The first encounter between Gin and Chipeska was a long scene where Chipeska complains about Santa for a bit, Gin asks if "that’s it," then Chipeska relates the story about finding Santa in dressing room, then they discuss that. The work that director Terry Zwigoff and his actors did with this scene left such an impression that the audience wanted more, so we decided to split this into two scenes, playing the dressing room scene not as the scripted flashback, but as a real-time event in the story. That allowed us another long moment with these great characters and performers.
However, when I first showed this scene to Terry, it was the long, full version. And he had no idea what I had done. I need to back up to “Ghost World” where I discovered that Terry loved how uncomfortable and funny messy eating could be. So when I saw that he gave Bernie Mac an orange for the second half of the scene with John Ritter, I made sure that I was going to use his dialogue mostly on takes when he was making a wet mess of the orange. It was a blast to edit, and even more fun to add sound effects.
However, when I showed this to Terry, he was whispering notes in my ear for the first half of the scene, then I stopped hearing from him once the orange-eating started. I thought I had failed. No laughing? No comments? But when the playback was done, I looked over to Terry, and tears were streaming from his face. He was laughing so hard he was speechless. He was on board, and continued working on milking the orange for all it was worth during the rest of the editing process.