Film IndustryVeterans Swap Stories of Tinseltown’s Past

Every six weeks, about 1,000 years of Hollywood history settles into several tables at the Lamplighter Family Restaurant in Sherman Oaks.

The occasion is a lunch and reunion for 20 or so picture, sound and music editors, most now retired and in their 70s and 80s. On Friday, 18 industry veterans showed up to celebrate the birthdays of seven in their party, swapping stories of the Hollywood they saw as they edited film, mixed sound and worked for decades behind the scenes.

“They go back a lot of years,” said Bill Elias, a regular of the group, whose members together have scores of Emmy and Oscar nominations and several wins.

At 63, Elias is one of the youngsters--and he’s been in the business for 53 years.

Now a picture editor at Paramount, Elias was a 10-year-old extra in Abbott and Costello’s “Mexican Hayride.” Elias’ father had a newsstand, and Costello was a friend. Such a good friend, Elias said, that when his father needed $5,000 for an operation, “Lou Costello put up the money to save my Dad’s leg, so, of course, I’m a big fan.”

Eugene Marks, 79, has been both a sound editor and a music editor. He edited the sound effects on two of James Dean’s three pictures, “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant.”

Marks recalled Dean’s flying past him one morning in Coldwater Canyon on the way to Warner Bros.

“He came roaring by me in his black Porsche,” Marks said. “Later that day, he was looping some lines, and I said to him, kiddingly, ‘You should drive a little more carefully. You almost drove me off the road.’ ”

Dean paused for a long moment and then said: “I should have killed you.”

Ralph Sandler, 72, was a picture and sound editor on numerous films, including “Can-Can.” He remembers the day when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the set and was flustered by the scantily clad dancers, including Shirley MacLaine.

“He came in on a Saturday--I’ll never forget,” Sandler said. “He said, ‘You should show people’s faces, not their backsides’--that’s what Nikita said.”

Sandler also was present at 20th Century Fox when Michael Curtiz was directing the John Wayne western “The Comancheros.”

An actor playing a grizzled cowboy had a bar scene in which he was supposed to strike a match on his pant leg. The actor tried two or three times, without success. Then, as a gag, he pulled his lighter out of his pocket.

“Curtiz didn’t get the joke, and he started cursing him in Hungarian.”

Neil Burrow likes to come to the gatherings with his father, Milton Burrow, 80, a sound man whose own credits include “All the President’s Men.”

The younger Burrow is 49. He also was a sound editor, who got his job in true Hollywood fashion, he said, “by sheer nepotism. Not a talented bone in my body.”

Now retired like his dad, the younger Burrow collects Hollywood memorabilia of the 1930s and ‘40s. He was only a youngster when he began going to the studios with his father, “and so I saw the tail end of the old studio system,” he said.

As for the white-haired encyclopedias gathered at the Lamplighter, he said, “They’re living treasures of information.”