A long time ago in a cut.., p.21
A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away, page 21
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When the picture was completed, we screened the finished film for the cast and crew. Harrison was there. He had shot a couple of other films in the interim, neither of which did well at the box office. His original contract with George was only for two films, and I had heard that he was holding out for more money on the third. I had also heard that George had threatened that if Harrison didn’t agree to appear in the next picture, he would carry around the prop of Han Solo frozen in the carbonite block throughout the whole film and then blow it up in the final reel. When I saw Harrison at the screening, I asked him, “Are you going to be in the next one?”
“You think I have a career without these guys?” he replied. He had landed the part of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark by then and was referring to both Lucas and Spielberg.
Many years later, at George’s fiftieth birthday party, I saw Harrison again. I thanked him for the trailer money he got for me. He hadn’t remembered. Then I told him how happy I was for him, the way his career had turned out.
“Imagine how I feel!” he answered.
We also screened Empire for the studio employees on the 20th Century Fox lot, in the same room where we had mixed King of the Gypsies. The biggest cheer from the audience came at the start, for the 20th Century Fox logo.
As the project was wrapping up, Larry Kasdan offered me Body Heat, his first film as a director, but I wanted to go home to New York and I turned him down. I felt that I would be able to have my pick of projects now that I was an Oscar winner. This was not the case. Nor would it be the last time I turned down what proved to be a good picture.
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The following year, I was stunned when the Oscar nominations were announced. Empire received only three nominations—for sound, production design, and score—and only sound won. The VFX guys received a special achievement award. The editing nominations went to Fame, The Elephant Man, Coal Miner’s Daughter, The Competition, and Raging Bull, which won. I have no problem with that, as it is a brilliant editing job. But, still young, I expected the Academy to recognize my work. I was very disappointed, but this experience led me to understand that in the long run, people don’t remember awards or nominations. It’s the work that matters.
* * *
I never worked for George again. When it came time to begin preproduction for The Revenge of the Jedi, before “Revenge” was revised to “Return,” I got a call from Gary Kurtz telling me that George had hired a British director, Richard Marquand, out of anger at the Directors Guild of America. When the guild screened Empire, they claimed that the credits on the film were a violation of DGA rules and fined George $50,000. The violation was that the director’s name was at the end of the film; because George wanted a consistent look to the titles, LucasFilm was at the beginning. To the DGA this put the producer’s name at the start, which was a no-no. Kersh hadn’t minded at all. “When my name comes on, everyone applauds!”
The next day, the Writers Guild fined George too. He would neither forget nor forgive, which is how Marquand got the job on Jedi. Of the hundreds of crew members who work on films of this size, Marquand was allowed to hire only two: his cinematographer and his editor. I was out of luck and once again disappointed. Looking back, though, I respect what Marquand did. Loyalty is too rare in Hollywood.
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When I am asked what it was like living through those few years that so deeply influenced my life and reputation, this is what I tell people: It was as if I were walking along, and a flying saucer landed near me. A hatch opened, and George stuck his head out. “Want to go for a spin?” he asked.
I got in and went for a terrific ride. Then the saucer landed again. I got out. George smiled, waved, and took off again.
It was the most fabulous adventure of my life.
12
Blow Out
BACK IN NEW YORK IN 1980, Brian De Palma was preparing to direct Personal Effects. Our sound editor from Phantom of the Paradise had inspired him to write the script. Brian was intrigued by the idea of someone going around with a tape recorder, recording sounds. He came up with a plot similar to that in Antonioni’s celebrated film Blow-Up, in which a photographer accidentally gets a shot of what he believes to be a murder. In this case, it was the sound of a gun shooting out the tires of a car, causing a fatal accident. I didn’t suspect it would one day become a bigger cult hit than Antonioni’s film.
George Litto was producing again, a prospect that left me less than thrilled. Once again, George wasn’t happy with the title, and this time he prevailed. The picture was retitled Blow Out. I thought this was unwise, since film critics had heaped accusations of plagiarism on Brian ever since Sisters, and this simply called attention to the similarities with Antonioni’s film classic.
Nancy Allen, Brian’s wife, was cast as Sally, the female lead opposite John Travolta, who played Jack Terry. I read the script and thought it needed rewriting. In particular, there was a chase through the subway system in which Jack tracks Sally and the killer, Burke (John Lithgow), using a wireless microphone hidden on her body.
It was a great idea, except that I thought the locations should have been chosen by their sounds. In a subway, there is not a lot of distinctive sound to give Travolta, listening on his headset, clues as to where the couple was going. The finale takes place at a bicentennial celebration in Philadelphia, with fireworks. I thought it would have been better if the location had been an amusement park with sounds of a sledgehammer striking a gong, or Ping-Pong playing, or air rifles—unique sounds that would pinpoint locations.
The idea of the surveillance wire was left over from a draft Brian had done for a picture called Prince of the City, which was ultimately directed by Sidney Lumet. Not wanting to waste a perfectly good idea, he lifted the entire scene and used it in Blow Out as a flashback illustrating Jack Terry’s backstory. Jack tells Sally of a tragic incident in his past involving tailing someone wearing a wire. Besides being a good scene, it also sets up the finale of the film.
Brian was not terribly interested in any of my suggestions, and they began shooting in Philadelphia, Brian’s hometown. The great Vilmos Zsigmond was back on board as the DP. In the film, Jack Terry is a sound editor working for a director of schlock horror pictures searching for a more perfect scream. To act his part, John had to know how to use the tools of the trade: splicer, synchronizer, rewinds, and a Moviola. I was recruited to instruct him so he would look authentic.
John came to my cutting room late in the day, and I walked him through how to use the various tools. I showed him how an editor would scrub the sound to find the exact perf where a sound would start, and how to mark the film and sound to put them into sync with each other. He was very polite and friendly and picked it up quickly.
When we left that evening, we boarded the elevator, which was manually operated by a uniformed employee. As we were riding down, the operator started to hyperventilate. “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed. “Is that really you?”
John grinned and said yes.
I thought the guy was going to have a stroke. He stuck out his hand and they shook vigorously. “Oh my God,” the man repeated. “I can’t believe this! This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me!”
I rolled my eyes mentally (I hope). I was embarrassed. When we got outside, John turned to me. “It’s moments like that,” he said in all seriousness, “that make it all worthwhile.”
* * *
Shortly after the Kennedy assassination, when the Zapruder film came to light, it had been considered too shocking for the public to view as a moving image, so Life magazine published the individual frames as still photos. This inspired the scene in Blow Out in which Jack reverses the process. He creates a film by carefully rephotographing on an animation stand the still frames of the assassination printed in a magazine. He then adds to it the sound of the car accident he has recorded. He syncs up the sound by aligning the sound of the splash as the car hits the river with the corresponding frame in his reconstructed film. This leads him to discover the image of the gunshot just before the blowout of the tire.
Among the angles in the dailies was a close-up of the Moviola screen as the film plays forward and back, over and over, as it would while Jack is searching for the precise frame. As I ran the shot, looking for the precise frame where I wanted to cut, I realized that the back-and-forth action on my screen was the same whether I was running my machine forward or backward. This confused me so much that I had to actually look down at my hand to see which way I was running the film.
It is interesting to look at this sequence today, as we had documented for history a work process that is now obsolete. All those tools and methods that were my life’s work for twenty-five years are no more.
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Cutting the picture proved to be problematic. There was a structural flaw in the script: the antagonist didn’t appear for about an hour, resulting in a lack of tension. To redress this, we started moving scenes around, which had a ripple effect. We took a scene and split it in two, separating the parts of the scene and using them in different parts of the film. In doing this, other scenes were dropped so that, ironically, while Brian had intended to make a film about a political conspiracy, the movie turned out to be about a lone assassin.
The climax of the film caused some contention between Brian and me. The scene called for Burke to drag Sally up to a high place overlooking the crowd under a massive fireworks display. This was intercut with shots of Jack fighting his way through the crowd to save her. When Brian saw my cut, he felt I had started intercutting Jack too early in the sequence. He made me recut it, starting Jack later.
When we screened the picture for George Litto, his first note was that Jack was starting too late. So I had to recut it yet again, putting it back the way I had it before. I also had an idea for the end in which Sally survives, but Brian would have none of it.
I learned an important lesson on Blow Out. A director deserves to have an editor who is solidly behind the project. My problems with the script should have made me turn the picture down. I unconsciously brought a negative attitude to the editing of the picture. This brought me into conflict with Brian and damaged our relationship somewhat. I resolved that I would never again accept an assignment only because of the director. I also had to like the script.
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In my career I have had a number of mishaps involving the cutting of the negative for my films, as when the neg cutter miscut the explosion of the Death Star in Star Wars (chapter 8). Or when the splices in Sisters were all made crooked on a misaligned splicer (chapter 5). But the most horrendous negative disaster occurred on Blow Out.
In my very first job as a shipping clerk at Dynamic Films, I learned that you never ever ship anything on Friday. If the shipment should go astray, two days will go by before you discover the loss, which makes recovery that much more difficult. Blow Out was filmed in Philadelphia, so the processing was done in New York, at Technicolor. The studio decided that rather than cut the negative in New York, that would be done on the West Coast, so all the processed film was packaged for shipping to Technicolor Labs in L.A.
Somehow, the shipment went out on a Friday. We were at the mix the following Monday morning when we got a phone call from the lab in L.A. There were four cartons of negative missing, containing footage from four days’ shooting. Apparently, the truck driver who collected the cartons from the lab on Friday had stopped on Fifty-Seventh Street to make another pickup. While he was inside, the truck was broken into and thieves stole the four cartons. They probably didn’t even know what they were stealing.
Brian was beside himself. He went out into the street, digging through trash cans, hoping the thieves had thrown out the cans of film once they saw they hadn’t hijacked a shipment of stereos. Then a call came from the lab in L.A. with more bad news: Some of the four days missing involved the parade scene, in which Jack drives his Jeep through a marching band of Mummers, onto the sidewalk, and through a plate glass window.
The FBI was called in and rewards were posted for the return of the film, no questions asked. But we never recovered the footage. The sequence was reshot at a cost of half a million dollars, covered by insurance. Because the scenes were originally filmed in winter, all the extras had to dress in winter clothing even though the reshoot took place in the summer. In the end, we were able to patch all the “holes” in the film. We finished up, and I took off for a well-deserved vacation.
Blow Out opened in the summer of 1981. I went to see it in the Hamptons, where we had rented a house for the month of August. When Jack gets to Sally too late to save her at the end, the audience actually started booing at the screen. I had never seen such an angry response to a film before. And yet, unpredictably, Blow Out turned out to be one of those early De Palma pictures that survived its initial rejection and is widely admired today.
* * *
Earlier that year, Robert Dalva had called and asked me to edit The Black Stallion Returns. Robert had cut The Black Stallion and had gotten the chance to direct the sequel as a result. The job meant going to Rome for four months, which sounded pretty good to me. Unfortunately, my father had contracted cancer, and when I told him about the offer, he said, “Gee, I hope you don’t take it.”
So I turned Robert down. Although I would have loved spending four months in Rome, my father meant the world to me, and it would have been intolerable to be so far away from him in his final days. I have never regretted the decision.
Ironically, Dad died on September 21, 1981, the day shooting began. I had come back to New York hoping to pursue my career there, armed with an Oscar. But we were now in a recession, when people make fewer movies. There I was, with two children, a golden opportunity to spend four months in Rome gone, and no work.
Then a job turned up out of nowhere. I got a call from George Romero’s producer. They were shooting an anthology film called Creepshow, inspired by horror comic books. Stephen King had written the screenplay, and they wanted me to edit one of the five stories, “The Crate.” I agreed as long as I could work in New York. They were OK with that, but I would have to make a brief trip to Pittsburgh to meet George.
It was winter by now, and my plane landed on a snow-covered runway in Pittsburgh. I was introduced to George, a big, shambling bearded man of great personal warmth. We chatted briefly, and that was that. I headed back to New York the same day.
One day Stephen King came to the cutting room. I was excited to meet him, as I was a big fan of his. The fact that I had edited Carrie, his first novel and the first to be made into a movie, was probably why he wanted to meet me. I have met a number of great artists, and I place Stephen King in the same realm as John Hughes and John Williams, whose creativity is inexhaustible.
We talked about Kubrick’s version of The Shining, which, apart from the spectacular performance by Jack Nicholson, I had some problems with. In particular, Kubrick had made a major change in the ending. In the book, one of the main character’s principal duties is to keep watch on the old hotel’s boiler, whose steam pressure tends to creep upward if left unattended, which is exactly what happens when he starts to go nuts. The book ends with a giant explosion. As I read it, I could imagine the suspense generated by cutting repeatedly back to the steam gauge during Jack’s final murderous rampage.
I mentioned this to King, and he agreed strongly. There are certain conventional elements in these stories that you just shouldn’t mess with. Freezing to death in the snow is a totally different ending, an anticlimax in place of a cathartic blast.
I finished my cut of Creepshow and showed it to Romero and his producers in my cutting room, and we parted company, never to meet again. I was still looking for a real project, but things were dead slow. It was spring 1982.
I didn’t know it then, but Creepshow was my final project as a New York editor.
13
The Black Is Back
ONE OF THE THINGS I LOVE about the movie business is the unexpected phone call that changes your life. It had happened to me with Star Wars, and it happened again that spring. I had been out of work for several months when Robert Dalva called. He wanted to know if I could come out to San Francisco to help on The Black Stallion Returns. The editor he had hired in my place, David Holden, was taking too long, and they needed an extra pair of hands. The cut was still long too. It had started at four hours! I wondered what Holden had been doing in Rome for those four months. Having a great time, I suppose. The production would guarantee me only six weeks’ work, but I had to make myself available indefinitely. John Breglio told me this was the worst deal he had ever heard of, but I agreed anyway. I needed the work, and I liked the Bay Area. And I liked Robert. With an infectious, booming laugh, he was a welcome presence in any room. I enjoyed discussing all manner of things with him, and he was always in an upbeat mood.
The cutting rooms were in Francis Coppola’s Columbus Tower, in San Francisco, near both North Beach and Chinatown. The job turned out to be a fabulous lunch situation, within short walking distance of some of the best Italian and Chinese restaurants in the city. I landed there in June, wearing what would have been appropriate attire in New York that time of year, a seersucker jacket. I froze. That was when I first heard the aphorism “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
David Holden turned out to be a thoughtful, intellectual-looking man. His temples were gray, he had patches on the elbows of his sport coat, and he smoked a pipe. We were preparing for a screening for Coppola, who produced the film, and I was set to work on the climactic race. The director of photography was Carlo Di Palma. He had worked with Antonioni and later shot eleven films for Woody Allen.
