The transient stress and the transient average orientation generated by the breakup process of a long Newtonian filament imbedded in a quiescent Newtonian viscous liquid have been calculated. Rayleigh disturbances were used to describe the relaxation of the filament and the variation of interfacial area in the absence of flow during the course of disintegration process. The effect of viscosity ratio and initial radius of the filament were discussed. It was demonstrated that the predictions of the model in terms of the time-evolution of interfacial area can be used to select the best conditions for carrying out the breaking thread experiments. The predictions of the proposed model were compared to some experimental data on polyamide/polyethylene system.