ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
 From left, Stephen Lovejoy, Michael Tronick, Tina Hirsch, Randy Roberts, Bonnie Koehler, Maysie Hoy and Carol Littleton. Photo by Peter Zakhary/Tilt Photo |
First Cuts
EditFest Panels Discuss the Craft
Compiled by Michael Kunkes
Back in August, the American Cinema Editors staged the first EditFest at Universal Studios. In this comprehensive event (co-sponsored by the Editors Guild and Avid), more than two dozen of the profession’s current and rising stars fanned out over four separate panels to show clips, share reminiscences, discuss the creative impact and business of editing, and offer career advice to a combined and eager audience of students and working pros. Following are some of the highlights of those panels.
How I Became an Editor
Moderator: Randy Roberts, A.C.E. (Producer, Law &
Order SVU); panelists: Michael Tronick, A.C.E. (Hairspray,
Mr. & Mrs. Smith); Stephen Lovejoy, A.C.E. (Eureka,
Our America); Bonnie Koehler, A.C.E. (In Plain Sight,
House); Tina Hirsch, A.C.E. (The West Wing, Gremlins);
Maysie Hoy, A.C.E. (The Joy Luck Club, Why Did I Get
Married); Carol Littleton, A.C.E. (Margot at the
Wedding, E.T.)
Roberts: I got my big break on a Dustin Hoffman movie called Straight Time. The editor and the director left the film and left me, the second editor, sitting there with Dustin Hoffman. I was telling him, “No, you can’t cut straight in; you have to come around,” and he’s going, “Okay, Okay.” So he’s on the phone with producer Bob Evans and tells him, “The picture’s going great; here, ask Randy.” Then Dustin takes the phone back and says, “Hire this kid for your next movie,” and he did. That’s how it goes in this town. You can be in the right place at the right time, but you better know what you’re going to do. The best advice I can give is to know how to tell a story. Avid is just a tool; I always say that if you give an editor some pieces of film, a light box, a pair of scissors and some tape, he will give you a movie. It’s all a mental process.
Lovejoy: I had done a student film at Loyola, and after college I got a meeting with Lew Wasserman at Universal and was a little full of myself. In the meeting, I told Wasserman I had made this film, and he yelled at me, “We don’t give a f*ck about your damn film,” and I went home and said, “I’m dead.” The next day, I got a call to come work in the editorial department at the studio because, they said, I had impeccable manners, sat up straight and looked people in the eye. I teach film editing in Santa Monica, and I am always telling my students that social skills really count and you have to be able to tell your own story. You learn the raw materials of storytelling just from living your own life.
Tronick: I was working for an industrial filmmaker making films for Chrysler. I would watch the editors make sense of all this chaos on the set. There was such an order to it and it was really appealing. One of these editors was Dan Carlin, Sr., and I worked for him out of his garage on Sam Pekinpah’s The Killer Elite. I went on to become a music editor on some very good films such as All that Jazz, Star 80 and 48 Hours, and I never wanted to be a picture editor; they knew all about labs and tech stuff and understood the studio politics, and I was just in awe. Then I started cutting picture on musical sequences for an editor named John Wright, and soon I was on features like Streets of Fire and Beverly Hills Cop. We all got where we are through different paths, so make the best out of every opportunity. If you’re making coffee, make the best pot of coffee you can; work hard and be eager and serious.
Hirsch: In 1969, I was in New York working on educational and corporate films, when one day I got a call asking if I wanted to be an assistant on this documentary that was shot upstate in Woodstock. Thelma Schoonmaker interviewed me and asked if I would prefer to work on the documentary or music portion. Of course, I went for the documentary, and I was hired as her assistant. The assistants worked in three shifts, 24 hours a day, synching dailies. There were no slates, no clappers and it all had to be lip synched. Well, I learned how to read lips when I was very young, and this turned out to be a great skill to have and they put me in charge of all of that. Not only that, I did the most perfect leaders with gorgeous handwriting. Then, when we had our eight-hour first cut, we moved the film to LA and thought I was in heaven!
Koehler: Like Tina, I was great at organization and because I had worked for architects, my printing was exquisite. One day, Richard Chew saw my labeling on the film boxes and he put me on a movie no one thought would get made called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I prided myself on being a perfect assistant. I would stand behind Richard and Milos Forman at the trim bins, reading their minds and handing them the trims knowing exactly what Milos would want next. They were so into what they were doing that they didn’t realize what a miraculous thing was being done by handing them exactly what they needed, because I was rehearsing every cut in my mind. Later, I was in charge of coding for Star Wars and worked a lot for George Lucas because I knew how to be very quiet. But I didn’t think anyone was going to want to watch this children’s movie!
Hoy: Actually, I started out as a Seattle whore! I had always wanted to be an actress, though in Vancouver’s Chinatown, it probably would have been easier to become an astronaut. I got cast in Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (and acted in 3 Women and A Wedding as well), was hired on Nashville because I could sew, and became part of this big repertory company and was hired as an apprentice, then took eight years off to raise a family. Years later, Altman hired me on The Player. He had a scene he couldn’t figure out; it was the museum scene where all these celebrities were arriving, but they had shot it wrong and all you saw was the backs of their heads. I looked at it and said, “What if we do it like an “Entertainment Tonight” segment, jump cut it and put some ADR underneath ? Altman runs out and says, “I have this great idea, we’re going to cut it like ET!”
Littleton: I had studied the oboe and was at UCLA studying literature when I met this kid named John Bailey who was going to graduate school at USC to study film. I said, “Oh, that’s interesting. People actually study that?” I hung around USC and realized that what he and his friends were doing was far more interesting; I wandered into the editing room one day and was dumbstruck. Later, I worked in advertising for an editor who put me to work building his sound effects library. One day, he gives me this documentary he was not going to finish because the filmmakers owed him too much money. He told me to just go do it, that this was the way to learn. I worked on that film nights and weekends and couldn’t believe how much fun I was having. Lo and behold, the movie sold and I asked what I could do next. That was my film school. And cinematographer John Bailey became my husband. We have the best jobs in the business; not only are we on the inside of the story, but all the skills I thought I would never use, like making oboe reeds, somehow add up and become important in the cutting room.
 From left, Stephen Lovejoy, Michael Tronick, Tina Hirsch, Randy Roberts, Bonnie Koehler, Maysie Hoy and Carol Littleton. Photo by Peter Zakhary/Tilt Photo |
Blockbuster/Special Effects Editing
Moderator: Alan Heim, A.C.E. (All That Jazz, The Notebook);
panelists: Rick Shaine, A.C.E. (The Incredible Hulk);
Dan Lebental, A.C.E. (Iron Man); Mark Helfrich,
A.C.E. (X-Men 3, Rush Hour); Mark Goldblatt, A.C.E.
(The Terminator, Terminator 2, X-Men 3)
Heim: At what point in the process do you get involved?
Lebental: I was on Iron Man for six months before principal photography started. In some cases, the studio threw out the previz material and usually these scenes were the disasters that we would face later. It’s such a changing world for editors on special effects films because while it’s great that we are sitting down with these artists and helping them design scenes, it means that we are no longer objective; we are participants in what is going to be filmed later––which is something I have mixed feelings about. I am sometimes uncomfortable not having a “catcher” at the end to say, “I don’t care what you are editing, this is what we should be doing.” It’s putting the cart before the horse in terms of the workflow, but that’s all part of the evolution of what we do.
Shaine: I came on The Incredible Hulk after shooting already started, and the first thing I was told was that the director didn’t like the previz. All I had were plates and no real actors to work with, so it because a very complicated process to get to the end. However, as we went, he did give me enough input on what he did like for me to get a sense of what shots he wanted, and what order things should go in. The more cuts he was able to see, the more he could hone in on what he wanted. An editor on these films has to develop his own capacity to previzualize things, and for me, developing these new animation skills has been great; it’s much better to pre-plan as much of the movie as you can.
Heim: What films have influenced you most?
Goldblatt: I must have watched the Odessa sequence in The Battlehip Potemkin a thousand times. I just couldn’t believe how profound an experience it was. As I got older, I thought that George Tomasini’s work for Hitchcock was amazing; the way he was able to play shots off each other to create suspense, wring your neck, grab the audience and then hit you on the head at just the right time to provide a revelation. And for action, Don Siegel’s movies [who was an editor himself before becoming a director], plus the work of John Glen and Peter Hunt, two English editors who worked on the early James Bond films.
Helfrich: For me, The French Connection––so influential, so gripping and visceral––done by Jerry Greenberg with whom I was fortunate enough to work later. I also loved the Blind Swordsman and Jackie Chan films. I was a big fan of Jackie’s before I got to edit Rush Hour; by that time, I knew his style and it turned out to be a great union. The first movie I edited was Revenge of the Ninja, so I got to hone my skills on a very similar kind of film.
Heim: How has working on these movies changed?
Goldblatt: When I was starting out, I did a movie called Humanoids from the Deep, and in the end scene, the heroine stabs the creature. I was cutting on a Moviola, where you would invariably lose frames. I ran the picture and realized I had put the wrong pieces together and I got this strobe effect that looked great and stayed in the film, so part of editing is being able to recognize the accidents that work. But today, the biggest mistake you can make on a visual effects movie is a lack of preparation up front. We can’t make this stuff up on the set.
Animation Editing
Moderator: Tom Atkin (co-director, Filmmaker’s Festival);
panelists: Paul Cihocki, (post supervisor,WALL-E, Finding
Nemo); Axel Geddes (WALL-E); Clare
Knight (Kung Fu Panda); Jim Stewart, A.C.E.
(Monsters, Inc.); John Carnochan, A.C.E. (The
Simpsons Movie, Ice Age, The Little Mermaid)
Atkin: What is the overall interaction of the editor with the animation team?
Stewart: It can get very frustrating in the middle of the film. A lot of things are being rewritten but a lot is also in production. Once that animation machine gets going, it’s just a big juggernaut coming at you all through storyboard, layout, editing and animation. It’s the hub of everything. The layout process is so important in computer animation, because that’s where you make the movie. People don’t realize all the things editors do in this process; they think all those shots are just given to us. But it’s in that process where we pick out the cut points to the next shot, and you have to pay attention to every little detail down the line to make sure none of your timings get lost. But really, it all starts with sound. You create performances through the recorded dialogue, then use effects and music to create the mood and timing of a sequence. Everything else after that follows that timing.
Knight: On Kung Fu Panda, I was very involved in the story process and helping the animators to choreograph. The music and sound completely informed our choices for the entire movie. We went for a more Asian sound and we also got a lot of the comedy from the music. We were all going wild with the editing and pacing possibilities and the director just wanted to make things fatter and fatter. I had to do some “naughty” editing where I said that I had just taken a few frames out when it was actually a few shots, and it wasn’t noticed. But it did give us the correct pace, and I feel my job is to be the caretaker of the pace of the entire movie and not get too freaked out by one sequence that is really cute and can get too fat and bring down the movie.
Comedy Editing
Moderator: Stephen Rasch, A.C.E. (Curb Your Enthusiasm);
panelists: Kevin Tent, A.C.E. (Sideways, Election);
Jeff Gourson (Big Daddy); Dana Glauberman,
A.C.E. (Juno, Thank You for Smoking); Janet Ashikaga,
A.C.E. (Seinfeld, My Name is Earl); Peck Prior (Meet
the Spartans, Uncle Buck); Craig Alpert (Pineapple
Express, Knocked Up)
Rasch: As an editor, how does your own “laugh meter” work?
Tent: What makes Sideways so funny is that the characters are so clearly drawn. For example, the character of Jack is prone throughout the movie to make these vulgar statements, and when we first previewed the movie, the audience loved that. We also realized that if we ended a scene with one of his vulgar statements, the audience went crazy. Editorially speaking, we were really working to not have too many of those moments.
Prior: When it came to John Hughes’s films, the job was always to find the movie within the movie, because he shot so much film. I mean, Uncle Buck was a movie about the uncle who comes to take care of the kids, and the script is 145 pages; the first cut was four and a half hours long. For John, it was too hard to get out of a scene so he just kept on writing. But if you have too much fun stuff, it can dissipate some of the really bigger jokes. You want to have room between the jokes so you can invest yourself in the characters and the story.
Ashikaga: I can honestly say that Larry David is the first genius I ever worked with. One time in the Seinfeld cutting room I turned to him and said, “Why is that funny?” He would literally break down for me every element of a scene. He has tremendous respect for his actors, and one of the things he told me was not to let someone step on someone else’s moment. With Larry, I started to realize that comedy is a phenomenal art form. Everything in life was open to him and I realized that the difference between comedy and drama is that in comedy, all of life is absurd, and in drama, you see life as tragic; it’s all about how you twist your world. As an editor, because you have established these characters in a very real way, you can then allow them to be ridiculous or absurd.
Gourson: Cutting comedy is a lot harder than drama, because comedy requires a lot more timing. In an action film, you can get away with a lot of quick cuts to get around problems, but in comedy, you have to make sure the moment is there for the laughter. If it isn’t, you’re just swinging and missing. The reward for me is when I sit in a preview audience and there’s a joke coming up and you think, “I hope they laugh,” and they do, it’s such a relief. Of course, when they don’t laugh, you experience that as well––but the great thing about editing is that you can go back and fix it.
Glauberman: I’ve worked with some great people over the years. As an assistant, I worked a lot for Sheldon Kahn and Wendy Brickmont, and recently as a full editor with Jason Reitman. You have to be prepared to sit in the room with these people for many hours a day and spend more time with them than you do with family. You have to always remember to have a good time, love what you’re doing, and laugh your way through the day.
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.