EDITOR'S NOTE
When Hope Was on the Ballot
by Tomm Carroll
 Tomm Carroll |
Don’t vote. It only encourages them,” Gore Vidal, the novelist, essayist, playwright and provocateur, once famously said. While undoubtedly cynical, that statement does have a certain ring of truth to it. And very little has happened on the national political stage in the last six years to make one think otherwise. However, with the imminent—and eminent—mid-term elections looming, we seemingly have a fighting chance of…well, if not necessarily putting our country on the right track, at least taking it off the highway to Hell that it’s currently careening headlong down.
It’s enough to make one long for the days when voting truly was more than the futile exercise of picking between the lesser of two evils (or the evil of two lessers, to quote another quip from Vidal), an era when a congressional or senatorial—or even presidential—aspirant actually offered hope for the nation’s future. The late 1960s was such a time, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) was such a candidate.
Richard Chew, ACE, personally found those years a time of political and spiritual awakening. Consequently, he jumped at the chance to edit writer-director Emilio Estevez’s ambitious Bobby, which opens in November. A smart, multi-storied docudrama, the film depicts the lives of fictionalized characters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968––the day RFK won the California Democratic Presidential Primary but lost his life to an assassin’s bullets in the hotel’s pantry. As socially conscious and politically astute as he is adroit at shaping and pacing films in the editing bay, the multiple-award-winning Chew was also drawn to Bobby because of its many unmistakable parallels to the condition in which this country finds itself today, he tells writer Michael Kunkes in this issue’s cover story.
Kunkes also interviews Michael Minkler, CAS, and Glenn T. Morgan, MPSE, the chief re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor, respectively, on Bobby, about the 1960s soundscape they created for the film, along with sound effects editor Tony Lamberti. Source material for this sonic world included period recordings from archival footage and television broadcasts of Kennedy’s speeches.
Hollywoodland is another period piece, albeit set about a decade earlier. Its editor, Michael Berenbaum, made his return to feature films with that early Fall release, after a successful six years of editing television. But more than time, he is concerned with space—as in where he likes to live and work. Despite the title of his latest picture, that place is most assuredly New York. Writer Adam Wisniewski covers a lecture and presentation that Berenbaum recently gave at the Editors Guild’s office in (surprise) Manhattan.
In a continuation of the numbers game that is the 24/23.98 fps workflow, Debra Kaufman reports on a seminar on the topic that the DR Group held in Los Angeles in September exclusively for Editors Guild members. And, on the sound side of things, Kunkes traveled to San Francisco in early October to attend the AES (Audio Engineering Society) Conference and Exhibition to check out the audio advancements apropos to post-production professionals, and describes the new products from the likes of Digidesign, Dolby, Euphonix, Glyph, Steinberg and other companies.
Thanks, as always, for reading—as the current magazine staff enters into its third year of this publication!