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Pilot Program Targets Revival of Long-Dormant Apprentice Classification

by uncredited
written by uncredited 5 minutes read

By Kristin Marguerite Doidge

In a virtual event held on Jan. 21, the Guild’s apprenticeship and growth committee presented an inspiring and insightful panel discussion about the reinvigorated apprentice editor pilot program. Current and former apprentice editors who’ve come up through the program shared their experience, tips, and wisdom with the nearly 60 attendees who participated via Zoom.

Gavin Segall-Abrams, assistant editor board member and committee co-chair, explained that the focus of the presentation was on picture editor apprentices, but noted that other classifications, such as sound and music editor apprentices, can also participate in the pilot program.

“Before it started two years ago, the apprentice editor (or, in New York, the editing room assistant) classification was infrequently utilized, and there was a sentiment among the membership that the classification had all but died out,” he added. “Thanks to the pilot program’s expansion of apprentice editor job duties, in addition to multiple employers’ utilization of the pilot program to hire individuals from underrepresented groups, it has been revitalized and is thriving again.”

Segall-Abrams and his committee co-chairs — Joshua Kirchmer, Aziza Ngozi, and Jerry Ross — hoped attendees would come away from the event with more knowledge about how the program works. For example, the Guild’s contract language for employers contains limitations, such as maintaining current staffing levels and who can assign work, while allowing an apprentice editor to be trained into a future assistant editor position.

Most important, the pilot program is not something that can be applied to like an internship, and employers are responsible for determining who they would like to hire under the apprentice editor classification (subject to roster requirements in Los Angeles). It’s “most successful when assistant editors put in the effort to train the apprentice editor employed on their project,” he added.

Three individuals who’ve recently benefited from the program include event panelists Tyshana Richard, Dalia Soto-Beltrán, and Joseph Santos. The event was moderated by Esther Sokolow, a Los Angeles-based assistant editor who secured her first union job as the apprentice editor on Paramount’s “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” in 2015. Since then, she’s served as second and first assistant editor on several feature films, and is currently working on DC Studios’ upcoming film, “The Flash.”

“I think the most important people who need to know that the pilot program exists are the cutting room teams working right now,” Sokolow said. “If you have the space to bring an apprentice on and the capacity to teach, you should be leveraging this program to your advantage to bring new talent into the fold.”

Soto-Beltrán, an assistant editor, shared that she landed her first job in television as an apprentice editor for the Apple Original bilingual comedy series, “Acapulco.” She’s passionate about creating pathways of access for underrepresented talent in Hollywood and credits the pilot program for helping her get her start in an industry that she said can be, at times, challenging. “It’s a beautiful way to open the door to so many people who have not found access into this industry,” she said. “That’s why I’m here, because I want to create that awareness, and if I can help any other apprentices, I will do it.”

Santos, who’s been working primarily in unscripted television on shows like NBCUniversal’s “The Voice,” was able to move up quickly after working as an apprentice on a union project in 2021. He spoke about “failing gracefully,” being able to make small mistakes as he got started, and how he feels a responsibility to “pay it forward” after having such a positive experience.

For Richard, an apprentice editor also based in Los Angeles, her first opportunity arrived on the Netflix feature film “Senior Year,” when editor Sarah Lucky asked her to come on board as an apprentice editor in 2021. The former production assistant said she’d already taught herself Premiere Pro, but her introduction to Avid was through the mentorship of Lucky and her first assistant editor, Ken Woodburn. She was then able to “expand upon those skills in Avid with the guidance of her wonderful team of mentors at Marvel Studios.”

“It’s been a very nurturing environment, and it’s nice to be around people who are your mentors,” Richard added. “For the other PAs on our shows, I pass along whatever information about the pilot program I can and just encourage them: if I could do it, you could do it, too.”

Ross, an editor and board member who was also in attendance, closed the event by sharing how encouraged he was by the discussion and the shared desire to continue to bring more awareness about the program to more Guild members. “I love all your stories, and I love the different types of ways you all came in,” he told the panelists. “What’s really inspiring is you represent the future of what this Guild can look like, and that’s amazing.”

To learn more about becoming a mentor or to participate in the Apprentice Editor Pilot Program, members can visit Editors Guild – IATSE Local 700 > Apprentice Editor Pilot Program.

Kristin Marguerite Doidge is a freelance writer whose work appears frequently in CineMontage. 

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John Axelrad and Lee Haugen Take Editing Voyage into Deep Space with Brad Pitt in James Gray’s ‘Ad Astra’

by A.J. Catoline
written by A.J. Catoline 18 minutes read

by A.J. Catoline

Sometimes in order to get found, we need to get lost. To go on a long journey of many miles, we need to first take that small step into ourselves, or — metaphorically speaking for editors — a journey into our own cutting room of the soul.

Brad Pitt goes on such a journey in “Ad Astra,” a film on a grand scale by director James Gray that delivers stunning visual effects sequences and also simple, intimate moments. Some scenes we are on a vast moonscape or a deep, dark lake on Mars. Then, the camera holds tight on the face of Pitt’s character — astronaut Roy McBride –– seeming lost deep in his mind as we hear his inner voice. He questions both the goal of his space mission and the meaning of his life. The only sound we hear is from inside his space helmet.

These are some of the editorial techniques used by film editors John Axelrad, ACE, and Lee Haugen, who continue their collaboration on “Ad Astra” after editing together on Gray’s last film “The Lost City of Z” (2016).

Brad Pitt in “Ad Astra.” Photo: 20th Century Fox.

 “’Ad Astra’ is an existential journey,” Axelrad said. “The further Roy McBride travels out into space, the deeper we go into his soul. It’s really a dive into the subconscious.”

Axelrad’s work with Gray stretches back more than a decade on his films “The Immigrant,” “Two Lovers” and “We Own the Night.” This editor knows well that his director loves to craft the film in the editing room and the entire post-production process.

“James is so hands-on, and he just loves editing,” said Axelrad. “He definitely milked every minute of his time in the cutting room. He is a meticulous filmmaker and very particular about the visual effects.”

“It was an extended directors cut,” Axelrad joked. Post-production was ongoing for about two years because the release of the film was twice delayed from early 2019, to the spring and now to a fall release. Mostly this was due to the complexity of the visual effects sequences that needed extra time to meet the director’s ambitious vision. But Gray used the extended schedule wisely to further craft the story.

“I don’t think a day goes by where James doesn’t come in first thing in the morning and say, ‘I got another idea,’” agreed Haugen, who said they had many options of Pitt’s performance to choose from.

“Brad’s performance was so subtle, but powerful,” said Haugen. “His little, tiny expressions would tell so much more about his internal dialogue. And having the voice-over helps the audience get even deeper into his thought process and into his soul. James wanted it to feel stream of consciousness.”

Pitt has said his portrayal of astronaut McBride — on a mission to find his famous astronaut-father played by Tommy Lee Jones, who has gone rogue somewhere in the galaxy — is inspired by his relationship with his own father. The performance is personal and it showed.

Haugen was inspired when he attended the first dialogue recording session with Pitt. “We had quite a few pages of lines for him to read. And he did it in one take, in one hour, without stopping,” said Haugen. “It was just so real, so methodical and so stream-of-conscious that we thought, ‘Wow, this is exactly the feeling we’re looking for in the voice-over.’”

James Gray directs Brad Pitt in “Ad Astra.” Photo: 20th Century Fox

“To James’s credit, as he co-wrote the script with Ethan Gross, he knows the final rewrite is in the editing room,” said Axelrad. “And he is willing to change and keep working with the material that he shot. The sky is the limit to how the film can come together. James is not trying to mold the picture into the script he wrote, but rather create a new vision.”

Sound played a large role from early in the picture edit because “James is meticulous about sound. For him it’s the icing on the cake,” said Axelrad. “The hardest part about working with James is showing him a cut with a rough mix on the Avid. It takes me a while to polish the sound that he has come to expect. I love sound editing. Sometimes I feel like I’m a frustrated sound editor masquerading as a picture editor.”

Audiences might expect an action space movie to be loaded with sound effects, though there is a memorable scene in “Ad Astra” that nearly goes silent. When McBride reaches Neptune space, he goes space-walking through an asteroid field and the sound becomes eerily quiet, allowing us to appreciate the emptiness of space. Using silence as sound design is something that can make an audience sit up and notice. It can be revolutionary as Stanley Kubrick used in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” when all we hear is oxygen hissing through a space suit.

“This being a studio movie, there was an unease about having complete silence in the picture,” explains Axelrad. “Yet James wanted to be true to the science of space as best as he could. ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is one of my favorite movies of all time, but I purposely chose not to re-watch it before doing this project. I also chose not to re-watch ‘Apocalypse Now.’ I think none of us wanted to be influenced and we just wanted the material to speak to us.”

CineMontage sat down with the editors to discuss how the film came together, but also to ask questions about collaborating as a team. From the perspective of the cutting room, the story of “Ad Astra” is one of mentorship. Axelrad first hired Haugen as an Apprentice Editor in 2008 on “Two Lovers,” and they have continued a voyage as a picture editing team.

I encourage ideas and I encourage my assistants to edit. I’m not possessive like, “The credit has to be mine.” It’s not about ego, it’s about what’s going to make the best film. – John Axelrad, ACE

Lee Haugen, John Axelrad, ACE and Scott Morris at the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of “Ad Astra.”

“’Two Lovers’ was such an amazing experience because I gained insight into the A-team of filmmaking that was John Axelrad and James Gray,” recalled Haugen. “And also John’s assistant editor was Tom Cross (‘Whiplash,’ ‘La La Land’). They were the most passionate, intense, and kind people. Being new to editing, they took me under their wings to teach me the ropes of the cutting room. John — being the great mentor he is — also gave me my first big opportunity. I could try and cut some scenes on my own and he would give feedback so I could hone my editing capabilities and style.”

“Lee would not be co-editing with me if he wasn’t a very excellent editor in his own right,” said Axelrad. “It’s not just because he worked with me once, I’m like ‘Okay, you’re next!’ Lee had to prove himself and he did. From the first time we worked together on ‘Two Lovers,’ I was impressed with his editing skill. As editors we hone our craft over time, and Lee and I got to the level where we were like, ‘Yeah, let’s edit together!’”

The “Ad Astra” picture editing crew is a triple-threat of mentorship. Like the Apollo 11 capsule that traveled to the moon 50 years ago with three cool astronauts, this cutting room made the journey with an Additional Editor. Scott Morris got his first job out of college as a production assistant on an independent film edited by Haugen.

Lee Haugen: Scott was the most ambitious production assistant I had ever met. And seeing that, I was hoping to pass along the same knowledge and mentorship as John had done for me.

Scott Morris: In school you can study film or the Avid, but only with experience can you learn the workflow and dynamics of a cutting room. Lee encouraged me to keep cutting and just do the work. I loved editing. I was always editing shorts or low budget features or anything I could do. Lee kind of showed me the path to just cut, cut, cut. Always be doing it.

John Axelrad: On “Lost City of Z,” I had to start the project later because I was finishing up “Krampus.” Lee and his assistant editor Scott went to Northern Ireland and Lee cut together the first editor’s assembly. It was my first time working with Scott, and I just all but fell in love with him. We then did “Papillon” together as a team. Scott was a huge contributor on both projects. On “Ad Astra” we were able to bump him up to an editor’s salary by following the union procedure. I think we developed such a collaborative workflow between the three of us. I encourage ideas and I encourage my assistants to edit. I’m not possessive like, “The credit has to be mine.” It’s not about ego, it’s about what’s going to make the best film.

And you brought in Hank Corwin as a consulting editor?

JA: Hank came in at the very end of the process. He worked a lot on the journey to Neptune sequence. Brad really wanted to get into the idea of someone losing their mind with isolation. I thought he added some really neat moments.

How do you all work together as an editorial team?

SM: We’ve created a team dynamic since we worked together on “Lost City of Z” and “Papillion.” We keep honing our workflow as our trust in each other grows. It’s like

John Axelrad (left), Scott Morris, and Lee Haugen. Photo: A.J. Catoline.

musical chairs, we all move together through the cutting rooms to screen and work ideas together.

LH: We work separately on a scene and then John and Scott will come in and we’ll watch and start collaborating together. And one of us will get an idea and want to go try it. It was a very efficient way of working to have a team to be able to explore our options and find these hidden gems that change the story and make it stronger.

JA: I think it benefits the film to have this kind of collaboration. We always say there are no bad ideas. Sometimes we’ll throw out an idea and maybe the director shoots it down, but in a creative environment you should be able to come up with outlandish ideas. Nothing pleases me more than to see my crew happy.

LH: We spend so many hours working together. We encourage an environment of having fun.

JA: Side story — every Friday we would have a pie-off in the cutting room. As Brad really appreciates a good apple pie, we would bring pies from various esteemed bakeries around Los Angeles.

What was the story where you all wore the space suits into the cutting room?

JA: That wasn’t just for fun but for a practical reason.

SM: We used the suits for proof of concept insert shots and the helmets to record sound from an astronaut’s point of view.

Lee Haugen, Scott Morris and John Axelrad, ACE in the cutting room of “Ad Astra.” Photo: Eddy Garcia.

JA: Long before we got our re-recording mixer Gary Rydstrom to add his brilliant work, discussions about sound design began early in the picture stage. There was a big discussion on how much we hear and how much we don’t. And how can we hear that? And what sound would it be? In the lunar rover chase, there’s no sound on the moon. We wanted the perspective from what Brad would hear from feeling vibrations and impacts through his space suit.

JA: The lunar rover chase scene was shot in Death Valley near Dumont Dunes. The stunt men wore these suits on the moon buggies. They shot with infrared cameras to make the sky really dark, which helped with the visual effects. I’m on location in an air-conditioned trailer and — when I say air-conditioned — it’s still something like 91 degrees. But these poor guys are like out in 120 degree heat wearing 15-pound space suits.

LH: Truth be told, when we wore the helmets they still smelled like sweat from the shoot!

JA: That sequence evolved over a four-month period. We truly didn’t know if it was going to work until the end. It was very complex, so it was all story-boarded. But the stunt guys and the second unit director had to makes changes during shooting. It then became apparent that we needed some overhead shots of geography to heighten the tension. It was just too claustrophobic-feeling without it. We accomplished that with VFX. And then James brought the stunt guys back for insert shots on a soundstage. I wasn’t used to something coming together over such a prolonged period.

The soundscape was amazing, how did the post sound process come together?

SM: We mixed at the Skywalker Ranch for weeks with re-recording mixers Tom Johnson and Gary Rydstrom. It was an amazing collaboration and fun process hearing what they brought to it. Watching James working in the rapid pace of the stage with all the people and tools, like additional dialogue and sound effects, it’s like watching a conductor.

JA: I’ve mixed with James on all of his other films, and he’s like a kid — although a very discerning one — in a candy shop.

SM: The story is all about what’s going on in Roy McBride’s psyche. What he is feeling can be heightened by how it sounds. James would always be looking for ways to use sound design to get into Roy’s subconscious mind.

The lunar rover chase scene from Ad Astra. Photo: 20th Century Fox

There is a scene in the film where Roy McBride is on his space ship watching an old film. A Dean Martin source cue plays that stands out from the rest of the film score. How was this song cue chosen?

LH: We wanted to go in the direction of using something old school, to juxtapose the future with the past. That was intentional.

JA: The film itself is an anachronism. Like our thoughts and our dreams, the future, the present, and the past are all kind of jumbled together. So if you see the film as a dive into the subconscious — where there could be a lot of old-school memorabilia even in space ships — the film feels like we are in a dream.

Talk about your current Assistant Editors. Does the mentorship continue?

JA: Since finishing “Ad Astra,” Lee and I are now editing separate projects.  Lee has Jason F. Voss assisting him, and I have Jared Simon as my 1st Assistant Editor on this Lionsgate feature I’m cutting.  It was my first time working with Jason and Jared on “Ad Astra,” and Lee and I want to continue to mentor and promote talented assistants.  It’s Jared Simon’s first role as the lead assistant, and he is doing an absolutely wonderful job.  He is getting the same exposure to the editing process as Scott Morris did, and Jared has had the opportunity to edit many scenes that I’ve given him feedback on.  I love to see my team get excited to be a part of the creative process.  Jared has contributed a lot of great ideas (both in picture and sound) to help elevate the quality of the edit.

When playing Roy McBride, Brad Pitt said he wanted to portray an astronaut who was tough and calm on the outside yet very vulnerable on the inside. Does an aspiring editor need to overcome feeling vulnerable to ask for help or mentorship? Do you feel that the position of Apprentice Editor is valuable?

LH: I think you do feel vulnerable when you put yourself out there and go outside your comfort zone. The most invaluable lesson for me being an Apprentice Editor from “Two Lovers” occurred once James Gray came in for the director’s cut. John asked me if I wanted to sit in during their edit. That simple offer provided me with the greatest access to see the interworking of an editor-director relationship. Not only did I get to see the technical side of John making edits, I heard the thought process between the two of them on why they made the edits. It was by far the most pivotal moment in my career.

The Avid Media Composer timeline of “Ad Astra.”

JA: I always fight to hire an apprentice editor and I do think it should be encouraged. I’ve had an apprentice editor on four films that I’ve done in the last 10 years. Unfortunately the Apprentice Editor position is kind of evaporating. But I want to keep it alive. I was an assistant for a lot of big editors back in the ’90s. Some editors were excellent mentors, and really took you under their wing. And some didn’t want you involved at all. It’s really a personality thing. On “Ad Astra” we started with Apprentice Editor Eddy Garcia.  Eddy was absolutely fantastic and proved that not only would he be a great Assistant Editor, but he also really knew a lot about VFX.  So when we saw an opening, we promoted him to become VFX assistant when our VFX Editor, Adam Avery, started working on the show.  If someone shows skills beyond the role they are working in, we want to do our best to promote them.

SM: The Apprentice Editor serves a crucial role in ushering in the next generation of editors. I’m proud that the union has historically created this exciting position as a gateway to the cutting room and I hope the legacy continues.

JA: I believe the editor should fight for their crew. I’m a big proponent of moving people up in the end credits. Especially assistant editors because they get buried in the credit roll. I want my crew to be involved all the way down to the post-production assistant. I want them to feel part of the process, not just someone who goes out and gets lunch. In post, we are a team. It makes me so happy to see people I have worked with able to broaden their careers. So yes, I encourage mentorship.

LH: I’m grateful to be a graduate of the “School of Axelrad!” I’m sure other alumni of the school agree, because they have been successful in the industry. It’s a fun group that we have. We don’t have a Facebook group yet, but we should start one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Hip-Hop, Sci-Fi, Pro-Union, Cold-Calling Comedy: Terel Gibson on Editing the Summer Hit ‘Sorry to Bother You’

by A.J. Catoline
written by A.J. Catoline 15 minutes read

by A.J. Catoline

There’s a lot of strike talk in the air. Workers are frustrated. They’re not getting a fair deal to advance up to the next level. They are looking for a spark of magic to shake things up. They need to find their voice. A union! Brothers and sisters unite! Stand up now! It’s a timeless, existential labor crisis of “Whose side are you on?”

We could be talking about the Motion Picture Editors Guild, whose members are super-charged and woke in a campaign to improve their working conditions in the current union contract negotiation debate.

But in this article we are talking about the recent film Sorry to Bother You, the cult hit of the summer that’s a fresh and wild ride, visually ingenious and about so many things. The film from Annapurna Pictures is about a campaign to organize workers in a union, while exploring hip-hop culture, the obstacles to black success in America, how capitalism crushes the soul, and how corporations have a dark secret to hide. And all that happens in a film that is also daringly funny.

“I have great appreciation for the Editors Guild. We would be taken complete advantage of if we weren’t unified, and that is one of the many messages of the movie: Unchecked power is an extremely dangerous thing.” – Terel Gibson

Before creator Boots Riley made his directorial debut, he was a musician with a political hip-hop group, The Coup. Before that, he was a union organizer helping California farm workers and had volunteered for the Progressive Labor Party.

Tessa Thompson as Detroit and Lakeith Stanfield as Cassius Green star in Sorry to Bother You. Courtesy of Annapurna Pictures.

Riley says it took him a decade to get his film made with a well-crafted pitch:

“It’s an absurdist dark comedy with magical realism and science fiction, inspired by the world of telemarketing. Cassius Green is a black telemarketer with self-esteem issues and existential angst who discovers a magical way to make his voice sound like it’s overdubbed by a white actor. This catapults him up the ladder of telemarketing success — to the upper echelon of telemarketers who sell weapons of mass destruction and slave labor via cold calling. In order to do this, he has to betray his friends who are organizing a telemarketers’ union.”

When Riley finally got the funding to begin production, he set out on an ambitious schedule, even by independent film standards, shooting 60 locations in 28 days around his hometown of Oakland, California.

When you are a first-time director trying to assemble so many elements of your vision, it is not surprising that post-production is not considered until late in the game. The production was already a week into shooting before Riley had a conversation with the film’s editor Terel Gibson. CineMontage recently sat down with Gibson to ask how the movie was able to compile so many themes, visuals and story lines into a tightly paced, 105-minute runtime.

Assistant editor Katherine Prescott and editor Terel Gibson.

CineMontage: Boots Riley said that it was many years of challenge trying to get this film made. How did he find you on his journey?

Terel Gibson: We have a mutual friend, with whom I had worked on a pilot — the director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, 2003; Twilight, 2008). She was at the Sundance labs with him. When Boots was looking for editors, she recommended me. I loved the cast and the amazing script. We connected when they were about a week into shooting.

CM: A week into shooting?

TG: It was a very compressed schedule but that compressed it even more. I got on the phone with Boots the next day when he was on set between setups. We immediately connected creatively and I could tell what he was going for. He asked if I wanted to do it, and I said, “Absolutely!”

CM: They were shooting last summer and wanted a cut ready for the Sundance Film Festival submission deadline in September?

TG: We locked picture for Sundance in 13 weeks. That’s including a five-week shoot. Looking at the footage, I was like, “How is it possible they shot this in one day?” It was incredible what they were able to pull off during production.

Originally, the plan was to do post in Oakland, where Boots lives and where they were shooting. But ultimately it proved more cost effective for him to come down to LA. He would work with me Tuesday through Friday, and then go back to Oakland on weekends to work on the music.

I remember early on the producers asking if I thought we’d make the schedule. I was like, “Sure, absolutely!” But then I thought, “This is going to be a very tall order; it’s an incredibly complicated movie.” But when you have these strong performances and a director who has a clear sense of what he’s going for, anything is possible. It was hard work, obviously. With lots of nights and weekends, but even from the first pass, Boots’ unique vision really came across.

Editor Terel Gibson, left, producer Forest Whitaker, who voices characters in the film, and director Boots Riley.

CM: What was it like working with a first-time director in the cutting room?

TG: Boots was very open to experimentation. But he would also be quick to say, “Leave it alone”’ if something didn’t quite work. There were a couple of sequences that we took out that were fantastic, but we didn’t want to slow the pacing and overstay our welcome. We had to be very critical of the moments that served themselves more than overall story. The goal was to give the film a sense of seamlessness and an unpredictable energy.

CM: When Sorry to Bother You premiered at Sundance, a review called it “the most bonkers film” at the festival. How did you weave together so many storylines and genres — comedy, hip-hop, social commentary and science fiction? 

TG: I actually don’t think it’s all that bonkers. We tried to stay consistent going from moments of comedy to intense drama to the more horrific moments. It’s an absurdist dark comedy but I think we are also living in an absurdist dark comedy. Because every day we pick up our phones and live in this constant fear of what new absurdity today’s news cycle has in store. There is a great line in the movie where Steven Yeun [who plays the union organizer Squeeze] talks about how when people feel powerless to do anything about a problem, they just accept the problem. We can become so overwhelmed that we just get used to it. I think that is what makes the movie so timely.

CM: A movie about workers rising up in their union is indeed timely.

TG: I have great appreciation for the Editors Guild. I’ve been a member for 20 years now and thankfully we are organizing the membership. We would be taken complete advantage of if we weren’t unified, and that is one of the many messages of the movie: Unchecked power is an extremely dangerous thing.

CM: What else inspires you about the story?

TG: I’m super-proud to be connected to a film that illustrates inclusivity. It’s nice to see the message is resonating with audiences.

Lakeith Stanfield, left, as Cassius Green and Armie Hammer as Steve Lift star in Sorry to Bother You Courtesy of Annapurna Pictures.

CM: Was it a challenge to cut the picket line scenes with so much happening on screen?

TG: We wanted the crowd scenes to feel like you were the eye of the storm. There’s a lot of handheld coverage and sound design to help fill out the world and make it feel like total chaos.

CM: Early in the film you use interesting transitions when Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) starts on the job as a telemarketer, and he is thrust into strangers’ homes as he pitches them on the phone. How were those cut?

TG: In the scenes where Cassius drops down into people’s living rooms, it’s the first time I think the audience understands that this is going to be a very different kind of film. My approach was to try to make all of the drop-downs feel rhythmically unique.

One of my favorite transitions — which was a discovery in the cutting room — is when Cassius goes to the doctor and asks, “Is it bigger?” Then we cut to a great shot between his legs and his girlfriend Detroit answers that question in the next scene. There was initially a scripted scene between those two moments but losing it felt very intentional.

CM: What was it like cutting dialogue that was over-dubbed with characters putting on their “white voices?” Did you have those voices early in the cut?

Omari Hardwick stars as Mr. _____ in Sorry to Bother You. Courtesy Annapurna Pictures.

TG: On set, they would have someone read the lines off-camera as the actors were mouthing the words. In the walk-and-talk scene in the office with Cassius and Mr. ____ [played by Omari Hardwick], the actors said all that dialogue and we dubbed the voices in later. We didn’t record the “white voices” until we were about two-thirds through the director’s cut. It was a very surreal experience when we brought those voices in because we had sort of gotten used to the original performances. Which worked in some strange other way.

With Patton Oswald’s voice, we recorded at a recording studio in Hollywood and then ran back to the cutting room in Santa Monica to see how it was feeling, and make adjustments. The next day, we recorded David Cross and threw that in. Rosario Dawson did the elevator voice, and Lilly James did the voice for Detroit during her art performance. She was shooting Mamma Mia 2 at the time, so she recorded via an Internet session. Basically, we were cutting the voices in as we went and our incredibly talented sound team refined it even more before the mix. It was such a bold choice and very important get feedback early on in screenings.

One of the main things we discovered was the importance of sync. The original intention was that it should be clear if it was overdubbed, but you don’t want it so wildly out of sync that it feels like a Kung Fu movie. We wanted it to feel odd but still rooted in the world Boots had created.

CM: Tell us about the assistance you had from your editorial department.

TG: My assistant editor Katherine Prescott did an amazing job. Her work ethic is one the main reasons we made it to the finish line. Kate helped so much with the visual effects, which there are a lot of in this movie, and thanks to her hard work we were able to include composite effects and replace green screen very early in the process.

We also had the luxury of working with composer Merrill Garbus from very early on in the process. She was able to send in all the score so I could modify the cuts to match the music perfectly. So when they did get to the dub stage, it was all there. As picture editors, we have to wear many hats these days, including cutting the music.

CM: How did you get started in the business?

TG: I started in 1997 on a film called Beloved working for Carol Littleton and Andy Keir as a post-production assistant. I could not believe I was working with the editor who cut E.T. I was like, “This is insane!” I got bumped up to an apprentice editor toward the end of that show.

Carol recommended me to Lisa Churgin for a film she was cutting called The Cider House Rules[1999]. That was my second job as an apprentice. So I came up the old-school way: apprentice, second assistant, first assistant, additional editor. I then started cutting on my own in 2010, as an additional editor with Pam Martin, a great friend and mentor, on David O. Russell’s The Fighter.

CM: Does the Editors Guild need to fight to keep the apprentice editor position as an opportunity for those starting out? 

TG: I could not agree more. I think it is really important. That position hardly exists anymore. We need to train the next group so they are not dumped into something they are unprepared for. Working as an apprentice for a number of years, I got to learn process thoroughly before I even touched an Avid.

Terel Gibson in the cutting room.

CM: Tell us a memorable story from your journey to becoming an editor.

TG: When I was on my first job for Beloved, they were shooting in Philadelphia and post was in New York. I was going back and forth on the train, from the cutting room with the sync film dailies, so they could screen those on set. And at the end of the day I would come back from set with the exposed negative and DAT sound to take to the lab.

Amtrak is a commuter train that goes express from New York to Philadelphia to Washington, DC. No stops in between. And it’s packed. And the train stops on the platform for maybe a minute. So I’m doing my daily run, I have a hand truck loaded with film boxes that I have to get off this train. I get one load off and onto the platform. There’s rush of passengers trying to get on. I’m fighting my way through getting the second batch of film off the train. As I get towards the door, I hear, “Stand clear of the closing doors!  Next stop Washington, DC!” And the doors close! I see the film still out on the platform! The train starts to move… “Oh shit…” I had run this scenario in my head before, and I knew what I would do. And the only option you have in that particular moment is to pull the emergency brake. It works really well. It stops the train immediately on a dime.

The doors open. The conductor comes out and yells, “What happened? What are you doing?!” I explained the situation. He looks at me, a 22-year old kid on his first job, and tells me that I had just committed a federal offense. I said, “I am incredibly sorry, but if I didn’t get off this train my career would be over!” He saw the film boxes and said, “Don’t do it again. Have a good day.” I packed up the dailies and never told anyone that story until years later.

CM: So as an apprentice editor, you saved the picture? And the exposed negative?

TG: One hundred percent! Now we send dailies digitally, so nobody will have to relive that again.

CM: What advice do you have for those starting out as editors?

TG: You reboot your career at every stage of this business, in terms of compensation or the scale of the projects you are working on. But that’s what it takes to work your way up the ladder. For me, there was no magical thing that happened. It was just a long, long time of hard work. But it can pay off.

And save your money, so you don’t have to make choices for the wrong reason. You just got to hang in there. And when an opportunity arises, seize it!

 

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GuildNews

Harrison and Gaines Join Guild’s LA Staff

by uncredited
written by uncredited 1 minutes read

The Editors Guild has added two new hires to its Los Angeles office. Joining the staff are Travis Harrison as Field Representative, and Harolena Gaines as Administrative Assistant to the Field Representatives (which also include Jacky Olitsky, Ann Hadsell, Jessica Pratt and Olie Amarillas).

“Travis and Harolena will be great additions to our team,” commented Scott George, the Guild’s Western Executive Director, in announcing the hires. “Travis has been a Guild member for 23 years, working as an assistant editor, while Harolena comes to us from Entertainment Partners, and her background with motion picture industry benefits and payroll administration, as well as knowledge of industry contracts, will be beneficial in assisting the Field Rep staff.”

Harrison started off in the industry as a driver for Soundelux in the early 1990s, then transitioned to the film vault at Paramount Studios in 1995. From there he went on to become an apprentice editor and an assistant editor. He comes from a family of post-production members: sister and music editor Jessica Harrison, brother-in-law and recordist Ryan Wordell, and father and post-production executive Hal Harrison. He looks forward to using his experience in his new role at the Guild, helping fellow members navigate their employment rights and benefits under the Collective Bargaining Agreements.

A motion picture industry professional with nine years of experience in contribution processing, payroll and pensions, Gaines has acquired the skills, knowledge and training to effectively problem-solve and multi-task, as well as to both establish and maintain workflow efficiency. In addition to Entertainment Partners, she worked for the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plans and studied business management and accounting.

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Features

She’s Got the Music in Her:
Mitsuko Alexandra Yabe

by Rob Feld
written by Rob Feld 11 minutes read

by Rob Feld • portraits by Sarah Shatz

Music editor Mitsuko Alexandra Yabe exemplifies the possibilities offered by the world of post-production if one is willing to throw oneself in and find one’s way. Yabe was born in New York but grew up in Tokyo, where she trained in violin and taught herself guitar. She was pre-med at Pomona College but got involved in the music scene in nearby Los Angeles, playing in a few sessions and producing music.

After graduating, she moved to New York City to pursue a career in the arts and entertainment industry. Broadening her search, Yabe met a network post-producer at an alumni event who told her that a company was looking to fill an entry-level position in television post-production. She got the gig — transcribing interviews for producers on the reality crime series The First 48 (2004-present) for ITV Studios (formerly Granada Entertainment) — and eventually joined the Editors Guild as an edit room assistant, the equivalent to an apprentice on the West Coast.

Mitsuko Alexandra Yabe.

Yabe worked with a team of assistant editors who taught her the ins and outs of dealing with the variety of footage types they encountered. Soon, however, after the company merged again to become ITV Entertainment, and everything from television pilots to sizzle reels began to come through, she became an assistant editor and had to learn quickly. Her mentors became the slew of editors who came through ITV, and the different styles of working inspired her own process.

Due to her musical background, however, from her first days in post-production, music-related requests were handed to her, as well as pulling sounds from libraries and doing additional Foley editing. Music editing came to be where she would spend the most time, but she felt the limitations of Avid Media Composer’s audio suite.

“The track counts are limited, we can only see waveforms by frame, and there’s not much you can do with plug-ins,” she elaborates. “At a certain point, it felt awkward to edit music extensively on the Avid. I could become a picture editor, but my passion was music, and I wanted to put my focus there. I needed to be in a facility where I could actually be in a proper 5.1 surround environment. In most cases, picture edit bays won’t be able to provide that kind of situation. I decided to look at a profession that would give me that opportunity.”

Through networking, Yabe met Ben Holiday, who offered her a job as an assistant music editor to help him on a music-heavy documentary. She seized the opportunity. The project was Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge(2017), and it earned a CAS Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for Television – Non-Fiction, Variety or Music Series or Special, as well as an ACE Eddie Award nomination as Best Edited Documentary – Television. Her transition was made; she found her path.

Since then, Yabe has completed work as a music editor on other projects, including Boots Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You, in which music also has an intense presence. The comic, surreal and politically minded film screened at the Sundance and SXSW Film Festivals earlier this year and is set for a July 6 release through Annapurna Pictures.

Sorry to Bother You.
Annapurna Pictures

The story takes place in an alternate present-day Oakland, where black telemarketer Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) develops a calling technique that hurtles him to career success. As he sells out his fellow workers and himself, he loses his artist girlfriend (Tessa Thompson), his friends and eventually much more. Riley, who began his post-film school career as a rapper with the group the Coup, wrote and directed the film and composed its music.

CineMontage interviewed Yabe in New York City in April about the upcoming film, her transition from television to feature films and the importance of mentorship.

CineMontage: Moving from television picture editing to film music editing is a pretty significant shift. What do you miss?

Mitsuko Alexandra Yabe:I came from a place where I was aware of the conversations around the decision-making process that lead to picture changes — why and how scenes changed. Now that I’m in a different department, I am sometimes in the dark. So that’s different.

Creatively, I would say what’s cool about music editing is the ability to delicately treat music in the way that I want. If we want to hear a certain instrument more than others as I’m editing, or lose a certain instrument sooner than another instrument in a queue, we can. But probably the most fun creative process now is working with a composer and tossing ideas back and forth. Actually, on every film I’ve worked, the composer was not based in New York, so I feel like it’s up to me to communicate in-depth the intentions of the director and the rest of the team.

CM: So you have the additional role of translator?

MAY:I’m between the director and the composer, and they both have to be happy. But I have to be happy, too. At the end of the day, the film is my boss; actually, the film is everyone’s boss. If one of our ideas is making the scene work better objectively, then it doesn’t matter where the idea came from. It’s just our jobs to efficiently find that solution and move on to the next note.

CM: Being a musician yourself must be a great asset.

MAY: Composers sometimes come to me and say, “Oh, I left that like this, can you take that and do something with it?” Or, “Oh, I’ll try and get back to it when I can, but in the meantime, can you X, Y and Z it?” Or when I’m working with the picture editor or director and they have a vague want. They sometimes might express it in terms of another composer’s work, in a way that makes sense, but also isn’t specific enough for the composer to address it. So, I would take their general note of“it sounds like John Williams” and try to musically identify where they’re coming from. What aspect of the queue led to that interpretation? Is it the chord progression? Is it the instrumentation? It’s sort of like babysitting the music and watching it grow into something living and breathing in the film.

Mitsuko Alexandra Yabe.

CM: The composer was also the writer/director in Sorry to Bother You. Can you talk about that?

MAY:I think the film’s creative vision was very established early on: that signature sound. Just as Boots describes the film to be “an absurdist dark comedy with magical realism and science fiction inspired by the world of telemarketing,” the all-electronic score texturally adds to the whimsical nature of the narrative. Also, if you listen closely to the lyrics, I’d say that the songs are exploring some of the themes the protagonists explore — giving the audience a meta-experience of the film through music. I’ve never heard a score like that, which really adds to the character of this film.

CM: How did that affect your job?

MAY:For me, it was more about the execution — formatting sessions for the mixer. It was complicated because there was a lot of music with all kinds of atypical instruments. You had wah-waahs with drone scrape or something. I had to organize all these synthesized sounds so that anyone could look at the session and know where things lie in a very short amount of time. If you say, “Okay, all the string instruments are at the top, all the percussions are at the bottom” — that makes sense. So, I listened to every single piece of audio and made sure they were relatively well organized.

There were over 100 pieces of music, so it was wall-to-wall, with everyone feeling pulled from every direction, while we were cutting so close to the holiday season. The band tUnE-yArDs, which recorded the score, was touring at the time, so there was a lot of calling back and forth and trying to figure out the time differences.

CM: Was there a particular area that required a lot of your attention?

MAY:I think I worked a lot on the music’s energy, with the transitions from scene to scene, because some moments are very comedic and I wanted to make sure that the feeling or emotion was being preserved. If it was cut off prematurely, then no one would find the scene funny. There were also many party scenes, so it was making sure the energy of the music was tight.

There’s a big riot scene in the film that we actually made work by pulling back on the music and moving it around in the space; you could actually hear the music better that way. We also tried to really capture the quality of music coming from the various cars, so we worked a lot to get the proper mix for them. The songs were by Boots as well, which was a unique experience that I loved. We spent a lot of time together looking at certain scenes.

CM: Does having the director as composer add another layer?

MAY: It does. Because he’s a musician, Boots’ ability to hear not just the music but the whole sound experience during the mix was so specific. You can hear the quality of a dripping sound hitting a desk or the balance between the sound design and the music. He could articulate so specifically that it made all of our jobs easier.

It’s a joy when that happens, rather than testing out all the time: “Is this right?” “Do you like this?” It also felt like the songs were still being written as I was editing them. There were a lot of phone calls with Boots’ audio engineer in the Bay Area. Boots would ask for another version of the song: “The drums are different here; it’s not loud enough; what about a little bit of the background vocals?” I felt like I was in the middle of a studio — part of the music production of the actual soundtrack — while I was on the stage editing and it was being mixed. I think we really gave it the attention that it deserved. It was highly ambitious given the time frame, but I think we nailed it.

I wish it was like that more often, how freely ideas are tossed around. It can get down to the wire to change things at the last minute, but at the same time, it really did feel like we were being creative to the maximum potential in the allotted time. I think at the end of the day, we’re all in it for that reason, for sure.

Sorry to Bother You.
Annapurna Pictures

CM: Tell me about your mentors? How did mentorship fit in with your shift into film music editing?

MAY:I am fortunate to say that I have quite a few mentors within the post-production community here in the city. I was able to build these relationships because I was proactive early on and attended many events at LIPPS [Ladies in Post-Production], Post New York Alliance [PNYA] and master classes at the Editors Guild office. For the Guild, I’ve taken the initiative to join the Diversity Committee and am now serving as an Eastern Region alternate member of the Board of Directors.

CM: So mentorship is important to you…

MAY:Mentorship is crucial — especially given that there are so few opportunities for apprenticeship due to shorter production schedules, tighter budgets, independent digital workflows and stricter guidelines for interns. My colleague, music editor Chad Birmingham, has been an exceptional mentor for me as I made my transition from picture assistant to music editor.

Because mentorship has had such a positive impact on my life, I have taken it upon myself to mentor high school students at Reel Works, a nonprofit organization based in Brooklyn that challenges high-risk teens to tell their stories and be heard. As I have always been the only woman of color in editorial or on the mix stage, I am focusing a lot of my efforts in training youth from all races, cultures and backgrounds.

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AwardsWeb Exclusives

Six Editors Inside the Egyptian Theatre

by Edward Landler
written by Edward Landler 14 minutes read

by Edward Landler • Portraits by Gregory Schwartz

The Oscar-nominated picture editors convened on Saturday morning, March 3 — the day before the 90th Academy Awards ceremony at the Dolby Theatre — at the 18th annual Invisible Art/Visible Artists program hosted by the American Cinema Editors (ACE) at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre nearby. An capacity audience had gathered with eager anticipation to hear these editors discuss the art of editing and the films for which they were nominated.

After welcoming the audience, the Cinematheque’s Margot Gerber introduced ACE President and Editors Guild Board member Stephen Rivkin, ACE, also an editing Oscar nominee for Avatar in 2010. Thanking ACE executive director Jenni McCormick and her staff for their work on the program, as well as Blackmagic Design, Avid, the Editors Guild, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and Adobe Systems for their sponsorships, Rivkin went on to introduce the six editors nominated for their work:

Tatiana S. Riegel, left, Jonathan Amos, Paul Machliss, Lee Smith, Sidney Wolinsky and Jon Gregory.

Tatiana S. Riegel, ACE, for Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya
Jonathan Amos, ACE, and Paul Machliss, ACE, for Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver
Lee Smith, ACE, for Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (who ultimately would win on Sunday)
Sidney Wolinsky, ACE, for Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water
Jon Gregory, ACE, for Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Moderating the discussion was ACE Vice President and Editors Guild President Alan Heim, ACE, an Oscar winner for All That Jazz (1979) and a nominee for Network (1976).

“Please note that every nominee is a member of ACE,” Rivkin pointed out. He also announced that Riegel would be leaving the discussion early to attend the Independent Spirit Awards luncheon as a nominee for its best editing prize (which she won). This was the fifth year that Film Independent was honoring picture editors, as a result of ACE and the Guild’s ongoing campaign to bring greater awards recognition to editors.

Moderator Alan Heim, left, Tatiana S. Riegel, Jonathan Amos, Paul Machliss, Lee Smith, Sidney Wolinsky and Jon Gregory.

Starting the discussion, moderator Helm asked the nominees for “a short version of how you got into the business.” Riegel complied, saying that after graduating from college as a poli-sci major, “Howard Smith, who is here, gave me my first job on River’s Edge [1986], working for free because I didn’t know anything, and I’ve been working ever since.”

In England, editor Amos “talked” himself into an editing job in a post-production company, got a reel together, edited corporate projects and made a documentary in Cambodia, all while trying to get a break in TV. Finding television work at Ealing Studios, he met director Wright, who was working there on the feature Shaun of the Dead (2004). He recounted, “Later on, Edgar remembered me when he was doing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World [2010]. You need desire, courage and luck.”

A producer’s son, the Australian Machliss wanted to work in movies since he was six. After “learning the ropes” in a Melbourne TV station, he took a chance and went to England, cold-calling to find work and got a job on Spaced (1999-2001), a sitcom directed by Wright. Along with Amos, with whom Machliss had also worked in TV, the director remembered him when he was making Scott Pilgrim.

Lee Smith.

Also from Australia, Dunkirk editor Smith found work at a post facility with the help of his optical effects technician father in 1976, when it was hard to find work in the industry there. Coming in contact with director Peter Weir, he worked as an assistant editor on The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), and, becoming an editor, often worked with Weir. He said, “Then I met Chris Nolan and we’ve done seven films together so far.”

Assuring the audience that “you don’t have to have a Commonwealth accent to edit,” Heim turned to Wolinsky. As a “film fanatic” with a BA in English and American Literature, he went to San Francisco State film school; he said, “I originally wanted to be a DP but editing has more to do with telling a story.” After working as an assistant on features with Richard Marks, ACE, he edited many TV movies and major TV series, including The Sopranos (1999-2007). Wolinsky met del Toro editing the pilot of The Strain (2014), a show created by the Mexican writer/ director who later called him to edit The Shape of Water.

Born in India, Gregory started seeing movies there; after his family returned to England, he said, “My schooling suffered because I was going to movies all the time.” Finding work at the BBC in the ‘60s, he recalled, “I knew I had to get into editing. I owe it all to the BBC, the best film school you could have.” Moving quickly into editing, he worked with director Les Blair and met writer/director Mike Leigh, with whom he continues to work. He concluded, “If editing’s all you want to do and nothing else, you’ve got it made.”

Tatiana S. Riegel.

The panelists then cleared the stage to allow a clear view of the first clip, a sequence from I, Tonya, which followed title character Harding from a skating competition to being berated by her mother (Allison Janney). When Heim asked about the skating, Riegel said, “Margot Robbie did everything that didn’t require decades of training.” She went on, though, to describe how each of the major skating sequences had their own personality.

“I had to figure out how to sculpt these sequences, with each reflecting Tonya’s life and career at that time,” the editor said. “This one was very early in the film and she’s a diamond in the rough.” She found the editing of the dialogue baring the characters of mother and daughter to be equally challenging, if not more so. She noted, “The film is always dancing back and forth between this very emotional, sad and tragic story and the craziness that brings in all this comic absurdity.”

Heim recalled being told about All That Jazz, “‘You’re going to win an Oscar but it’s not going to be for the dancing.’ The insight there is that it’s the story.” Riegel agreed, “It’s always the story, cutting the scene for the truth and the emotion of it. It brings out the humanity and you don’t have to force that. You don’t have to bring in the comedy; it’s there.”

Jonathan Amos, left, and Paul Machliss.

The Baby Driver clip was the film’s first bank robbery and car chase, cut to the music of the mix tape thst Baby hears through his ear buds as he drives the getaway car. Asked how the two editors worked together, Machliss described how the editing was done in two stages.

Filmed in Atlanta, Machliss was on location for the entire shoot, setting up the shots with the director from animatic reels, created by animatics editor Evan Schiff from precise storyboarding that showed the car’s journey set to the music. Machliss said, “It was a clear process to make sure it was working and I had the cut in rough form by the time we left Atlanta. Back in the UK, Jon took over to give the action scenes a kick.”

The editing was tied to the music so that specific visuals had to be at certain “anchor” points fixed by the songs. Amos explained, “You’re constrained to the music. We shot more footage than was in the animatic and we had to fit all the material inside the structure; you kind of compressed the material that you hadn’t envisioned originally.” Machliss added, “The shot had to inform the edit and the edit had to inform the shot.”

Also, with so much material turned over to special effects during post, Amos said, “It was something one editor couldn’t do by himself. We both had to be there to keep it moving.”

A second Baby Driver sequence was shown, a quiet scene in a diner in which the action still had to match the song playing from a juke box. Machliss noted, “I love the scene for its lack of pace; it’s just as effective emotionally as the quick cutting.”

After screening a sequence from Dunkirk depicting a German air attack on British sailors and the ensuing air battle with RAF Mustangs, Heim asked editor Smith if he used a lot of special effects. The editor replied, “Only the tiniest bit of CGI is in there; pretty near every shot is in camera. I had so much in camera, I never really thought about the special effects to clean little things up.”

Smith noted that the sequence had been shot in IMAX and, because of the size of the camera, snorkel lenses were used to shoot point-of-view inside the British planes. He added, “The tracer fire was the CG sweetener there since they couldn’t actually fire at the planes.”

Sidney Wolinsky.

Emphasizing that director Nolan designed the film to be largely in camera — to be seen from the point of view of the British characters — Smith said, “From the first frames of the film, you’re drawn into the action all from our point of view, no perspective from the Germans. It was like editing a silent movie; there was very little dialogue in the script and no narrated back story. And on top of that was this very complex shifting of time throughout the film.”

While making Dunkirk, Smith hoped that they weren’t making a $100 million art movie. “You have to tell the story visually without anybody explaining it to you,” he attested. “It was very experimental. For a film studio to put that kind of money into it was a brave thing to do.”

In the clip from The Shape of Water, the mute Elisa recognizes the immediate peril to the creature at the research lab, and tries to explain it to her artist neighbor, Giles. Moderator Heim asked Wolinsky, “She’s signing and he’s translating. How do you deal with this?”

Pointing out that she insists that Giles repeat her words, the editor said, “It’s beautifully written and it’s not artificial. The challenge was to time his words to her signing. I tried to place the subtitles close to their hands or faces; I didn’t want the audience to direct their attention from the faces because of the acting.”

For the film as a whole, director del Toro had to make it believable in terms of what he shot and, as Wolinsky explained, “I had to keep up the pace and make people follow the story, always keeping the subtext in mind; how each scene fits into the movie.”

Heim remarked on the subtle introduction of the music in the sequence and the editor commended his assistant Cam McLauchlin’s music cutting, as well as his picking and cutting much of the temp music. About the music over all, Wolinsky maintained, “The key thing was, ‘Will the creature live or die?’ You can overdo the music and diminish the impact. It was a rich musical environment — stuff on the television, source cues, Alexandre Desplat’s [Oscar-winning] score — everything was woven together from scene to scene.”

Jon Gregory.

In the deceptively simple scene shown from Three Billboards, Frances McDormand’s Mildred stands in a doorway talking with her son and the town’s minister sitting at the dining room table. Heim picked up on its inner life and asked how the editing made it vibrant.

“You can either cut it, and you’re just on the reaction shot or you’re just on the dialogue shot,” Gregory responded. “Between the two extremes, there’s a minefield.”

Realizing this was the first scene that the movie spends more time with Mildred, the editor decided to hold back the reactions of the minister. He explained, “I just wanted to hold it on her so I played it on her until she goes all the way out — her body language, staying on her back. I thought it would work even if it didn’t get a laugh.”

Gregory went on to describe how he kept to that kind of thinking throughout the film. Summing it up, he said, “The editor leads the audience through with these shots. You have an innate rhythm in you and timing and you hope it’s right.”

A more general discussion followed about how the change from editing film to editing digitally has changed attitudes toward screening dailies. Amos said, “With the quantity of footage we shoot now that we’ve got digital, we’ve lost the time for it.”

Smith felt it was still an integral part of filmmaking, especially, he said, “When you’re running your cuts. You invite people who are not involved and you see the film through them.”

While Gregory wouldn’t go back to cutting on film, he pointed out, “You did have the time to think as opposed to just doing it and redoing it.” Wolinsky asserted, “Ultimately you make the decisions while you’re cutting. What I find great now is that you get through it pretty fast, and you can go back through the dailies and see what you’ve missed. I find I have to cut the scene in order to figure how to do it.”

Fielding questions from the audience, the editors were asked about what art forms influenced or inspired them. The answers included music, painting and cooking. The entire panel agreed that apprenticeships should be brought back, with Gregory commenting, “I love to involve assistants more in the actual film but you can’t do that now because they have so much to do.”

Back row, from left, Jonathan Amos, Paul Machliss, Jon Gregory and Stephen Rivkin; front row, Alan Heim, Sidney Wolinsky, Tatiana S. Riegel and Lee Smith.

“How early do directors bring you on to the film?” was the session’s last question.

The Baby Driver editors claimed the earliest involvement. In 2011, director Wright recorded a table read of the script and the editors worked in the music and sound to create a 100-minute “radio play” which helped spark interest in the project. Later, animatics editor Schiff cut an animatic version of the sequences played to the songs “Bell Bottoms” and “Hocus Pocus” to show how the film would play.

As less extreme examples, Heim said he found it valuable to be at the table reading and for the blocking, while Wolinsky said, “The most traditional thing is to come on a few days before shooting.” Smith agreed with that and stated his gratitude to his assistant editor John Lee, who would come in some weeks before he did to set up the editing rooms.

With that, this year’s edition of Invisible Art/Visible Artists came to an end, and the program participants, audience and panelists alike, carried on their own editing conversations in the courtyard outside.

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Features

Monty the Mentor: In-Demand TV Editor DeGraff Eager to Help Any Assistant Who Asks

by Debra Kaufman
written by Debra Kaufman 12 minutes read

by Debra Kaufman • portraits by Wm. Stetz

The editing career of Monty DeGraff has been in sync with some of television’s cultural icons. Starting off with his first editing credit, cutting a 1989 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), followed by five early episodes of Melrose Place (1992-1999) as an assistant editor, he went on to edit throughout five seasons of Law & Order (1990-2010), nine episodes of Daredevil (2015-present), and now several yet-to-air installments of Amazon Studios’ The Man in the High Castle (2015-present) and the pilot of the much-anticipated upcoming ABC sci-fi thriller The Crossing (2018).

Monty DeGraff.
Photo by Wm. Stetz

From his first film job as an apprentice on the lot of Lorimar (the studio that brought us such mainstays as The Waltons, Dallas and Falcon Crest), to the golden age of original streaming content, DeGraff has achieved his goal in the field. “What I really wanted was experience cutting lots of different types of shows, and get to work with the very best material on the most compelling shows,” he says.

ABC’s The Crossing, which is set to premiere April 2, is a high-concept story that some have compared to Lost: A town becomes a haven for war refugees escaping an event 250 years in the future, ultimately revealing a conspiracy. DeGraff said the pilot came to him through ABC post-production executive Paul Rabwin, with whom he worked on the 2005 miniseries Revelations. “He convinced the producers to meet me, and they did in fact hire me,” DeGraff relates.

Although he doesn’t want to reveal too much about The Crossing, DeGraff says the pilot’s opening scene takes place under water. “They did a lot of shooting in a water tank in Vancouver,” he says. “It’s a phenomenally beautiful shot and such a strong piece, it pulls you in for the rest of the episode. I think all of us who worked on it are really proud of it. It was a rare project where, even in the middle, we felt the show was going to be picked up.”

The pilot, he recounts, was “one of the smoothest” he’s worked on, in part because of his assistants, Greg Sirota and Kaylee Koenig, along with music editor Amber Funk. “Greg was my first assistant and took control of everything that came into the cutting room,” says DeGraff.

He also played a role in advancing Sirota’s career. “Greg was very experienced,” he reveals. “He couldn’t figure out how to make the leap to editor, so at the end of the pilot process, when it was assured the pilot would be picked up, I spoke with the producers and convinced them they could take a chance on Greg. He got picked up as an editor and he’s thriving. There’s nothing more exciting than seeing someone do really good work and become a peer.”

“I’ve had many assistants with whom I have never developed a relationship, but when an assistant says, ‘I’d like to stay with you on a number of projects and have you help me become an editor,’ I take that relationship very seriously.”

Mentoring younger editors has become an important focus for DeGraff. When he was editing City of Angels (2000-present), he had his first experience mentoring an assistant, Kelley Dixon (now ACE). “First of all, she was African American and it was startling to me how she got there,” the editor concedes. “She was also a tremendously talented sound editor and made my cuts look good. She and I also did Bull [2000-present] and Revelations together, and we could talk about what we were doing.” Dixon went on to edit Breaking Bad (2008-2013), Shameless (2011-present) and The Walking Dead (2010-present), among other shows.

Knowing more about DeGraff’s own path to becoming an editor helps clarify why mentoring is so important to him today. New York-born and raised, he was a history major at the University of Rochester. After graduation, he was torn between law school and a career in film and television. A friend’s mother worked at Paramount and found him an opening as an NBC page, and the decision was made.

The Crossing.
ABC

The page job led to an opening in the post-production department where DeGraff found work as an apprentice editor. “Once I was in the union, I got a job at Lorimar, which was inside a studio, on the old MGM lot [now Sony],” he recalls. “They had an army of editors, assistants and apprentices, all in film.” That gig got him on the Editors Guild roster, and his first job as ACE editor Tom Benko’s assistant on MacGyver (1985-1992). When Benko got the call to do the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation, he asked his assistant to join him there. Two seasons later, DeGraff recounts, he asked executive producer Rick Berman for a chance to edit an episode. “He said that if Tom was okay with it, so was he,” recounts DeGraff, who then became an editor.

For the next few years, DeGraff “bounced back and forth” between editing and assisting. Then he got on a Dick Wolf show, New York Undercover (1994-1999), which led to his stint on Law & Order. “That was the single most important happening in my career, outside of the initial editing credit on Star Trek,” the editor attests. “Law & Order was critically acclaimed and it allowed me to reach out to other producers.” After Law & Order, DeGraff considers his work on Netflix’s Daredevil to be another big leap forward. “It was an extremely well-shot show that had a lot of very complex, challenging fight scenes,” he continues. “When you meet a challenge like that, you grow.”

DeGraff notes that, in addition to his breakthrough projects, the craft of editing TV dramas has changed in the last 15 years with the increased amount of footage. “Single-camera is a misnomer,” he says. “It’s almost always multi-camera and, especially for cable and streaming shows, we’re dealing with 50 minutes for the final product, as opposed to network, which is 42 minutes. That eight minutes is a lot. One-and-a-half hours of dailies became three or four.

The Man in the High Castle.
Amazon Studios

“Those editors who could handle the complexity thrived,” he continues. “Everyone found their own way of how to really own the material and not get bogged down by it.” Young assistants, he adds, aren’t intimidated by the footage since they see their editors doing it on a daily basis.

The increased footage had an unexpected impact. “When you’re shooting multiple takes from several cameras, it puts a lot of weight on the editors to be the repository of knowledge about that footage,” DeGraff stresses. “It made me eventually stop second-guessing what the directors or producers would want — not to ignore their vision, but I started to have confidence that if I could satisfy myself, I could satisfy everyone else.”

Throughout that period of time when DeGraff was getting his footing as an editor, he had no mentors. “A number of editors helped me by rehiring me, but I didn’t have those editors who actually critiqued my work and showed me how they were doing what they were doing,” he says. “So I had to find my own way.” Part of that was due to the nature of television post-production, where assistants are often hired separately from editors, unlike the close relationship that often develops between an editor and assistant in the feature film world.

The Man in the High Castle.
Amazon Studios

DeGraff didn’t even consciously consider himself to be a mentor when he first started helping Dixon. “She was the first person that made me think that I had something real to offer young editors in terms of my experience,” he says. He says he prefers if the assistant approaches him for mentoring. “That shows an openness and a hunger to learn from my experience,” he says. “I’ve had many assistants with whom I have never developed a relationship, but when an assistant says, ‘I’d like to stay with you on a number of projects and have you help me become an editor,’ I take that relationship very seriously.”

When he was editing the Netflix horror show Hemlock Grove (2013-2015), assistant Damien Smith approached him. “He asked to stay with me for a couple of shows, so he could grow to be an editor,” says DeGraff. “He had a tremendous amount of background in sound work and was already a talented editor. He assisted me on the second season of Daredevil and the pilot of Designated Survivor (2016-present), and showed producers he could cut scenes, and they bumped him up to editor this season.”

The editor’s most recent mentee is Koenig, who assisted him on The Crossing pilot. When DeGraff moved over to The Man in the High Castle, she reached out and asked if he was looking for an assistant. “I felt like I had a lot to learn from him,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Absolutely.’” The experience, according to Koenig, has been transformative. “Right away, he had me practice cutting scenes, including scenes that were very difficult,” she adds. “He gave notes like a director would, in a way that shows he didn’t dislike the choice but that another, better one could be made.”

Monty DeGraff. Photo by Wm. Stetz

DeGraff also encouraged her not to be afraid to speak up. “He said, ‘You have good opinions and thoughts, and to sit in the room and not speak them isn’t doing the project a service,’” she remembers. “I found my voice and learned to have confidence in my own abilities — that people will believe me if I believe in myself.”

Mentoring is a two-way street, DeGraff notes. “I am constantly learning from my assistants new short cuts and ways of using the Avid more effectively,” he reveals. “They learn from their peers and the other editors they work with, and pass it along.” Working with mentees has had another impact on him: “The commitment has really deepened for me. It has given me a lot more confidence in my own editing. A lot of the process of editing isn’t something we articulate to ourselves. [Having to do so] has deepened my understanding of my own process and helped me as an editor.”

Mentoring Guild assistants has another important facet. “During an open Editors Guild meeting last fall, it became apparent that many young editors are not aware of — or passing on — the protections and benefits of union membership to their assistants,” says DeGraff. “The culture of knowledge of our bargained-for rights is slowly eroding. It’s the editors’ duty to help their assistants know their rights.” The Guild, he adds, is also “aware of this reality and is working to turn it around.”

When DeGraff started in the business, there were seven African Americans in the organization. “Now there are a large number of African-American assistants,” he says. The editor has been happy to mentor any assistant who asks for help, but his work with the Guild’s African-American Steering Committee, and his awareness of women editors’ issues, through the Women’s Steering Committee (both sub-committees of the Guild’s Diversity Committee) has honed his focus. “I’m not opposed to mentoring whoever comes across my path,” he adds. “But I’ll be especially on the lookout for talented assistants who are women or people of color.”

The Crossing.
ABC

DeGraff notes that encouraging both women and African-American union members is crucial. “Often we are in our cutting rooms and isolated from one another,” he explains. “One of the biggest challenges is simply knowing that there are others like you to whom you can turn for support and information. It serves primarily as an opportunity for us to know who’s out there, but also an opportunity to help someone who may encounter a challenge for the first time. Talking with someone else who has encountered that challenge is a way to go forward.

“There are so many African-American assistants out there who are hungry for solid information on how you find your support team,” he continues. “Everyone has to create that for her or himself. For some things, someone needs to show you the ropes. A lot of that takes place in the steering committee.” The committee also plans to celebrate successful members as “way-showers” for those assistants. “We all take great pleasure and joy in each other’s success,” says DeGraff, noting that editor James Wilcox recently won the ACE Eddie Award in the Best Edited Miniseries or Motion Picture for Television for the pilot episode of Genius (2017).

DeGraff has already started work on Netflix’s Narcos (2015-present), and the production has assigned him an assistant, who he will doubtlessly be open to mentor. “I’ll be doing two episodes over the next six months,” he says. “They’re mini-movies, with very dense storytelling in terms of imagery and sound. I’m really looking forward to that.”

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Features

Bridge of Lies
Editor Keith Fraase Shapes
the Political Drama ‘Chappaquiddick’

by Rob Feld
written by Rob Feld 16 minutes read

by Rob Feld • portraits by Sarah Shatz

Originally intending to be an actor, Keith Fraase fell in love with behind-the-camera work while at the University of Texas at Austin. Then he thought he wanted to be a cinematographer, but eventually fell into an apprentice editor job with Sandra Adair, ACE, to replace a friend who was leaving that position on Elvis and Annabelle (2007). From Adair, he learned a work ethic, a sense of a film family and a love of editing that would serve him well after she later referred him to director Terrence Malick.

Malick’s productions are known for their relentless pace, with multiple editors collaborating on any given film. Fraase originally interviewed to apprentice on the iconoclastic filmmaker’s The Tree of Life (2011), but heard nothing back. It would be two years before the film finally moved out of pre-production and Fraase, who had been editing corporate work in the meantime, finally got the call for the job; he was credited as “artistic consultant” on the film. Ultimately, Fraase became lead editor on Malick’s next film, To the Wonder (2012), and stayed with him for seven years. The director’s style of filmmaking, and the vast amount of footage it encompasses, also proved a perfect training ground for Fraase’s first documentary project, Amir Bar-Lev’s Grateful Dead film, Long Strange Trip (2017).

Chappaquiddick.
Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures

Eager to work on a more classically styled film, Fraase jumped at the chance when college friends who had written the script for the upcoming Chappaquiddick approached him to meet its director, John Curran. The feature film, which opens April 6 through Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures, depicts the scandal that eventually ended the presidential prospects of Democratic Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy (Jason Clarke), after he drove his car off a bridge, killing its passenger — an aspiring political strategist and Kennedy insider, Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara).

Chappaquiddick, named for the island where the accident took place, presents the logistical truth of the actual events, but focuses on Kennedy, his disastrous decisions and his position within his unique and powerful family. Fraase’s challenge was to maintain empathy for Kennedy as the senator makes unforgivable choices. It was an obvious challenge to be sure, but — emerging from the stylistic difficulties of Terrence Malick’s films, and from a documentary that could have gone in any number of directions — one that proved far more complicated than the editor had anticipated, as he told CineMontage in an interview in January that also covers his work with Malick.

CineMontage: Chappaquiddick seems a radical departure for you, both stylistically and process-wise. Both the screenplay and camera moves are specifically designed.

Keith Fraase: It’s actually why I took the job. Chappaquiddick was a chance to try something that was more classical. I naively went into it thinking it was going to be a walk in the park, because I had worked on stylistically more adventurous films. But just because a script is fantastically written doesn’t mean it’s going to play fantastically when it’s all put together, or that people will perceive the film’s events in a certain way. When I was reading the script, my feelings toward Ted Kennedy’s character changed from scene to scene — between utter disgust to a sort of empathy for the shadow he lived under, cast by his brothers and his father. Sometimes I was rooting for him, sometimes I wasn’t.

CM: How did you approach that balancing act when you actually had footage with which to work? 

Chappaquiddick.
Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures

KF: It was tricky. The character makes some big mistakes. What is it like to live your life in the shadow of JFK and Bobby Kennedy? It presents a fascinating character, and even more so because it’s real. When I first spoke to John [Curran], I wanted to make sure we never condemned Ted fully, but rather felt empathy for him — not sympathy, but empathy for his position — while also understanding that the things that he did were questionable at best, and horrific at worst.

CM: And how does that translate to your job?

KF: The big thing that we worked on was performance choices. There were certain lines that read beautifully on the page, but when Ted’s character would say them, they would just make you wince with utter disgust for him. After test screenings, we tried to shave away as many of those as possible, to make the character someone you could at least follow through the film and not make you want to walk out of the theatre.

Many moments from our first cut were too specific when, as much as possible, we wanted to make what happened the night of the accident a question. It’s not known for sure whether Mary Jo was alive for hours afterwards; she could have died on impact or by drowning in the car. We wanted to say, “This could be happening.”

Basically, there’s a moment in the movie where there’s an intercut between Ted doing his nightly routine and Mary Jo in the car. That montage was created to express that this could be happening in Ted’s mind, the thinking of that. Now whether that comes across to the audience, I’m not sure. But we tried to stress the mysteries of that night, and not make a definite choice.

CM: Without giving anything away, can you name an example of a scene that was too specific?

KF: There was a scene that occurs after the accident, where Ted and his friends Joe Gargan [Ed Helms] and Paul Markham [Jim Gaffigan] go back to the bridge. Joe and Paul are diving into the water, trying to save Mary Jo, but they are unable to, and Ted says they need to get back. There’s a whole scene that takes place after that in which they’re arguing about what to do. After the first test screening, I thought, “No matter what, this is the scene; it’s gonna stay in the movie because it has hints and is very exciting.

But we ultimately ended up cutting that scene from the film because we realized from subsequent test audiences involving 100 people each that things were occurring in the scene that were swaying the needle too much in one direction in terms of how they viewed Ted’s character — and they were never able to get back and feel for him after that point. That totally came from those two screenings. We realized that scene was a linchpin that opened up a dam for us.

CM: What is your responsibility when telling a historical story like this one — about people who did or might still exist?

The Tree of Life.
Fox Searchlight Pictures

KF: I had the luxury as the editor to focus solely on story. It was more John’s job to be aware of the fault lines. I felt it was my job to say, “This is the story that we’re telling. This is how best to achieve that goal.” If too many of us in the editing room are confined by other considerations, we’re going to keep ourselves from experimenting in a way that will produce the most interesting results.

But I’ve now worked on two documentaries [including an episode of the Dirty Money series, which became available on Netflix in January] and it’s weird talking about people as characters when they’re real. All of the films I’ve worked on with Terry were in some way autobiographical; Tree of Life deals with the death of his brother, and To the Wonder deals with his second wife. I was very conscious of the fact that when I’m talking about characters who do bad things, sometimes I’m talking to the person who did those bad things.

For any film, I try to have love and empathy for every character, whether good or bad. If you maintain that empathy for those characters, then you never have to worry about treading lightly because you really do care about them. I care about everyone in Chappaquiddick. Even if I think that their decisions were wrong, I don’t think that they’re terrible people for making wrong decisions. I just think that they were mistaken.

CM: Speaking of Malick, tell me how you got into his world.

KF: When The Tree of Life was finally ready to go, I was called to interview with Terry. To be honest, I hadn’t seen any of his films and wasn’t aware of his importance to cinema, so I wasn’t awestruck and we were able to have a nice conversation. When he interviews you, he likes to talk about where you’re from. I’m from Houston, which he knows really well. It wasn’t a chat about film; he was interested in me as a person.

CM: How did you make the leap from apprentice to full editor?

KF: Terry had always planned to do a movie in tandem with Tree of Life, which eventually became Voyage of Time [2016]; the creation section of Tree of Life would expand to be a 40-minute IMAX movie, released simultaneously. Because the producers had no one else available, I was asked to be assistant editor on it. I of course jumped at that, but really didn’t have the experience for it. But I was brought into a room to sit at a table of 10 people, including Terry, the producers and a visual effects supervisor who had worked on The Matrix and Batman Begins — heavy-hitters. They started asking me about workflow and process. I had no answers for anybody. I basically told them I would check on it and get back to them. It’s the most embarrassing moment of my career. But for whatever reason, they didn’t fire me.

CM: Yet you wound up as editor?

KF: An editor was supposed to be hired, but Terry was involved in cutting Tree, and they never got around to it. So, I just started cutting footage. I guess I was ballsy enough back then to grab Terry and pull him into a room to see what I had been doing. He was impressed enough that he started working with me. We ended up having a really good rapport. Part of what I did on Voyage then became the creation sequence in Tree. I worked on Voyage for about two and a half years [ultimately sharing editing credit with Rehman Nizar Ali], then became the lead editor on his next film, To the Wonder.

CM: So what was your process for working with Malick, once it became formalized?

KF: Terry has a very strict dogma, which I learned on Tree. There are exceptions to every rule, but he believes films should be fluid, so he’s always looking for the camera to keep moving, and always wants the actor to move. He wants deep focus as much as possible; he thinks selective focus doesn’t feel real — that it’s the filmmaker placing his own intention on the viewer, when you should be allowed to look around the frame as you please. The screen should be like looking into a window. Before To the Wonder was shot, we had a lot of conversations. It’s a really different process.

CM: What is that process like?

Advertising art for The Tree of Life.
Fox Searchlight Pictures

KF: I don’t put together a rough cut, show it to the director and then have 10 weeks to deliver a final. It’s much more like a documentary. I make selects in a different way than I would for a narrative film, where there are actually takes. Instead, I’m making selects for behavior. I’m looking for interesting things that the actors do. It doesn’t have to include all the lines of the scene. Terry isn’t shooting scenes of a script; he’s giving situations to the actors for them to improvise, and is interested in what surprises him. So I’m just looking for moments of life that don’t feel like a line delivery. That takes a while to figure out with Terry. If I go through a scene and it wasn’t successful because nothing moves me, I might not select anything.

For Terry’s films, I’d make three different cuts of each scene, trying to use all of the footage that I had selected from however many hours they shot, to see the different ways a scene could go. We called that “triangulation.” By the time I’m on that third cut, and I’ve used all my main line selects, I’m usually working with scraps of things. I’ll end up making something that I wouldn’t have otherwise intended to make. And sometimes that can produce interesting and surprising results.

CM: How does that work with multiple editors?

KF: I think we ultimately had five for To the Wonder. We divide up the movie, differently for each film. We didn’t know exactly how they were all going to fit together. We’ll sit down, all three editors, and spend about a week looking at the different scenes and moving them around in the timeline, trying to find a structure that makes some sort of sense. This is all before Terry gets into the cutting room.

The first assembly we did of To the Wonder was nine or 10 hours long. We find the few kernels that are actually igniting and that we think we can make something from. Then we choose a representative cutout of the three cuts we would have made, and Terry comes in. He goes through every scene, every cut. It’s also incredibly frustrating because he is a phenomenal editor in his own right, but he refuses to learn Avid. He basically knows three buttons. He’ll say, “Just do something like this,” press those three buttons and do something amazing. I would beg him to let me teach him Avid but he refused to do it. I think he likes not having the power himself.

CM: Please explain.

KF: Terry is all about letting go of intention. He feels his job is not to create, but rather to recognize and select. When something happens, he’ll say, “That I can recognize as strong. We need to hold on to that.” Accidents are like the universe saying, “Hey, this should go here.” I think that’s why he likes to sit back as much as possible. Then we’re not locked when we mix. We mix, and cut, mix and cut four or five times. He wants the soundscape to be part of the creative process.

CM: That sounds amazing creatively, but isn’t it exhausting?

KF: It’s incredibly exhausting. I don’t think I could do it now. We dedicated a lot of our lives to the edit room. I think Terry really believes in overcoming struggle to create something. He likes the feeling that we’re under attack — that we’re racing against the clock, against money running out, or against financiers who want to take the movie away from us. He found a way of expressing himself, and he keeps trying to go down that path. I think for him to continue his journey, it’s good for him to keep changing his crew. Terry’s a kind and wonderful person, and he’s a good friend. And I do think he needs young people who are willing to go the distance with him, who have the stamina to keep going.

CM: Tell me about transitioning into documentary with Long Strange Trip.

KF: I was terrified about starting A Long Strange Trip because I had felt that I had never done a documentary. Voyage of Time was technically a documentary, but it’s kind of its own thing. Although this was working with a lot of interview material and voiceover, which Terry used a lot, as well. There was an infinite amount of archival footage, which I had also dealt with before. I was also used to trying to find the story in the images. Sometimes with a narrative film, the story is already mapped out. With documentaries and with Terry’s films, you have to dig deep and find where the narrative is in each image or each sequence. So I ended up being a fantastic fit, and I had a blast.

CM: Was there anything unique about the editing process of the 238-minute film?

KF: When I came on board, another editor had already been cutting for eight or nine months. At the time it was only going to be like a two-hour movie. They had a rough sort of idea of where the movie was going to go. I was brought on to help finish it. We did end up expanding the film. I helped flesh out the themes and we spent several weeks just doing that, trying to figure out where we wanted the story to go in terms of the themes and the ideas.

The only thing I can say that was unique about this process was that we sort of fine-cut as we went along, instead of just doing a very quick, rough edit. Of course, we would go back and change things. But we had the ability to breathe in the editing room, to take our time and really craft something that was layered and nuanced on the first pass.

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ColumnsMy Most Memorable Film

Tom Foligno on ‘The Aviator’

by Peter Tonguette
written by Peter Tonguette 10 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette

Tom Foligno.

In 2004, after spending a decade working with Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE, assistant editor Tom Foligno finally got his first chance to be an editor. It wasn’t in the cutting room, however, but on the big screen.

That year, Foligno was cast as an extra in Scorsese’s biopic of the publicity-averse industrialist and sometimes moviemaker Howard Hughes, The Aviator. The film — with a cast including Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn and John C. Reilly as Noah Dietrich — was honored with five Academy Awards, including Best Achievement in Film Editing for Schoonmaker.

For a memorable scene depicting the editing of Hughes’ 1930 classic, Hell’s Angels, Scorsese turned not only to bit-part players but also to several real-life veterans of his own cutting room, including the film’s first assistant editors, Foligno and Scott Brock.

“It was great because Marty thought of us right away,” remembers Foligno, who had worked as an assistant editor on five Scorsese films, beginning with Casino (1995) and ending with The Aviator. “He said, ‘I have this scene in an editing room and I want you guys.’ We also helped dress the set. They wanted our opinions on what an editing room might look like.”

The scene has the usual Scorsese blend of motion and energy. “It’s one of those classic Scorsese shots where he starts tight on an old-fashioned Moviola and then pulls back,” Foligno remembers. “It twirls around and we see the entire editing room, and it twirls around again.” The camera pauses on a female editor meticulously examining a strip of film while wearing white gloves (a cameo appearance by legendary editor Anne V. Coates, ACE) before moving onto Foligno, looking dapper in a suit with a vest. The assistant editor walks across the screen while carrying a reel of film. Soon after, an off-screen character barks out: “Pat, Mr. Hughes needs this reel in the projection room right now!”

Since Scorsese and Schoonmaker had already made the transition from film to digital editing, Foligno and his cutting room colleagues were unable to contribute splicers or tape to the set, but they did help create the picture of the “super-busy, cluttered editing room” envisioned by production designer Dante Ferretti and his wife, set decorator Francesca Lo Schiavo.

Although Foligno’s walk-on in The Aviator remains his sole screen appearance to date — “My only,” he jokes, “my absolute only” — the experience represented the culmination of the decade he spent working on the director’s films. “He had plenty of other extras,” Foligno reflects, “but he wanted to give us that opportunity to get us in the film.”

A native of New Jersey, Foligno grew up as a fan of Scorsese’s films but never imagined that he would one day work with — let alone be directed by — the master filmmaker who shares his Italian-American heritage. “I would rent VHS tapes of all his films, but the one that really hit home was Goodfellas [1990],” Foligno says. “I must have watched that a thousand times and tried to memorize every line, but I wasn’t saying, ‘I’m going to work for that guy one day.’ Not at all — it was the furthest thing from my mind.”

Foligno broke into the business in 1986, when he was hired to work in post-production at Troma Entertainment in New York City. “I had never been in an editing room, much less a full film company,” he says. “I worked for a while, then they started paying me a little bit of money.”

The Aviator.
Miramax/Warner Bros./Photofest

While at Troma, Foligno met future assistant editor Joel Hirsch, who subsequently worked with Scorsese as an apprentice on Cape Fear (1991) and second assistant editor on The Age of Innocence (1993). By the time Casino came around, Hirsch had moved up to first assistant editor, and Foligno was brought on as second assistant. “I said, ‘If you ever have a chance to hire me in Scorsese’s cutting room, please do,’” Foligno recounts. “And he did.”

Starting with Casino, Schoonmaker and Scorsese cut their films using the Lightworks system, which the filmmakers preferred to the more widely adopted Avid. “On Avid, it’s a lot of keyboard strokes and mouse clicks,” Foligno explains. “On Lightworks, there is a controller that mimics how it would be on a flatbed system like a KEM or a Steenbeck. There were only four buttons and a little toggle that would allow you to go forward or reverse. Thelma saw the set-up of this system and it looked very familiar to her. I think that’s why she gravitated toward it instead of Avid.”

The Aviator was the first Scorsese-Schoonmaker project on which there was no film in the cutting room. “On all the films prior to that, we had worked with digital information, but we always matched back to film and projected film in a double system with sound and picture,” Foligno says. “Previously, I was on a bench, conforming film, marking up opticals and sending out requests for things. This was the first film where I didn’t have a bench, so they got me a Lightworks.”

During the production of The Aviator, the cast and crew — including the editing team — moved multiple times. Filming kicked off in Montreal before moving to Los Angeles for desert and flying scenes. Finally, the company made its way to New York, but then Scorsese changed offices, relocating from Park Avenue to his current digs at the Directors Guild of America building.

“It was stressful because you had to have everything organized,” Foligno comments. “There were a lot of tapes and other things that we had to keep track of, and make sure we didn’t leave anything anywhere. You never knew what was going to happen next or what we were going to have to do, so each day was like a fresh start.”

Despite the repeated moves, Scorsese and Schoonmaker’s process remained unchanged. To go over dailies — which sometimes accumulated during busy production periods — the director and editor sat in a screening room while Foligno operated a projector via remote control. “We had to make sure that we knew where all the takes were and on what tapes they were,” Foligno says. “We had to really map it out via time code. If he said, ‘I want to see Take 5,’ you had to get to that very quickly because his time was limited.”

Observing Scorsese scrutinizing the takes was an education in itself. “He would be editing in his mind,” Foligno recalls. “There were little, subtle things that might have just gone by you, but he would say things like, ‘I love that. See that look?’

“Thelma worked right from the first moment that we started shooting,” Foligno continues. “She assembled it, but sometimes she might cut a scene together with two or three takes of the same angle back-to-back, so Marty would look at those within the context of the scene itself and then make a final decision.”

Tom Foligno had a cameo role as film editor, circa 1930, in a scene from Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004), on which he worked as an assistant editor.

From Scorsese’s notes, Schoonmaker assembled exhaustive lists of selects. “She had books and books of selects culled from Marty’s notes to help her keep track of the footage,” Foligno remembers. “Marty had an amazing memory of what he liked, so those notes were paramount in Thelma getting what he wanted into the cut.”

Using Lightworks, Foligno also helped on temp sound effects and mixing, as well as visual effects. “In the scene where Hughes sets all his clothing on fire in his backyard and he then calls Dietrich to get him all new clothes, there’s a split screen, but Marty didn’t want a usual split screen,” Foligno says. “He wanted one that went from the top right to the bottom left, and the fire that was in Hughes’ shot had to bleed through. It was a cool effect, and I was happy that I could creatively shape that moment into what it eventually became.”

Under Schoonmaker’s supervision, Foligno, along with Brock, also helped to temp mix the soundtrack for screenings. “We would make it sound how she wanted it to sound,” he explains. “She has a fantastic ear for minute detail, and I learned a lot about music editing from her.”

Although The Aviator has a final running time of 2:50, Foligno remembers the film coming together more readily than some previous projects. “When we first cut Casino, it was three-and-a-half hours long, and after we screened it, Marty decided, ‘I want to move a bunch of stuff around.’ So we juggled a lot of scenes and reconfigured the whole thing,” Foligno recounts. “The Aviator pretty much stayed as it was after the first cut.”

Tom Foligno and his children Sylvie, left, and Hannah with editor Thelma Schoonmaker, during post-production on The Aviator at Halloween in 2004.

Foligno’s collaboration with Scorsese and Schoonmaker came to a close after The Aviator, but not before she had a chance to acknowledge her longtime assistant on a very public stage. During Schoonmaker’s Oscar acceptance speech, she first thanked Scorsese and the cast before expressing gratitude for the contributions of several other members of the team: “There are so many people to thank, I won’t thank them, but I think they know where they are — the mixers, the wonderful visual effects people, but particularly my assistants, Scott Brock, Tom Foligno and Erin Crackel. They really got it up there on the screen.”

Foligno was watching the broadcast at home in New York. “I couldn’t believe how generous she was in doing that,” he says. “Usually, it’s producers or directors or big executives who are thanked, but not us — not the assistants. That was really mind-blowing, and I will always be indebted to her for that.”

Foligno left the Scorsese-Schoonmaker cutting room to gain more experience on Avid, and in 2013, as big jobs in New York started to decline, he moved to Los Angeles. He is currently working on the popular HBO series Ballers (2015-present), but remains appreciative of the opportunity to work with the director he grew up revering. “You can’t imagine all the people I met just from being in his office,” Foligno says. “The Dalai Lama [the subject of 1997’s Kundun] himself came into our editing room. He was fascinated with the splicer: ‘How does that work?’ I shook the hands of Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Newman and John F. Kennedy, Jr., to name a few, who came by the office to see Marty.”

Above all, for the lessons learned on The Aviator and other films, the assistant editor is grateful to Schoonmaker.

“She was the nicest person — gracious and fun to be with as well as being a phenomenally great editor,” Foligno says. “As I look back, it was just a great time to be there with her, doing what we were doing.”

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GuildWeb Exclusives

What Our Members Do: Marko Costanzo

by Edward Landler
written by Edward Landler 6 minutes read

Where are you currently employed?

I am a freelance Foley artist. I work with c5 Sound, SOS Post, Warner Bros. and Disney.

Current Project?

The feature Mary Poppins Returns and the TV series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisal and She’s Gotta Have It.

Describe Your Job?

Foley artists create sounds in sync with actions seen on screen. We will make the footstep sounds for every character in a film, giving their steps the personality the actor portrays on camera. We will use props to create sounds for other things happening on screen: Creaking beds, billowing sheets hanging on a line, horses’ reins, soldiers’ rattlings, etc.

How did you first become interested in this line of work?

I was introduced to the Foley room as an apprentice sound editor on Sophie’s Choice. I walked into this dimly lit room with a dirt pit and a gravel pit and odd wood-surfaced floors and watched the then “King of NY Foley,” Elisha Birnbaum, make footsteps for Meryl Streep. Then Elisha was asked to make the sound of a lightbulb pull-chain and he told the editor he did not have one, but would buy it. I chimed in immediately, declaring I had one at home and would bring it the next morning. The engineer recorded me pulling the lightbulb chain; when asked what I thought of the Foley room, I said, “This is something I could like doing.”

Who gave you your first break?

Elisha Birnbaum gave me my first break for Foley work. Before that, Chic Ciccolini gave me my apprentice sound editor opportunity and, before that, Roberta Friedman hired me as a production assistant on the Omni Magazine TV show. My very first break was from Guy Spera, one of the owners of Sound One.

What was your first union job?

Sophie’s Choice.

Which of your credits or projects have made you the most proud and why?

I am so proud of so many it’s hard to choose, but The Silence of the Lambs comes to mind over and over. It was an amazing film. It was also at that time I started working with the crew at c5 Sound. Silence became very popular, and being a small part of that energy was enough fuel for me to keep striving to do more.

What was your biggest challenge in your job (or on a particular project) and how did you overcome/solve it?

The biggest challenge by far was creating the 30-foot metal lifeboat in Life of Pi, complete with zebra, hyena, orangutan and tiger all frolicking around inside it while floating alone on the high seas. Pi had many unique settings; the lifeboat and the floating island inhabited by meerkats are just two.

The lifeboat was created by placing large metal containers next to each other to form different sounding cavities. We made a list of all the different sounding parts of the boat and then recorded each character on each part of the boat. For example, the top edge of the boat would sound metallic, but not hollow like the belly of the boat. The seats of the boat also sounded different than the boat’s bottom and, at the start of the lifeboat sequence, there were wooden pallets that were later removed and used for rafts. Then we made a pit big enough just to float the pallets. The editors then sorted through our tracks to put the footsteps and other boat interactions in order.

What was the most fun you’ve had at work?

Working on The Big Lebowski. The Coen brothers have made many wonderful films and Lebowski had just the right mix of human interplay among so many wonderful actors. I still watch it and recall dropping the bowling ball on the tile floor, sticking Lebowski’s head in the toilet, and splashing in the tub to avoid a marmot’s scratches. Back then, our entire sound crew was bowling once a week and we were having a blast when we weren’t working, too.

Jobwise, what do you hope to be doing five years from now?

I hope to be working on films in the same capacity as I am now, and maybe do a few more talks about Foley at film festivals — and perhaps teach the craft at universities. Foley is an essential part of the film process and Foley artists will continue to fill the needs of directors and sound editors for their films.

What are your outside activities, hobbies, passions?

My outside activities include skiing, scuba diving, collecting bottles (while scuba diving), playing video games, and making balloon sculptures. I used to be known as Marko the Magician in high school and college. While I do not perform magic anymore, I still perform with balloons for parties and conventions.

Favorite movie(s)? Why?

It’s a Wonderful Life,  pure magic. Brazil, way out there! The Silence of the Lambs, scary.

Favorite TV program(s)?  Why?

Boardwalk Empire, great writing. House of Cards, good evil people. And (going way back), The Little Rascals, I loved the Flory-Dories!

Do you have an industry mentor?

When I entered the industry, Elisha Birnbaum was looking to retire and he allowed me to observe him for almost a year. In that time, I learned many techniques and secrets that I carry with me to this day. I was in a unique situation working at Sound One during those years (1984-1989). I really learned a lot about Foley recording from their handful of sound engineers, as well as the dozens of enthusiastic Foley editors that sat in the Foley room with me each day. Each would describe the flavor of the sounds he or she wanted to hear. Their comments would help me balance the sounds we were creating. They all rounded and grounded me.

What advice would you offer to someone interested in pursuing your line of work?

Find any job you can at a facility that has a Foley stage. Work your way into meeting the editors, the engineers and the Foley artists. Be willing to help if needed, and be prepared to listen and learn.

Was there ever a circumstance when you had to rely on the Guild for help or assistance?

Over the years, I have called the Guild with questions pertaining to hours and facilities. The advice I received has saved me time and helped me to clarify my queries.

Is there anything you’d like to say to your fellow Guild members, some words of encouragement?

Always do the best that you can! I have been part of the New York City film community since 1981. Making a career here is possible if you have a good work ethic and if you want to participate in this collaborative world. I have met so many talented people since joining our ranks, and I cherish all the associated memories of hard work. I work hard because I am proud of what I do. Be proud of what you do! Your name is on it.

Compiled by Edward Landler 

Editor’s Note: To recommend a member (including yourself) to be featured on the home page of the Editors Guild website contact edlandler@roadrunner.com.

 

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