Does Anyone Know What The Editor Does? by David Saxon The following is from an article written by retired Guild member David Saxon first published in the Hollywood Reporter and Backstage magazine in 1984: In the making of a film, the writer creates the story, the director creates the translation to film, the cameraman creates the visual, the actors transform themselves into the characters... With everything already created , what is left for the editor to do? After all, how many different ways can a few shots be pasted together? Say, for example, that there are ten shots to be arranged in every possible configuration. How many ways can ten shots be spliced together? Incredibly, there are 3,628,800 different ways to rearrange just ten shots. Add one more shot and you have almost forty million possibilities. How Many Ways Can Ten Shots Be Spliced Together? But there is more to it than just the arrangement. How long should a shot be? Twenty frames? Three feet? Fourteen seconds? Maybe some shots should be cut out completely. Decide, feel it, try it, make it right. More millions of possibilities, more decisions. We have a screening. It's not very good. The lead actor had a bad day and kept muffing his lines, and it shows. The actress's overacting was rather obvious ... The pace is unbalanced. The story doesn't play. Back to the editing room. After a while, from the dark recesses of the editor's domain, a revised film emerges. The actor is at his eloquent best, the actress has become totally credible, the story telling touches your heart, the dynamic pacing keeps you on the edge of your seat. Nothing is out of place. Now the picture works. Does anyone know what the editor does? Is the editor a mechanic who only carries out the dreams of creative people? Is editing a job anyone can do? Of course not! Editing is an instinctual creative art. Editing takes the raw material and molds and shapes it until it works in the best possible way. Editing refines the story, enhances the emotion, builds up the suspense, and guides the timing and the pacing, so that what emerges is the most powerful reality. The editor makes an astronomical number of conscious, unconscious, instinctive, and often agonizing decisions, so that he [or she] will, like Michelangelo, find that statue in the block of marble. But does anyone know what the editor does? Sometimes even the editor doesn't.   Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 19, No. 4 - July/August 1998   Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 776