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Oscars 2001
What Were Your Key Creative
Challenges?
by
Stephanie Argy
For the second year in a row, the Guild Magazine approached the Academy Award nominees in Film Editing, Sound and Sound Editing and asked them to write about their work on the films for which they were recognized.
Guild President Donn Cambern wrote to the nominees, in part:
In a time of rapid technological change, we at the Guild think it’s important not to lose sight of the creative and artistic aspects of editing and re-recording. We know that whatever our tools look like, most of us do this work because we love it. In the next issue of the Guild Magazine we hope to publish brief statements from the nominees answering the following question:
What were your key creative challenges in making this picture?
We hope this will focus our readers on the enduring values of our crafts and also put a spotlight on the nominees instead of looking only at the winners.
The articles on the following pages are as unique and idiosyncratic as the work on the movies themselves. We congratulate all the nominees and thank them for their participation.
As a prologue to the Oscars, The Guild, The American Cinematheque and The American Cinema Editors co-sponsored a first-of-a-kind panel discussion entitled "Invisible Art/Visible Artists," featuring this year’s Film Editing nominees and moderated by Guild President Donn Cambern. Over 500 people, both members and non-members, attended this watershed event, held the day before the Academy Awards, at the recently renovated Egyptian Theater.
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Egyptian Theater, with (L to R) Dede Allen, Joe Hutshing, Mark Livolsi, Stephen Mirrione, Pietro Scalia and Tim Squyres |
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The panel focused on the evolving art of film editing, and on the editor’s contribution to the filmmaking process. A short clip from each nominated film was shown, after which the editors described their work and methods on the movies. Cambern, an Academy Award nominee himself for 'Romancing the Stone', used the clips and the editors’ experiences as a way to spur discussions on issues that concern editors in general.
The clip for 'Almost Famous', for example, led to a conversation on compressing sequences; editors Joe Hutshing, Saar Klein (not present at the event) and Mark Livolsi used parallel cutting between different scenes to help them reduce the movie from its original four-hour length to a more manageable and marketable one. Next, Tim Squyres explained how the tree-top fight sequence in 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' also had to be shortened to be effective. Pietro Scalia’s work on 'Gladiator' prompted an exchange about how to maintain a sense of order in a chaotic battle scene, sometimes with techniques as basic as flopping the image. In talking about 'Traffic', Stephen Mirrione and the other editors stressed the importance of maintaining an emotional reaction to the scenes they cut, and the clip from 'Wonder Boys' let Dede Allen explain what she feels really matters in editing – conveying character and subtext, not how many cuts the editor can fit into a given section of the movie.
Cambern lamented that few people outside the profession understand what a film editor does, and that they assume that if all the elements of a movie are good, it somehow magically falls together. "Editors are referred to sometimes as technicians, which I find appalling," he said.
A videotape of the discussion will be available from A.C.E. by early summer. Call 818-777-2900 to purchase a copy. (The price has yet to be determined.)
As A.C.E. president Tina Hirsch said in her introduction, editing at its finest is an invisible art, hard for non-editors to perceive and comprehend; this program was the first of what is slated to become an annual event, devoted to making the artists who do the finest of that work a little more visible.
Go to articles
Stephanie Argy is the editor of the Guild Magazine.
She can be reached via email
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine
Vol. 22, No. 2 - May/June 2001
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Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700