A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : DUCK! : The Right Moment Is So Hard to Know

The scenario usually goes something like this: Producers and studio executives see the first dailies of a new movie in production and panic. A few days later, the director gets the ax. The culprit: “creative differences.” So a new director takes over where the other one left off.

But what happens when the first director has shot almost two-thirds of the movie? That’s what happened with the romantic comedy “Hard Promises,” which Columbia will release this week.

By the time the film’s original director, Lee Grant (“Staying Together”), was replaced by Martin Davidson (“Long Gone”), she had shot 30 days of film on a 49-day shooting schedule.

But when Davidson was brought in to the film, it was agreed that he would start over from the beginning--on the original shooting schedule. Because the film was financed independently and there was no more money available, he had to reshoot the entire movie in the remaining 19 days.

“I don’t recommend making a movie this way,” says Davidson.

Davidson says that TV movies are routinely shot in 20 days and that’s how he approached “Hard Promises.” Shooting six to seven pages a day, rather than the customary one or two, he ground out almost four minutes of edited footage a day.

According to Davidson, only two scenes of Grant’s--about 14 of the film’s 97 minutes--remain in the 97-minute film.

So why was Grant replaced in the first place? “As is often the case with collaborative situations, she had her idea of what the film should be and we had our idea,” says actor William Petersen, one of the film’s stars--and one of its producers. “She was giving the movie a little more of a serious tone than I felt it could handle. It’s a movie about forgiveness. I didn’t want to make a movie about pain.”

Why did they wait so long? “It was one of those things that we couldn’t tell about until we were way into the film,” says Petersen.

A spokesman for Grant said she declined to comment.