Editing: The Kindest Cut

It’s a lonely job, usually spent isolated in a dark cubicle for months at a time poring over thousands of feet of film, frame by frame. Physically, it’s not unlike writing, say those who do it for a living.

“We have the best job in the business,” says film editor Carol Littleton, who claims her personality “is not suited to the social demands of the set.” Littleton, who edited “Body Heat” and “The Big Chill,” prefers the quiet of the cutting room, where, she “gets to see immediate results. It’s a little like writing. It’s the final rewrite.”

Unlike writing, acting and photography, however, film editing is often invisible, which makes it another of the mystery categories at Oscar time. “I’d like to think that when people see films, they’re not aware of editing,” says veteran editor Bill Reynolds, who has been nominated for the editing Oscar seven times and won twice (for “The Sound of Music” and “The Sting”). “The only time I watch the editing in a film is when I’m bored.”

“Most viewers--and that includes academy members, most of whom are actors--don’t know what an editor does,” says George Grenville, current president of the American Cinema Editors association. “But when they see a film and their mind starts to wander and they don’t know why--chances are, it’s bad editing.”

Arthur Schmidt, who won last year’s editing Oscar for his work on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” believes “that a lot of (academy) people in other categories have to ask their friends who are editors or directors how they should vote. Even for the people in the motion picture industry it remains a mystery what we do.

“In most cases people end up voting for a film where they’re aware of the cuts. Looking back, most of the films that have won have been action movies. But editing comedies and dramas can be just as difficult.”

The most popular movies of the year are also likely candidates in the editing category because voters assume “that maybe the editing had something to do with the fact that it was a good picture,” says Steven Spielberg’s chief editor Michael Kahn.

Those who do it for a living, emphasize that editing is simply another facet of a movie’s story-telling craft. “You judge editing on the basis of rhythm and pace, fluidity, form and structure,” says Grenville, who edited “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” “It’s a question of transitions, going from one sequence to another.”

An editor is often a creative repairman, as well, explains Carol Littleton. “Many times when the scene is on the page, it works, but in the process of shooting you encounter variables: mechanical failure, weather, an actor having a bad day, physical difficulties executing a scene. All these problems are solved in the editing room.”

None of which is admissible evidence on Oscar ballots. “That’s why, it’s so difficult to judge,” Littleton adds. “No one has seen all the footage except the director and the editor. Only they know the possibilities of what was there or not there.”

Whether knowledgeable about this or not, all those actors and other academy members by now have made their choices of the best film editing of 1989, from a list of nominees made by the academy’s editing branch: Noelle Boisson, for “The Bear”; David Brenner and Joe Hutshing, for “Born on the Fourth of July”; Mark Warner, for “Driving Miss Daisy”; William Steinkamp, for “The Fabulous Baker Boys”; and Steven Rosenblum, for “Glory.”

Two of the movies, “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Glory” are, in part, action pictures, involving chaotic combat scenes, the sort most often favored with editing awards. “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Fabulous Baker Boys” are what some editors call “structured dialogue” movies, requiring studied pacing appropriate to their stories. The fifth, “The Bear,” a French film about an animal in the wild, is a quasi-documentary that had to be constructed largely in the editing room.

Michael Kahn, who edited “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and other movies for Spielberg, believes there is some justification for awards going to action pictures. “Personally, I find that action scenes are more challenging because you have reams of footage where you have to look for the keys to put it all together. But there are editors who say they find dialogue scenes more difficult.”

Among this year’s nominees, Kahn singles out “Born on the Fourth of July” as an example of a movie that requires the “free-form” editing of action pictures, in which “there’s a lot of editing, a lot of pieces there--the scenes had to be made in the editing process,” as opposed to a movie like “Driving Miss Daisy” in which “it’s sort of set how the scene is going to go.”

The turbulent scene in “Born on the Fourth of July,” for example, when Tom Cruise is jostled out of his wheelchair while demonstrating against the war at the Republican convention, is the kind of scene, Kahn says, where, “It’s very important how you manipulate the visuals and move things around. You know there’s a lot of footage there. You don’t just throw it up in the air and it all goes together.”

Meanwhile, Littleton, who studied music before she found her calling in the cutting room, says a movie like “Driving Miss Daisy” is “like chamber music, and it’s harder to play chamber music than to be part of a symphony because it’s so transparent.”

“I’ve done different kinds of movies, and I’ve found that ensemble movies like ‘The Big Chill’ are difficult to do because the material is so reduced and so simple,” Littleton continues. “ ‘The Fabulous Baker Boys’ had its own special difficulties sustaining the erotic tension between Michelle Pfeiffer and Jeff Bridges all the way to the end of the picture. Relationships can be hard.”

But Littleton was also impressed with “Born on the Fourth of July,” whose battle scenes she terms “extraordinary.” “I was quite amazed with that part of the movie. Through the images and sound and manipulation of footage, you come up with this extraordinary visceral experience.”

Editors work closely with the director, screening and sifting the footage as the movie is being shot, then proceeding to cut and assemble scenes which have been filmed from a variety of angles and distances.

“An editor’s job is to see that every sequence builds to a dramatic climax,” says Grenville. “That scene in ‘The Fabulous Baker Boys’ where Michelle Pfeiffer slithers along the piano wouldn’t have looked like anything if you had just seen it in long shot. But the way it was shot and edited, you saw her in close-up, you saw how she was affecting the audience in the bar . . . by the end of it I’m sure every young man who saw that film wanted to go to bed with her.”

A good editor can suggest when another line of dialogue is needed to accent a scene or when an existing line is better excised, when a laugh line can be timed better through the rearrangement of a few frames or an imbalance between two performances corrected. The fine tuning of post production can so consume directors that Richard Marks, who edited “Terms of Endearment” and “Broadcast News” for James L. Brooks, is described by an associate as “the guy who finally has to tell Jim to let it go.”

The editor’s job today is magnified by the amount of footage shot, which in general is much greater than it used to be, made possible by portable cameras and other new technology. For a typical two-hour feature, a director shoots 20 times the amount of film eventually seen on screen. The editor has to keep track of it all, though in the end, the director (or studio) has the final cut, leaving the editor’s work open to judgment based on someone else’s choices.

Like writing and acting, film editing is affected by fashion and conventions. The once pokey “dissolve” that separated scenes in the movies of the 1930s and ‘40s is rare today in a film culture that has grown accustomed to “jump cuts” and the frantic editing of music videos.

“You can get carried away with the craft and overdo it,” explains Arthur Schmidt, who was also nominated in 1981 for “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” “Sometimes the most difficult thing you have to use is restraint. ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ was so sensitive and delicate, I had to be careful not to overcut the scenes, not to use too many ‘reaction cuts,’ ” in which actors are shown reacting to what another actor has said or done. “In that movie it was important to give the actors a moment when they needed it.”

In contrast, the biggest challenge of “Roger Rabbit,” he says, was “that when I cut the picture, there was no animation yet. I had to leave an appropriate amount of film for the animator to put the animation in the scene.”

Were the academy voters aware of this?

“I think within the industry people realized that it was a difficult film to edit,” Schmidt says.

The American Cinema Editors give out their own award, the Eddie, which will be presented Saturday night in Los Angeles. This year’s three nominees are “Born on the Fourth of July,” “Glory” and “Field of Dreams.” (Last year, the voting deadlocked for “Mississippi Burning” and “Rainman.”)

Over the last decade, about half of the Oscar-winning editors, coincidentally, have been British, reflecting, in one senior editor’s opinion, “Hollywood’s infatuation with the accent and the fact that they frequently worked for less.” Union scale for editors is $1,700 a week, but top editors make as much as $7,000 a week and more.

Many editors say that the toughest challenge they face is simply getting the opportunity to work on films of quality. “I have some friends who are good editors but they just haven’t been lucky enough to get a really good movie,” says Schmidt.

“Our work is tremendously compromised by a weak script,” says Littleton. “A film is rarely better than the script.”

“The particular skills?” says Kahn. “I really can’t tell you what they are. When it feels right to me, I show it to the director. You don’t edit with knowledge. You edit with feeling.”