shoot without a script
The film version of Rent starts with a song--"Seasons of Love A"--that doesn't come until Act Two in the stage version. On the one hand, this is because a film, even a musical, doesn't have the two act structure common to stage musicals. But, this song also serves as a sort of love letter to Rentheads who will probably be disappointed by other changes made for the film--from small stuff like Mark never actually calls Alexi Darling to quit his job (seriously, though the lines are there, he's nowhere near a phone), or Mark opening up the film (after that initial transplanted song) with dialogue rather than singing; to big stuff like cutting half of "Goodbye Love" because director Chris Columbus thought it was emotional overload. Similarly, the film never explicitly lets us know that Roger's ex-girlfriend killed herself because Columbus thought that would be "too much." It's a musical about a bunch of poverty-stricken artists, many of w...