stay for the credits

February 22nd
18:33

13 notes

“We all referred to Verna Fields [editor of Jaws] as Mother Cutter. She was very earthy, very maternal. She cut her films at her house, at her pool house, in the San Fernando Valley, and it was a very haimish kind of workplace..All of our disagreements happened with that darn shark! Verna was always in favor of less to be more. And I was trying to squeeze in that one more—because it took me DAYS to get that one shot! So I’m going back to, I’m on a barge for two days trying to get the shark to look real, and the sad fact was that the shark would only look real in 36 frames and not 38 frames. And that 2 frame difference was the difference between something really scary, and something that looked like a great white floating turd.” - Steven Spielberg.

September 29th
13:54

5 notes

Cutting For Impact: A Conversation With Verna Fields

A great read for anyone interested in editing.

There’s a feeling of movement in telling a story, and there is a flow. I think the rhythm, to a certain extent, comes from the direction and what’s on the film, but when you’re running it, you kind of have a feeling that now is the time to cut.

I don’t know how else to say it. It’s a feeling you get, and there’s no way to really instill it. A lot of people have started cutting, and one of the early exercises that I recommend to these people is to get a lot of footage and cut to music. I don’t mean the beat, necessarily, but you’ll get what I mean by rhythm, because what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing will create a rhythm, and then you’ll see it. - Verna Fields

13:22

22 notes

Source

"Jaws is still one of my favorite movies. I didn’t know I could be manipulated like that—so wittily, so teasingly, in a way that made me laugh at my own fear. (The only Hitchcock film I’d seen in a theater was Frenzy, which was too sick to appreciate in the same vein.) What clinched it was that unbelievably brilliant sequence that begins with a high-angle shot of Roy Scheider dropping fish entrails in the water as shark bait. He was resentful; he said to Shaw and Dreyfuss, “Why don’t you guys come down here and shovel some of this shit?” And we started to laugh—he said “shit!” heh-heh—and then the head of the shark appeared in the water (no music, no foreshadowing), and I felt my mind detach from my body and my laugh turn into a shriek and merge into the collective shriek of everyone in that huge theater. I literally shook for the rest of the movie: Every cut by the late Verna Fields had me poised to leap out of my seat."

— David Edelstein.