I’m going to be flying by memory today, but feel confident I have my facts straight.
There’s a scene in Pretty Woman where Julie Roberts and Richard Gere are having a conversation in their hotel room one morning. On one of the director’s commentaries Garry Marshall says that scene was edited down from either a longer scene (or possibly two scenes). This caused some continuity problems because Julia Roberts is eating food. So one second she’s eating a croissant, but after the camera cuts away to Gere and comes back to Roberts she is now holding a pancake. Marshall talked about the editor not wanting to cut the scene that way because of the continuity problem. But Marshall justified cutting it that way because it worked best for scene flow and was the best performance. Then on the commentary he said something to the effect of, “I will always protect the actor.”
I had seen Pretty Woman two or three times at that point and never noticed the continuity problem until Marshall pointed it out. I imagine cutting for performance and protecting the actors are a couple of the reasons Marshall has been able to work with some of the finest actors of the last 40 years.
(Couldn’t find that scene on You Tube, but if you know where a link is of that scene send it my way and I’ll include it.)
