NEWS

CUTTING REMARKS
Out of the Editing Room and onto the Academy's Stage by Michael Kunkes

As an art form, nothing has changed the way cinema is perceived emotionally and intellectually more than the editorial process." With that, moderator Randy Haberkamp the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' (AMPAS) director of educational programs and special projects, opened "Cutting to the Chase: The Continuous Evolution of Motion Picture Editing," a four-week seminar series held at AMPAS' Linwood Dunn Theatre in Hollywood this fall. The sessions focused on the art of film editing and involved several leading film editors and their collaborators. Each week had its own unique theme.

Editing Interface--The Editor/Director Relationship

Two teams of editors and directors-- Bruce Green, ACE, and Garry Marshall, and Bruce Cannon, ACE, and John Singleton-celebrated their close working relationships by showing clips from the films of which they were particularly proud, but which were buried by their respective studios: Marshall's romantic comedy The Other Sister (1999) and Singleton's period drama Rosewood (1997).

"I usually choose my projects based on who the director is and if he's someone I'd want to spend a lot of time with," Green said. "Garry is collaborative and he's funny—and I'm in a good mood every night when I come home. That's what is most important to me." Marshall added that he and Green share a close camaraderie in the cutting room. "We'll sit, we'll talk, we watch the girls go by, and at 5:00 p.m. I say, `Hell, I'm going home; you stay here and do the work.'"

Waxing sort of serious, Marshall added, "Emotion is put into everything I do. If you get the character right and the emotions right, you get a lot of free laughs." "Garry and I are cut from the same cloth of just wanting to entertain," Green added. "I tend not to over-cut films for jokes. We're not interested in boring people."

The pair showed a clip from Runaway Bride (1999), and explained that the electricity between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts was so intense on that particular take that the filmmakers had to make a difficult choice. The scene was shot with two handheld cameras--and one mistakenly wound up filming the other behind the actors. "If you look at the scene closely, you can see the footage counter from the other camera go by in the dark," Marshall pointed out. "However, Bruce and I both understand about character, and it was such an emotional scene, you don't even notice."

"When I work with Garry, I become the point person for post--especially for sound. I will work with the sound editor, music supervisor, and even the composer," Green said.

And Marshall feels that his and Green's talents balance each other perfectly. "Of all the people in the business, I am probably the one most comfortable inside the box. I once went outside the box and I hurt myself. So Bruce takes care of that; he's a little more out there."

Cannon virtually echoed one of Marshall's comments. "Emotion, emotion, emotion," he said. "All of John's films, from Boyz n the Hood (1991) to the present, are about character and emotion. And there's a lot of comedy in his films; they are always about the juxtaposition of those two things and making sure they roll into each other on the screen without fighting each other. That's something we really work on when we are cutting." "Bruce is an enormous help to me because when it gets to the point of actually cutting the movie, I am usually exhausted and spent," said Singleton. "Fortunately, I try to cut as I shoot. I don't shoot a lot of different angles and then figure out what to do with it. I pretty much know right at the beginning how I want it to look."

Singleton and Cannon also screened the climactic scene from their first collaboration, Boyz, in which the death scene was filmed largely from above. "Bruce will sometimes question why I shoot from a certain angle, as in that overhead shot," Singleton revealed. "But you don't really know sometimes why you do something until the film speaks to you. After seven films together, Bruce and I have learned to keep an open mind."

Anatomy of a Cut

Four editors—Alan Heim, ACE; Neil Travis, ACE; Michael Tronick, ACE; and Anne V. Coates, ACE—all picked specific scenes from one of their films to discuss. Heim presented a favorite scene from Sidney Lumet's Network (1976), for which he received an Oscar nomination. With its plotlines about corporate oligarchy and malfeasance, news as tawdry entertainment, TV terrorists and Arabian oil problems, this is one of the most prescient films of all time. Heim told the story about how the seven-minute scene—which earned Beatrice Straight her Best Supporting Actress Oscar—was almost cut from the film.

In the original preview, the scene in which William Holden confesses his affair with Faye Dunaway to his wife (Straight) immediately preceded a long scene of an idyllic weekend tryst between Holden and Dunaway. "The general feeling was that the scene between Holden and his wife slowed down the picture and should be cut," Heim recalled. "But I knew we had a great love scene for older people, and we decided instead to simply switch the scenes. Suddenly, it made her into a sympathetic character."

Heim learned a lot from working with Lumet on the film. "Sidney taught me how to read performances, how to make quick decisions, and how to live with those decisions," he revealed. "I figured Network was going to be nominated for awards because there were several great performances in it, but I was amazed that I was nominated. I don't think I've ever had a more comfortable experience on a film."

Travis selected the buffalo hunt scene from Dances with Wolves (1990), not because it was it was his favorite, but because of the funny stories associated with it. "Most of my favorite scenes are actor-, not buffalo-driven," he joked. "Director Kevin Costner was working with a guy who owned the largest private herd in the country. He told the crew that buffalo will only run into the wind. But of course, film crews know better than anyone else, and they placed seven cameras wherever they wanted.

So when they called action, the buffalo came over this ridge, running in all different directions—and none of them passed in front of a camera. We even had a `buff-cam' placed in the ground, for underneath shots, and I ended up with 1,000 feet of a blade of grass."

They got it right the next day, Travis revealed. "But we didn't have a buffalo hunt, we had a buffalo chase; there were no buffalo falling down," he added. "It was all very slow and pastoral compared to today's action scenes. Every film deserves its own rhythm, and one of my pet peeves with so called modern approaches to editing is the tendency to cut an action sequence so that everything is so close that you really can't tell what the hell is happening. You're not really seeing anything that is advancing the story."

On Doug Limon's Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Tronick had his own chance to make a difference on an action sequence early on. "I was called into a meeting with Doug and the producers. Though I was trying to keep a low profile, I was into three weeks of dailies on an action sequence that was being shot on a set duplicating the Rocky Mountains, and I was concerned about it," he said. "The studio head asked me if I thought this was going to be a kick-ass action sequence and I said, `No,' and ultimately the sequence ended up being shot in the desert instead.

"There are moments when you just have to speak what's in your gut, and I wanted to avoid the `stupid summer action movie syndrome' and keep coming back to Brad and Angie's relationship, where I saw the spine of the story," he added. There must have been 200 versions of each reel, but I always kept my first editor's cut in the bin and I always referred to it. It was my anchor and my guide through 19 months."

"David Lean always talked about having the courage of your convictions," said Coates, speaking of the director of one of the most famous films she edited, of Lawrence of Arabia (1962). "He spoke about the courage to cut each scene in the way you thought was right. "Sometimes, I would suggest something to him and he would say, `That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.' But two or three days later, he would come back and say that what we had talked about gave him an idea—so you've got to dare to say what you believe and stick to it." Coates also showed a steamy love scene between George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez from Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998) that was originally shot as two separate scenes. "I cut the two scenes separately, because that's the way they were in the script," recalls Coates. "Then Steven and I started experimenting, and had the idea of putting them together to make one sequence that builds and builds into a very complex and passionate scene. The way they were cut together was almost like serving the appetizer and the main course together."

Cultural and Technological Influences on Editing Style

Five veteran editors—Michael Jablow, ACE; Lynzee Klingman, ACE; Richard Chew, ACE; Richard Marks, ACE; and Donn Cambern, ACE—addressed the influence of culture and technology on their own work. Film met reality in a key oval office scene presented by Jablow from Rod Lurie's The Contender (2000), in which a vice-presidential candidate, played by Joan Allen, is smeared by allegations of highly inappropriate behavior. Coming at the end of the Clinton presidency, the film faced a topical ethical dilemma head- on. "Rod hates movies that look conventional, with a master, medium close-up, over-the-shoulder and close-up," Jablow said. "He also feels just as strongly that a politician's personal life is private. In that scene, I held the master until way in the back of the scene and jumped into a close-up immediately—one of a lot of extreme choices we made on that film."

Two other editors, Klingman and Chew, shared documentary roots as a major influence on their careers. "It's just the best way to enter the business," declared Klingman, who showed an emotional scene from Brad Silberling's City of Angels (1998). "The editor is creating the story, the character development and the beginning, middle and end. And you have to make it work, because you can't go back, reshoot and get more coverage."

Discussing the switch to nonlinear editing, Klingman confessed, "Honestly, working with film was just a lot harder physically; digital is a lot more fun. No more sending out for dupes; if you don't like something, you just undo it."

Chew screened a clip from I Am Sam, co-writer and director Jessie Nelson's moving drama about a mentally challenged father. "I started as a cameraman, and my influences were great documentarians such as DA Pennebaker and Richard Leacock. I never had any ambition to work in narrative features," confessed the co-editor of Star Wars. "I Am Sam came along and Jessie made the choice to shoot the film in a rough documentary fashion. She also cast Sean Penn, an actor who with every take explores his character in a way that goes in a completely different direction. "It was a challenge to piece this together because the camera was moving so much, but you want to include a lot of that movement because it creates a feeling of spontaneity," Chew continued. "Jessie told me, `You're not part of an orchestra; you're a jazz musician—ust go out there and blow.'"

Marks and Cambern both showed clips from films that are today considered iconic. Marks screened the Dolong Bridge scene from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), a nightmarish, drug-induced cacophony of shadows and noise. "Culturally, Apocalypse was the first attempt to recognize war as a personal experience and entangle it with a '60s and '70s sensibility," he said. "A war movie with this kind of legato pace could never be made today. We shot 1.5 million feet of film—90 percent of the dialogue had to be rerecorded--and we spent three years editing. But I think we made a few good choices."

Cambern recalled his experience cutting the LSD trip sequence near the end of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969). "Peter Fonda, Dennis and a soundman went to New Orleans in a completely stoned state and shot 25,000 feet of 16mm film," Cambern recalled. "But there was something there in the midst of all that cannabis, and it became my job to find it." Cambern was a music editor for 15 years and also has a degree in music. He called upon that knowledge to break down the mass of film. "It was the last piece I cut in after the movie was done," he said. "I just kept looking at these reels and reels, and didn't try to cut it at all, just get familiar with it. Once I understood the form I was after, it was a matter of getting in there and digging."

The Editing Team

The seminar's final session covered collaborations between different editing teams: Joel Cox, ACE, with sound editor Alan Robert Murray; Lisa Zeno Churgin, ACE, and her music editor Lise Richardson; and Kent Beyda, ACE, paired with animator Leon Joosen.

Cox and Murray, taking a break from editing Clint Eastwood's Flags Of Our Fathers, screened the "Kill Little Bill" climax of Unforgiven (1992), for which Cox won an Oscar. Afterwards, they talked about the director's strict reliance on production sound and his disdain for automatic dialogue replacement (ADR).

"Ninety percent of the dialogue in Unforgiven goes back to the original tracks," Cox explained. "Looping rooms are not alive. They are sterile and soundproof, and Clint is adamant that he is not going to antiseptisize his film so that someone in the back of the theatre can hear a word."

The pair then showed "The Punch," the key moment from Million Dollar Baby (2004). "We wanted to keep this movie realistic, and Alan and I talked about how all your sensory organs would convulse from a punch like this and what you would hear in your head," Cox explained. So Alan created sounds for things that shouldn't have sound, and things you'd expect to hear, you didn't. It was our interpretation of what the senses shutting down in the brain should sound like."

"Starting with Foley, we strove to make the sound as realistic as possible," added Murray. "Then in the mix, we tried to make sure it was even more realistic. Although we wanted the audience to feel the punch, we didn't want it to be overdone, either. But seldom has a screen punch done what this one has."

In a departure, Churgin and Richardson brought along a work in progress in the form of two scenes from Tony Goldwyn's The Last Kiss, currently in post. To demonstrate the importance of choice in music editing, both clips were shown with several different pieces of temp music, each varying the mood of the scene. "Music is becoming more and more important for previews, and people are beginning to make major decisions based on temp scores," Churgin said. "I generally put music in with my first cut. Some films are easier than others, but this one was difficult because Tony really has an ear that's more purely musical than the traditional movie score-oriented. This was a very emotional film with a lot of levels to work on.

"I can do an adequate job with music," Churgin continued. "But Lise is a superb music editor and I like having her input sooner rather than later, because people then make major decisions based on her temp score." Richardson added, "When I started editing, we didn't do temp on every show, but it really helps in a lot of ways to shape what you are trying to say in a film early on--to refocus the emotional beats. It's a completely subjective thing."

Temp tracks can also create a problem that Richardson calls "Temp Love." "It's a syndrome where everyone falls so in love with the temp track that the composer feels forced to write something that's almost exactly the same. If you put Aaron Copeland on the temp track, suddenly everything sounds like Copeland."

The evening concluded with Beyda and Joosen showing scenes from Raja Gosnell's live action/animated Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004) and talking about the restrictions of marrying computer-generated animated characters to live actors and the problems and opportunities it creates. "In animation, you have upwards of 40 people who have to do the same thing for one character--and still make it look like one personality, Beyda said. "One of the big challenges on a film like this is that the live action is cut. Then it's up to those 40 people to make it all flow like a single actor and maintain a sense of reality."

Marks may have been voicing the thoughts of many participants--let alone suggesting the theme for a whole new seminar series—when he mused aloud, "I often wonder what would happen in five, ten or even 20 years from the time we cut a film.if we were able to go back to the original material and re-edit it?

How would it change, and what would we do differently? Wouldn't that be a fascinating experience?" And the best advice on maintaining a career in editing actually came from director Marshall: "Get a cutting room with a window, because it's nice to look out and see."

Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.

The “Cutting to the Chase” event was produced by Randy Haberkamp, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ director of educational programs and special projects, and Sharon Smith Holley, Assistant Editor member of the Editors Guild. Historical editing equipment for the Academy’s lobby display was supplied by Joel Marshall with Atomic Film Company. A DVD set of the series has been donated to the Guild and will be screened for New York Guild members in the near future.

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