The story of a movie is made in the editing. Earlier, I sketched out one version of Pause of the Clock; here’s another:

A black screen. Beep, beep. “This is Phil, sound roll 5, Crueler than Truth. Testing, testing.” Someone removes the lens cap and we’re looking at a stand of trees at the bottom of a hill. As Phil wrangles sound levels and microphone placement, Tchavdar, the cinematographer, moves the camera to get the right vantage point, while adjusting the focus and exposure. Rob, the director, pops in and out of the frame, rehearsing with the two young actors, Gavin and Lesley. Various other people connected with the production scurry about, including Scot, his hair dyed blond, who keeps muttering, “It’s a disaster. It’s a disaster in the making.” Derrick, the assistant director, is frantic to have everything in place. Tchavdar complains that they’re losing the light. They need to get the shot now or never. The actors get into place: Gavin and Lesley hidden behind the trees, ready to run up the hill and then fall in the snow. The clapperboard comes into the frame. Phil calls, “Speed.” Tchavdar says, “Slate.” Clap. Rob yells, “Action!”

An empty two-bedroom apartment. We move through the rooms. Tchavdar recites the poem in voiceover.  When we get to the kitchen, a young man with orange hair, wearing glasses, sits motionless at the kitchen table: Dylan. He’s reading a notebook.

Title card: PAUSE OF THE CLOCK.

The same apartment. The front door opens and Rob enters, carrying a suitcase. He begins to unpack, talking about how boring Colorado was. Dylan sits on the sofa playing with a paddleball. Rob asks if he’s been reading any good books lately. “Philip Roth,” answers Dylan. Then Dylan asks if he still writes his screenplays in notebooks. Rob answers that he used to, but not anymore; he prefers loose-leaf paper, so that he can shuffle the pages around.

Later, Dylan and Rob share a bag of Dorritos. Rob talks about his new screenplay, comparing it to raising a child.

In a bright sunlit room, Rob rehearses a scene from the movie with Gavin and Lesley.  As the actors try a bit of dialog Rob daydreams about an unknown man slapping Lesley. Almost tenderly. Gavin asks him a question, bringing him out of his daydream. “What are we thinking, running up that hill?” Rob answers, “You’ve just run away from an uncomfortable situation and you’re in this field with snow everywhere and it’s exhilarating.”

Nighttime in the apartment. Dylan sketches on a pad while Rob talks with someone on the phone. Lesley. After some small talk Rob finally asks if she’s read his script, Crueler than Truth. She has. What does she think? “I didn’t like it, to be honest. The character I’d be playing is basically me, I’d be playing myself. And I mean it’s your life, you can, but I’m an actress and movies aren’t real, movies are fiction. And with three or four of those scenes I’d be really uncomfortable.” Rob sighs, and then says, “Think of it this way. Movies look like real life, but they aren’t real life. It’s like when you dream about someone. They look just like they do in real life but it’s not really them. Movies are like that. Movies are like a dream.”

Rob sits on the edge of his bed, slowly tears a piece of paper into strips, and stuffs them into his mouth.

In the living room, Dylan puts a CD on the stereo. Meanwhile, Rob exits the apartment carrying a blue garbage bag. He walks to the alley, puts it in a dumpster. He walks away, down the alley and out of sight. In the kitchen, Dylan makes breakfast. He sings “Liza” to himself as he takes a bagel out of the freezer. Rob’s voiceover: “Sometimes I wish Dylan were the kind of person who would take the trouble to pry into my life. I imagine him alone in the apartment, going through the rooms. Room by room. He finds my diary and opens it and begins to read.” Dylan sits alone at the kitchen table and reads a notebook.

On a sunporch, Gavin kisses Lesley and they embrace, slowdancing in place.

Dylan closes the notebook and puts it away, into the drawer of a black metal filing cabinet.

“You knew I was adopted, right?” Lesley asks. Gavin says, “What?” They sit together on a couch in a living room we’ve never seen before. Lesley explains the complicated series of events that led to her discovery. Gavin seems bewildered.

Dylan walks down a sidewalk in the neighborhood carrying a brown grocery sack. The sack breaks, spilling potatoes everywhere. He tries in vain to gather them up and put them back into the bag. Elsewhere, on another sidewalk in front of a busy street, Rob stops suddenly and stares at something on the ground: an entire carton of Neapolitan ice cream, slowly melting in the sun.

Evening in the apartment: Dylan and Rob prepare dinner together, spaghetti and red sauce. Rob blows his nose while chopping onions. Later, a group of their friends, including Phil and Tchavdar, eat dinner together in the living room. Joking around about various things. Everyone teases Rob, who has begun to lose his voice from a cold.

Outside, killing time between shots, Dylan demonstrates to Tchavdar how to make a loon call with his hands. Tchavdar can’t do it. He asks Dylan if he likes fat people. “Umm, I have a certain liking for fat people yes.”

Rob hangs out with Derrick in the living room of Derrick’s father’s townhome. Derrick asks how the the trip from Chicago went. They talk about the similarities between Rob and his brother Mikey; onscreen we see the two meet at a Greyhound station and hug.

Dylan continues reading the diary. Derrick sings “Liza” to himself in the shower, and then wraps a towel around his waist and stands in front of the bathroom mirror as he shaves. Rob also shaves, in his own bathroom, the blade rasping across his throat and drawing blood. Dylan takes the place of Derrick in front of the mirror and shaves, cutting himself.

On the sunporch, Gavin kisses Lesley; and then Dylan takes his place and kisses her.

In the apartment, Robs sits in the living room eating a donut. Dylan enters, and Rob offhandedly remarks that someone called for him yesterday but he had forgotten to tell him about it. He casually apologizes. Dylan loses his temper. “Sometimes these things are important!” Rob says, “Don’t you even want to know who it was?” “It doesn’t really matter,” says Dylan, who storms off his bedroom.

Dylan sketches angrily on a pad while, in his own bedroom, Rob quietly folds laundry.

Nighttime: Dylan asleep.

Morning: Rob wakes up, in a bedroom we’ve never seen before. He stumbles downstairs, carrying a white cat. He puts down the cat, walks over to a window and opens the blinds. Sunlight pours in. He flops back down on the bed. In the brilliant morning light his lips are the color of cherries.

In a nearly-empty apartment we’ve never seen before, Dylan makes final preparations to move out. When he’s nearly finished he walks over to a black metal filing cabinet, the same one we’ve seen before, and takes out several notebooks, which he puts into his knapsack. He turns off all the lights and locks the front door behind him.

Back on location: on a snowy mountain road, a minivan with all the actors and crew pull over. Everyone spills out of the vehicle. As they unload the gear Rob declares that it’s the perfect location.

Rob yells, “Action!” Gavin and Lesley emerge from the trees and lumber up the hill through the deep snow. As they approach the camera they fall down, laughing, rolling around. Rob yells, “Cut!” A moment of breathless anticipation, then Rob pronounces the take perfect. Time to pack up and move on. Scot, for one, is incredulous.

At the end of the day, the crew relaxes. Scot on guitar, Rob on piano, Tchavdar on drums. They improvise a jam.

Sleeping on the floor with other crew members, Tchavdar snores loudly. The rest of the house is silent except for a ticking clock. Later that morning, Rob and Dylan stand in front of a window, the same window where Rob opened the blinds. Talking. Dylan talks about how difficult it is to hug his father. The intimacy of it is embarrassing. Rob says, “I kind of wish I was going back to Chicago with you.”

In his kitchen, Gavin prepares a turkey sandwich. Just as he is about to take a bite, he puts it down and prays. As he eats the sandwich we hear him recite I Corinthians 13.

The Greyhound bus station. Passengers come and go. Mikey waits for his brother to arrive.

Back at the window with the blinds open, Rob and Scot talk about the meaning of life. “Everything can be doubted,” says Scot. He said that the scariest thing about his mother’s suicide was the fact that life went on. “Her presence in my life was ultimately nonessential.” Rob insists that there must be a deeper meaning to everything. Suddenly, from offscreen, Tchavdar announces that the camera has run out of film. “I don’t know why,” he says.

Back in Chicago, an oddly-dressed man walks down the sidewalk. He stops Dylan, who is passing in the opposite direction, and says, “Excuse me, sir. Can you tell me which way St. Louis is?” Dylan points behind him. “Thank you sir, and have a nice day,” says the man. He continues on his way. Rob is also walking down the sidewalk; following behind Dylan, in fact. The man approaches Rob, takes out a knife and stabs him. Rob falls to the ground dead. The man calmly walks away.

Lesley reads a letter, crumples it, begins weeping. Gavin tries to comfort her.

Dylan is alone in the apartment, sick in bed with the flu. Tchavdar drops by with a bottle of vodka and two shot glasses. But Dylan declines a drink. Tchavdar tells a story about a pastor from Philadephia he once knew who was invited to say something at a funeral. But he had no idea what to say. He turned to the Bible to see what Jesus did in a similar situation, but all he could find were examples of him raising people from the dead or saying things like, “Let the dead bury their own dead.” In the end, the pastor didn’t go to the funeral. Tchavdar notices a notebook near Dylan’s bed. He picks it up, flips through it, reads a passage out loud. “This is Rob’s handwriting. What are you doing with this? Is this his diary?” he asks. “I read it,” Dylan says. “I read most of it. I don’t know why.” Tchavdar scolds him, says he should just read the Bible instead. “It’s all written down in here.” Tchavdar says goodbye and leaves the apartment.

Later. Dylan is asleep.

The giant sanctuary of a church. Dylan walks up to a folding table at the back of the church, behind which sits the oddly-dressed man. “Sign here, here, and here,” he tells Dylan. Once Dylan has finished signing all the paperwork the man says, “A pleasure doing business with you.” Dylan slowly walks down the center aisle to the front of the sanctuary. In front of the altar he meets a middle-aged woman in a dark skirt and peach-colored blouse. “I thought you were dead,” says Dylan. “We all did.” The women smiles and says, “No, I merely went out of town. But I wanted you to think I was.” She pauses and says, “Do you know what the meaning of life is, James?” He says, “Tell me.” “I was waiting. I was waiting for a train to take me out of the station. The president was there. He kept pacing back and forth. He started cursing. Soon he was cursing at the top of his lungs. I asked him how he could call himself a Christian and talk like that. He said that there were more important things. I told him that out of everything he’d said today, nothing was more important than that. He said that technology was more important. You wouldn’t have anything without technology. I said that Jesus walked on water without technology, Jesus fed the multitudes without technology.” She stops talking. Dylan says, “Then what happened?” The woman smiles. “Then he said, ‘Next question.'”

Cut to black.