It was not a scene of any great originality, and possibly because of this the writer put a great deal of effort into making it as fresh, sensitive and original as he could. The result was a beautifully crafted piece of work. But it was twenty-five pages long, and the producer and director were much dismayed. They saw it as a one-act play in its own right that would badly interrupt the progression of a film really intended as just a sequence of musical numbers. The playwright, a thorough professional, recognised this problem. But when invited to cut it down, he discovered he was not able to reduce it by more than three or four pages, and even those cuts were painful to him. He gladly agreed to let some other screenwriter tackle the job.