NEWS
Thursday with Carol
Littleton Illuminates Her Films' Character Introductions
by Adam Wisniewski
 Carol Littleton talks to a crowd of filmmakers about her career at the Editors Guild New York office. Photo by John Clifford |
On a wintry Thursday evening in late February, Carol Littleton, ACE spoke to a crowd of more than 50 filmmakers at the New York Editors Guild office. In her presentation, the then Artist-in-Residence at the Manhattan Edit Workshop––who is a former President of the Guild and currently the organization’s Vice President––described techniques of creating character and thematic introductions in her films.
Defying convention is a nice way to sum up Littleton’s start in Hollywood. A former literature student, she converted to the film world in the early 1970s via her husband, cinematographer John Bailey. While she never worked as an assistant, she received invaluable on-the-job training while at Richard Einfeld Productions––first working in sound, then moving into the edit bay. She opened her own commercial editing facility, but in 1976 left ad work to seek out features.
While interviewing with Lawrence Kasdan for a job cutting Body Heat (1981), Littleton impressed the first-time director by relating that she enjoyed the humor in his film noir homage. Their relationship has continued through seven other features, and she also edited the recently released In the Land of Women, the directorial debut of Kasdan’s son Jonathan. Additonally, Littleton earned an Academy Award nomination for her work on Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and won an Emmy for editing the television adaptation of Tuesdays with Morrie (1999).
Littleton began her presentation by showing the extended introduction of Kasdan’s Grand Canyon (1991), which influenced films like Traffic and Crash a decade later with its details of numerous characters and plotlines revolving around a central theme.
The film opens by contrasting images of a pick-up basketball game in South Central LA with a Los Angeles Lakers game being played at the Forum in nearby Inglewood. We leave the game in the midst of a conversation by Steve Martin and Kevin Kline and follow Kline as his car stalls when he cuts through a rough neighborhood. A car of roaming hoods accosts Kline, but he is saved when Danny Glover’s tow-truck operator outmaneuvers the lead thug.
“One thing that this film takes heavily from theatre is the notion of stating themes very clearly and a theatrical introduction of the characters,” said Littleton. “In a sense, the curtain parts and you have one main character after the next. The characters are introduced with pure exposition.”
 Carol Littleton editing Grand Canyon in 1991. Photo by Janelle Showalter |
When Martin enters the picture, he argues extemporaneously that life is a series of chaotic events, which bears out in the surprise of Kline’s expensive BMW suddenly dying on him. His encounter with Glover is the coincidence that sets the entire film in motion, but before moving on, the film pauses on Glover as he recasts the film’s message, this time on a personal level—that this life is not right, that something is fundamentally wrong with us.
“It was a little more leisurely paced than anything we could probably do now,” she explained. “But it still has power in the sense that it’s very deliberate. This moment, the next moment, and the next...”
A clip from Jonathan Demme’s Beloved (1998) showed the traumatic rebirth of Thandie Newton’s title character as her soul is spit out of the woods and released back among the living. “The most important part of this sequence is the sound––a wonderful montage of insects and bugs with this creature coming out of the primordial mist and muck,” said Littleton. “This is a simple illustration of one of the best introductions of a character that I can think of. It captures the magic and the aspects of who Beloved is, or might have been, or could be.”
While Grand Canyon and Beloved utilized rather conventional editing techniques, for E.T., Littleton’s material was based solely on the performance of Spielberg’s space creature. “This was before CGI,” she related. “We had a little man who was dressed in a suit. We had just the top torso with the eyes. Then there was a mime artist who did all the hand work. They were constantly trying to do human-like things, like the puffing of the cheeks and eyeballs bulging and opening. If the puppet worked in the shot, that’s what we were going to use. “
Littleton said that Spielberg understood that the entire film’s success rested upon the audience’s first reaction to E.T. “We only previewed it once, in Houston,” she recalled. “Just before he sat down, Steven said, ‘Well, when they first see the puppet, if they discover it’s plastic, I’m outta here. If we can hang them in the first scene, we’ll be okay.’”
The pacing and anticipation in the revealing of the alien paid off, she continued, adding, “The first time the ball came rolling out of the potting shed, everybody said, ‘Whoa!’ People were hooked.”
Littleton concluded the evening by discussing several methods of her personal editing process. When she prepares for an upcoming project, the editor will read through the script in one sitting and make notations in the margins. “Not a critique, just my impressions as a reader,” she said. “Several months down the line, when I’m feeling out of touch with the material, I’ll read it again and see my initial reactions. And that will bring back that state of mind.”
 Carol Littleton, second from left, with, from left, Josh Apter, head of Manhattan Edit Workshop, East Coast Field Representative Annie Ballard and Guild Second Vice President Martin Levenstein. Photo by John Clifford |
Littleton’s ongoing relationship with Kasdan allowed her to develop a technique by which she breaks a film down into its basic structure in order to identify areas that are running long or in need of more attention. “If you have the luxury of time, just do a bare-bones version, where you don’t think about structure, don’t think about introduction of characters, and don’t think about the narrative line as much as how quickly the story can be told and not lose anything. We learn what works, what doesn’t. What has to be milked, what has to be sped up.”
Several times during her talk, Littleton remarked on the deliberate pacing in her work, explaining that even these clips, some less than a decade old, might seem “slow” by today’s standards. As a student of film history—she consulted on the restoration of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924)—Littleton noted that we have to acknowledge the trends of current filmmaking, but also incorporate the historical successes of the medium.
“The first question you get on a preview card is, ‘Did it drag anywhere for you?’” she said. “I hate that question. Pace is not about when a movie drags, it’s when it’s working. In fact, the place where the focus group thinks the film is falling apart is actually three scenes before. Something wasn’t set up right, so they’re bored.”
Littleton charged her audience to remember that the editor must ultimately take on the same mantle as the writer: “When you’re working on your first cut, explore the stuff that speaks to you, and do it the way you feel it needs to be done; you can always do it another way.
“But if you don’t satisfy the elements [of theme, character and place] when you’re doing it, you might not find the strongest film that can be told,” she continued. “The script is just a blueprint, and at a certain point—as much as you love it—you’re just going to have to put it aside and say, ‘Now we’re making a movie, and how is this going to work?’”
Adam Wisniewski is a freelance writer who covers television and film technology, consumer electronics and video games. He lives in Brooklyn and can be reached at adam@smob.com.
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