NEWS
55th Annual ACE Eddie Awards
by Michael Kunkes photos by Peter Zakhary/Tilt Photos
 Thelma Schoonmaker, left, Wendey Stanzler, Michael Berenbaum and Terilyn A. Shropshire. |
Amid the laughter and acceptance speeches at the 55th Annual ACE Eddie Awards, held February 20 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a cautionary note was sounded. It came from Jim Clark, one of this year’s two Career Achievement Award designees. Clark, a full-time editor since 1960, got a laugh when he said, “Editors need even more patience today than in the old days, because digital systems carry with them a great weight of danger.” But he wasn’t joking. “This is a serious point,” he offered. “When your mother or your aunt can cut a movie, we hold the seeds to our own destruction, and we must guard against that. At the stroke of a key, we can create a new version of a reel, which can then end up in multiple versions of a film. Highly dangerous.”
Hosted by actor/comedian Jay Mohr and kept at a brisk, two-hour pace, the
show also included a career achievement award for David Blewitt, ACE. “Everything
was going along fine, and then David Blewitt,” was the joke that presenter
and 1960s pop star Nancy Sinatra recalled about the veteran editor.
The awards were wrapped around a tribute to producer/ director James L. Brooks,
presented by Richard Marks. Brooks, who says that the editor is the answer
to the “Who’s going to tell him?” question asked by nervous
production people almost since film began, acknowledged the high regard in
which he holds editors: “In an industry where cynicism is an occupational
hazard, I have never worked with an editor who was cynical about the work.”
“Jim Clark was very worried that people other than the director and editor were going to have more control over the footage, that editors were going to be replaced,” comments Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE, who accepted her best dramatic feature film Eddie for Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, a precursor of her Academy Award. “I don’t feel that is the case now, but of course I work for a director who will fight to the death for how he feels a film should be, and there are lots of editors and directors who don’t have that power. It takes so much work to get a film to the screen with the right pace, rhythm and sweep. So while I don’t think we are going to lose our jobs, studios making alternate versions is still a worrying trend.”
The Aviator was a film with over 400 effects shots, and that was a new experience for Schoonmaker. “I had to learn about previsualization, as well as how to deal with asking for and cutting in changes,” she says. “Fortunately, I had a great relationship with Rob Legato and his visual effects department. Rob was a fantastic collaborator who never made us feel like it was us against them. He was completely into melding his work with Marty’s.”
Another challenge for Schoonmaker was The Aviator’s ensemble acting style. “I am used to scenes where two people talk to each other, and this was the first time I had to work with a group of actors and a lot of overlapping dialogue,” she explains. “Usually, directors are very careful not to overlap dialogue so the editor can get in there, but this was how Marty wanted to shoot it. This was especially a concern in the luncheon scene at Katherine Hepburn’s New England home, as well as in the Hollywood club scene where Jude Law plays the drunken Errol Flynn. We had to loop a few words, but by and large it worked out wonderfully.”
For Schoonmaker, the most difficult sequences were the ones that took place in Hughes’ theatre/screening room. “They were written much longer to show the progression of Hughes’ illness,” she says. “We found that when putting the film together, we had to greatly reduce their length, so the problem became truncating these scenes, yet keeping the same emotion. So after a lot of re-editing, we finally went at it kinetically instead of intellectually, and just went for the best stuff where Leo DiCaprio was showing his madness. We just didn’t worry about matching or jump-cutting because the combination of the images and Leo’s performance was working fine by itself. The movie had too epic a sweep to let those run at their original length.”
Winning the Eddie was very surprising and moving for Schoonmaker. “Because I work in New York, I can’t attend the many functions of ACE and I have very little contact with my fellow editors in Los Angeles,” she says. “It is wonderful to be recognized by my fellow editors, because they understand that editing isn’t just about the very dramatic airplane crash sequences in The Aviator. It’s also about building characters properly in the way you edit actors’ performances, finding the proper rhythm for a film that stretches from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, and figuring out how to shape the gradual decline into madness of the main character. My fellow editors really understood what we were doing in the editing of The Aviator, and that makes their award very precious to me.”
Amazingly, the Eddie won by Paul Hirsch, ACE, for Ray in the Best Edited feature film, comedy or musical category was his first, and his first nomination since Star Wars in 1977. “When I first heard I might have a chance to work on Ray, my first reaction was, ‘Cool!’ To win an award for it, after such a great work experience, was the cherry on top of the sundae,” Hirsch says, giving a huge nod to fellow editor Peck Prior, who helped put together the first cut, and whose ideas are in the finished film.
 Paul Hirsch. |
For Hirsch, the joy of working on Ray was the way music blended into the drama. “It was something I had never quite seen before,” he recalls. “I found myself intercutting two lines of action, one of which might be three days long, the other three minutes. And of course, Jamie Foxx was magnificent. An actor’s eyes are one of his primary tools for expression, and because of the prosthetics and sunglasses, Jamie had to express all his emotional nuances using only his voice, his rhythm and his body language.”
Hirsch points to a couple of challenges. “The scene with the audience shouting out song requests while Ray is trying to introduce country music to them was one,” he says. “It was hard to communicate exactly what was going on. The montage for ‘Every Day’ was tricky, getting the dramatic scenes to be just the right length so that cutting back to the performances came at musically desirable points. But the biggest challenge was taking 55 minutes out of a picture that really didn’t have any weak scenes. It’s pretty great that this independently financed feature, with basically an all-African-American cast and a small budget, was one that no studio wanted to make, yet went on to get six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.”
The secrecy surrounding the series finale of HBO’s Sex and The City
extended to the cutting room, where co-editors and co-winners Michael Berenbaum,
ACE, and Wendey Stanzler, ACE, cut three alternate endings in an attempt to
throw the press and paparazzi off the scent. “We didn’t know ourselves
until the last minute,” says Berenbaum, who won his second ACE award
for Sex and was also nominated in the Best One-Hour TV series category for
the Desperate Housewives pilot. “The final script had all the dialogue
crossed out, and wasn’t even released until the day the scenes were
shot,” he says.
Though Stanzler and Berenbaum have worked on the show for six years, both
previously winning Eddies, the award-winning finale and its lead-up episode
were the only ones they worked on together, making the achievement especially
sweet. “Working on Sex and the City was one of the most professionally
satisfying experiences of my life,” said Stanzler, who is moving into
directing with two episodes of NBC’s new Grey’s Anat-omy, after
directing an episode of Sex earlier in the final season. “The writing
was the best you could ask for, and I got to work with a group of actresses
who taught me volumes about narrative and performance. It’s hard to
describe the emotions, because winning this award means that everyone who
does what you do is saying, ‘We really thought what you did was great,’
and that’s an incredible thing.”
Jamie Foxx should have been a presenter, since his presence on a show in 2004 was almost an Eddie guarantee, with Jim Miller and Paul Rubell, ACE, nominated for Collateral, Paul Hirsch winning for Ray, and Terilyn Shropshire, ACE, winning in the category of Miniseries or Motion Picture for Commercial Television for FX’s Redemption. Shropshire, the first African-American to win an ACE Award, says, “It’s not a matter of inclusion or exclusion, it’s a matter of knowing who we are as a group. We are artisans,” she says. “But at the same time I am very aware that there are very few of us out there, and even fewer that have been considered for a broader range of genres and material. For me it meant a great deal to be recognized by people that do what I do, and that’s what I cherish the most.”
 Michael Brown. Photo by Ron Regalado. |
Redemption, the true story of Crips gang founder Stan “Tookie” Williams, was told with a visual style that takes the audience back and forth through his life as a gangbanger and death row inmate who renounces his past and becomes an anti-gang advocate. “As an editor, you are bit of a gypsy; a chameleon,” says Shropshire, who dedicated the award to her father who passed away the week production began. “Each film brings its own personality and rhythms,” she says. “And our goal was to involve the audience with the story and its flow without having them worry about the actual span of years.”
Michael Brown, ACE, Eddie winner for Best Edited Miniseries or Motion Picture for Non-Commercial Television Comedy or Musical, and two-time Emmy winner, knows about years going by. Something the Lord Made, the story of the relationship between heart surgery pioneers Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas, is his seventh film for HBO and 14th for director Joseph Sargent, in a relationship extending 25 years. “For me, this award is more important than an Emmy because it is your peers who vote for you–the men and women who sit at the Avids and make editorial decisions,” he states. “They know what goes into a film more than almost anyone else–except for the director.” Brown, whose first TV editing job was on Green Acres, adds, “The biggest problem with today’s made-for-TV movies is the lack of time given to script, casting and editing. Netrworks continue to rush projects into production that aren’t ready, then rush the post-production schedule. HBO is unique for providing additional time to make changes.”
 Philip Neel. |
Philip Neel took home his second Eddie, this one for Best Edited One-Hour Series for Television for the “Hired Guns” episode of Boston Legal. He previously won for Ally McBeal, and in 1972 was nominated for the very first ACE student competition. “Because Boston Legal is a new show, the award is very special to me,” says Neel, who alternates between producing (Seaquest, Boston Public, Moonlighting, The Cape, Twin Peaks) and editing (Remington Steele, Sisters, Bronx Zoo, Ally McBeal).
“Part of this show’s style is the rapid camera movement,” Neel says. “And Bill D’Elia doesn’t worry too much about crossing the 180-degree axis, when he’s directing, but all the directors shoot every scene with at least two cameras–three for the courtroom scenes. You can’t rely on the camera movement being the same each and every time, so we really have to look at all the film, because there might be a hand-off that works really nicely relative to the dialogue. When I see movement that I like, I will use a different color dot for each camera so I know where I am. Mostly, I edit normally, but if a movement is particularly good–even if the background is different–I will build a scene around it, because this show is more about the characters than the cases.”
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production.
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