stay for the credits

September 29th
14:39

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The Moviola Mavens and the Moguls: Three Pioneering Women Editors Who Had the Respect of Early Hollywood's Power-Brokers

Great article on the important female editors of early cinema: Margaret Booth (started as D.W. Griffith’s negative cutter and patcher), Barbara McLean (nominated for All About Eve) , and Anne Bauchens (the first woman to win an Academy Award for Editing for Cecil B. De Mille’s North West Mounted Police (1940).

I wish they could have included Dorothy Spencer who edited John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942).

14:17

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"I choose to work with nice people because life is short. There are some famous directors who have offered me work but who are known to be extremely unpleasant. I politely said no: I like to enjoy myself."

—

film editor, Anne V. Coates.

One of my favorite love scenes of hers is in Out of Sight. I transcribed an editing film I watched in school in which Coates explains her editing choices for the scene. You can read it and watch the video here.

14:04

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"You have to be the kind of person who can stand behind the director. The ego goes away and it’s all about creating his vision for him."

— film editor Tina Hirsch (The West Wing). Hirsch became the first female president of the American Cinema Editors society in 2000.

13:54

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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

13:45

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Film editor Dede Allen worked her way up at Columbia Pictures, first starting as a messenger, then as a sound librarian, and up to assistant film editor. She was mentored by director Robert Wise, who had edited Citizen Kane. After 16 years working in the film industry, she cut her first important feature, Odds Against Tomorrow (1959).

She’s known for cutting The Hustler (1961), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Wonder Boys (2000), among others.

13:22

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"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.