Sam O’Steen; Was Editor for ‘Chinatown,’ Other Top Films

Sam O’Steen, a widely respected and thrice Oscar-nominated film editor who left his mark on some of the most popular movies of the postwar era, has died in Atlantic City, N.J. He was 76.

O’Steen, who had been living in New York City, died Wednesday of a heart attack, his daughter Kathleen O’Steen said Saturday.

In a career spanning more than 40 years, O’Steen was associated with a number of first-rank directors including Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski and Alan Pakula.

Films on his resume include Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown,” which earned him an Academy Award nomination; Pakula’s “The Sterile Cuckoo” and “Consenting Adults;” Stuart Rosenberg’s “Cool Hand Luke;” and Frank Sinatra’s only directorial effort, “None But the Brave.”

But it was with Nichols that O’Steen was most closely associated, editing nine of the director’s films including “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” for which O’Steen also was nominated for an Oscar. The film won five Academy Awards in 1966 but O’Steen lost out to the editors of the auto racing film “Grand Prix.”

The Nichols-O’Steen partnership produced some of the most respected films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The list includes “The Graduate,” “Catch-22,” “Carnal Knowledge” and “The Day of the Dolphin.” It continued in the 1980s and ‘90s with “Silkwood,” which earned O’Steen his third Academy Award nomination; “Heartburn;” “Biloxi Blues;” “Working Girl;” “Postcards From the Edge;” “Regarding Henry” and “Wolf.”

O’Steen’s work on “The Graduate” earned critical praise and the British Film Academy Award for best film editing. His touch was memorable, critics said, for its long personal shots of Dustin Hoffman’s face, enabling viewers to study the expressions and better understand the thinking of Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock. The technique was a departure from the quick cutting often associated with modern films.

“Sam has a great feeling for what happens between people. And a feeling for rhythm and lengths,” Nichols said some years ago. “And a picture is made almost entirely of decisions on how long things should be. Sam O’Steen’s hallmark is simplicity and rightness.”

In reviewing “Heartburn” in the New Republic, critic Stanley Kauffman noted O’Steen’s influence on the Nichols film.

“Sam O’Steen has been the editor on almost every one of Nichols’ films, and ‘Heartburn’ shows why. O’Steen understands Nichols’ impatience, his thrust, and also his contradictory need, once in a while, to linger. Party scenes are often boring. O’Steen helps Nichols--and us--through the parties here before our jaws can clench.”

“Chinatown,” the classic Roman Polanski film, is largely shot in close-ups of the characters talking and revealing clues of the mystery. Yet, thanks to O’Steen, who garnered one of the film’s 11 Academy Award nominations, the action never seems to stop. Polanski said O’Steen had “a skill and imagination that takes my breath away.”

O’Steen, who was born in Arkansas but grew up in Burbank, served in the Coast Guard during World War II. He became interested in films as a boy and would bribe guards with newspapers from his route to let him onto the Warner Bros. lot. There he would hang around the film editing room watching famed editors such as Owen Marks, whose work would later include “Casablanca” and “The Treasure of Sierra Madre.”

Deciding the motion picture industry was for him, O’Steen unfortunately discovered that getting onto the lot was easier than getting into the necessary union. So he worked in a print shop until his mid-30s.

His first credit was as an assistant editor in “The Wrong Man,” a 1957 Alfred Hitchcock film. His first film editing credits came in 1964 for “Youngblood Hawke,” “Robin and the Seven Hoods” and “Kisses for My President.”

O’Steen also directed the television movie “A Brand New Life” in 1973 and the feature film “Sparkle” in 1976. He received the Director’s Guild of America award and an Emmy nomination in 1975 for best television directing for “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.”

Besides his daughter Kathleen, O’Steen is survived by his second wife, Bobbie, and daughters Molly, Danielle and Wendy.