basically a rehash of

me asking lame questions and bothering Rob about more dumb things. I found someone in Atlanta who would rent me an editing suite. They wanted 1600.00 a month for it. I managed, with the help of Rob, to get it down to about 900 a month after eliminating things like 'editing chair' and 'squawk box'. My ignorance still got me stuck paying $15 a month for a tape dispenser and $30 a month for a 'back rack' for my cutting bench (which I covered with stuff and constantly showed off to people to justify the expense). What I didn't realize at the time is the rental company wasn't really trying to rip me off. Usually when they drop off an editing suite, it is to a shooting location, where there is probably just a canopy or an empty building that has been rented for use during the production. At the time, there was far less indie stuff than there is now, so they probably just didn't have the insight into my situation to see that I would probably have a tape dispenser already. All the editing stuff arrived at 6:00am one Saturday morning in a big, yellow rental truck. I had persuaded Jeremy to spend the night so he could be here to help unload. The driver, Hunter Yoder

(hereafter referred to as 'the progenitor') had been driving all night from New York with his family in the truck. He

was very hyperactive and breaking one joke after another. We had been up 'til 4am drinking the night before, so we were not really bonding with the progenitor that morning. After setting up my flatbed editor (the delight of which, to my virgin eyes, was inexpressable), the progenitor asked if we had any test film. It took me a moment, and then I said, "Yes, of course." Running to my bedroom, I pulled the first reel of the film from its lovingly organized storage place. The progenitor threaded the film and I finally got to see the first fruit of all that work: It was the first scene we shot, the one of Ben and Coco sitting in bed. Jeremy and I were as excited as dogs on a cattle drive. After watching for a moment, the progenitor said, "Cute chick." Editing took four months. Honestly, I didn't really know what I was doing. At one point, Rob came in and watched what I had done. He liked everything but this one scene (incidentally, the one scene that, during a moment of 'hitting the wall' I had made Rob shoot all on his own). He re-assembled the whole thing and re-cut it. I told him he was right and it looked much better now. Yes, I was lying. But not in the way you might think: I really couldn't tell the difference. When I look back at the scene now, I know it looks very nice. It was a dialog sequence (the one at the restaurant), and considering how complicated dialog is to cut, I have no doubt what I had done was absolutely terrible. Still, I regret not being able to see that original cut again, to see what it was that made Rob key off it as being obviously worse than the rest of the film. It's sorta like that 'smell my finger' thing.