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Film

In Like Flynt

by Edward Landler August 1, 2016

written by Edward Landler 11 minutes read

by Edward Landler

Director Miloš Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt premiered 20 years ago, on October 13, 1996, the closing night of the New York Film Festival. From an original screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, it traces the life of the Hustler publisher from selling moonshine in Kentucky at the age of 12 through his creation of one of the raunchiest and most popular American sex magazines to his landmark First Amendment victory at the United States Supreme Court.

The People vs. Larry Flynt. <em>Columbia Pictures/Photofest</em>

The People vs. Larry Flynt. Columbia Pictures/Photofest

The film met with both acclaim and disdain. In an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oral History interview, Marcia Nasatir, an industry executive involved with the film, said, “Miloš found the worst person in the world to defend. When I talked to women outside the business, they said, ‘I’d never see a movie called The People vs. Larry Flynt.’”

Far from celebrating sexual liberation, Hustler’s images of women were often demeaning and sometimes violent. Yet, in depicting the unseemly Flynt and his wife, stripper Althea Leasure, the film distills and blends raucous comedy and personal tragedy to draw a sharp satiric bead on the contradictions of the American character.

The day after the premiere, the porn tycoon flew Forman and his stars in his private jet to the director’s native land, the Czech Republic — a free democracy since the fall of Communism in 1989. At the invitation of President Václav Havel (a playwright and the filmmaker’s friend from childhood), Flynt’s saga was presented to an audience of 200 at the Presidential Palace in Prague with an interpreter providing simultaneous translation off-screen.

Nasatir commented, “You’ve got to live in a country where you have no freedoms to appreciate what it is.”

Three years before, while director Tim Burton was still shooting Alexander and Karaszewski’s script for Ed Wood (1994), about one of cinema’s cheesiest creators, the writers were drawn to another less than fully admirable real-life figure. “Just two regular Joes with wives and kids,” as they said in their introduction to the published screenplay, they wanted to write about “a man most noted for his shameless vulgarity.”

When they pitched the project to Columbia Pictures, they also sent an outline to Oliver Stone. His flair for mixing popular culture with political controversy in movies like Born on the Fourth of July (1989), The Doors (1991) and JFK (1991) made him an obvious choice to direct.

The Columbia executives told them, “It’s a Capra movie with porn!” When Stone expressed interest, Janet Yang, his partner in the production company, Ixtlan, set up a development deal with the studio.

Drawing from major news sources, court transcripts of Flynt’s legal battles and interviews with the publisher’s associates and friends, the writers spent half of 1994 writing a 215-page draft. When the script was cut down to 167 pages, Stone realized he was still too busy with Nixon (1995) to direct — but he wanted Ixtlan to produce.

Its “freedom of expression” theme led him to send the script to Forman, who had grown up under both Nazi and Communist dictatorships. A leading figure in Czech cinema, he had infused such films as Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman’s Ball (1967) with sly satire too subtle for ham-fisted government censors to comprehend.

The director was able to leave what was then Czechoslovakia during the “Prague Spring” of 1968 to seek work in America, and did not return after Soviet troops crushed Alexander Dubček’s reformist regime. Since then, Forman had made six English-language movies, two of which — One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984) — had brought him Best Picture and Best Director Oscars.

When Forman received the screenplay, he saw Flynt’s name in the title and threw it aside. When his manager told him Stone had sent it, he read it and found, as he said in an interview shortly before the film’s premiere, “the kind of script directors dream about.” He committed to the project in March 1995.

Forman said, “I had experienced political regimes in which crusades against pornographers…turned into the worst censorship where freedom of the press was practically eliminated entirely. It started with homosexuals and pornographers, and Jews and blacks, and finally…your plumber is a pervert…and you are a pervert.”

Cutting the final script down to 140 pages, Forman said he and the writers agreed that “the hero would be the Supreme Court and everybody else would be simply human with all their pros and cons.” The director, however, was determined not to glamorize pornography “because I am conditioned from my childhood to see pornography as bad and I still feel that way… I could have splashed the screen with images from Hustler that would make people scream in disgust.”

Such images were only suggested off-screen or not seen clearly in frames composed to draw attention to characters’ reactions to them. A graphic exception was a picture of a woman’s naked body being put through a meat grinder.

They also went through the script thoroughly with Flynt himself. He was no longer the wild man of the 1980s who drew contempt citations and was confined to a psychiatric prison facility for throwing oranges and spitting at the federal judge whose orders he defied. The writers regarded him as “a charming, soft-spoken man” — still in a wheelchair due to the 1978 sniper’s attack that severed his spinal cord.

As they completed their revisions with the publisher, Forman recalled, “I mustered up my courage and asked, ‘Larry, don’t you mind that you do not really look like a hero in some of these scenes?’ Flynt grunted, ‘Yes, I do mind, but what can I do about it when it’s true?’”

In December 1995, Columbia joined with Mike Medavoy’s Phoenix Pictures to finance the movie. Michael Hausman, who had worked on four of Forman’s films, would produce along with Stone and Yang.

Meanwhile, Forman had assembled a mix of experienced actors and non-professionals with fitting backgrounds to heighten the movie’s sense of reality, confirming Phoenix executive Nasatir’s view that “Miloš is one of the great casting people in the world.”

The director was set on Woody Harrelson to play Flynt “from the moment I met the guy.” The Texas-born Harrelson acknowledged, “Poor white trash, that’s me all the way.” Appropriately, Harrelson’s younger brother Brett was cast as Flynt’s brother Jimmy. Determined to work with Forman, Edward Norton pursued the role of civil liberties attorney Alan Isaacman so earnestly that he was a natural choice.

Political strategist James Carville played an anti-porn prosecutor and WNYW-TV news reporter and anchor Donna Hanover (and wife of then New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani) played evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton (sister of Jimmy Carter). Lawyers played lawyers and US marshals played themselves, as did Flynt’s personal bodyguard and personal physician. Flynt himself took on the role of the judge presiding over his first obscenity trial in Cincinnati.

The most problematic casting choice was rock singer Courtney Love, brought in by casting director Francine Maisler, to play the part of Althea Leasure Flynt. Not yet two years since Love’s husband, Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana, committed suicide, her own life had been nearly as troubled and indulgent as Leasure’s.

Forman offered her the role only if she would stay off drugs and agree to regular drug testing, but the insurance company refused to cover her. Yang negotiated a separate non-refundable $750,000 insurance policy. Columbia and Medavoy refused to pay for it and the cost was split among Stone, Yang, Hausman, Forman, Harrelson and Love.

The People vs. Larry Flynt. Columbia Pictures/Photofest

Flynt told Premiere magazine that what got the singer through production “was having the good fortune of having Miloš Forman as a director and getting involved with Edward Norton during the filming.” More than that, Love fully committed to the part and provided a real emotional grounding to a complex human being.

Early in the shoot, she captured respect in key scenes with Harrelson. At the American Cinema Editors’ EditFest New York in 2012, the film’s editor, Christopher Tellefsen, ACE, said, “Almost every scene with them was done with two cameras because she was such a good improviser… She would take Woody by surprise so often that it…created a wonderful dynamic.”

With a cast and crew of over 150, the 75-day shoot ran from January 17 to April 27, 1996. Shot by Philippe Rousselot, ASC — an Oscar winner for Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It (1992) — most of the principal photography took place in and around Memphis, Tennessee, standing in for Kentucky, Ohio and Georgia. The Memphis train terminal built in 1929 was converted into a full-sized replica of the US Supreme Court chambers where Flynt’s Jerry Falwell lawsuit was ultimately decided.

Despite filming in the Bible Belt, the production attracted little attention. A Memphis TV news crew covered the shoot on a day of exteriors depicting Flynt being met by protesters as he arrived for his Cincinnati trial. Thinking the protest real, the local TV station ran their crew’s footage as showing a real demonstration against the making of the movie.

Late in March, production moved briefly to Oxford, Mississippi, to shoot another old courthouse exterior and, during most of April, major sequences were shot at the Flynt Publications building on the Sunset Strip and at Flynt’s mansion in Bel Air. The final day of filming took place on the steps of the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC.

The major difficulty facing editor Tellefsen was the amount of footage. Cutting dailies of a scene during the shoot, he said, “I did a few versions of it and [Forman] says, ‘That’s good…but try four versions…no, make 10 versions.’ It was fun but a lot of work.” He continued: “Miloš doesn’t move the camera much, but everything was covered. In the trial scenes, every single juror had coverage. There was about 800,000 feet of film… It was a big, challenging job.”

Wishing the controversy would go away, Columbia gave no tickets to Larry Flynt for the Oscars ceremony on February 28, but Woody Harrelson took him as his guest.

The first cut was three hours long and the final 129-minute cut was locked in September, barely a month before the New York premiere. The National Organization of Women had issued a statement attacking the yet-unseen film back in May, but the end of 1996 saw Larry Flynt on about 50 Top Ten lists.

On January 7, 1997, The New York Times ran an article by Gloria Steinem claiming the movie glorified Flynt and was “even more cynical than the man” because it didn’t own up to Hustler’s sexism. Following up, she placed a full-page ad in Variety on January 17, paid for by Ralph Nader, to influence the film’s Academy Awards chances. It received just two nominations — for Forman’s direction and Harrelson’s performance.

Wishing the controversy would go away, Columbia gave no tickets to Flynt for the Oscars ceremony on February 28, but Harrelson took him as his guest. Neither the actor nor the director won, but earlier in the month The People vs. Larry Flynt won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and Forman was honored with the Torch of Liberty Award by the American Civil Liberties Union. On its initial run, the movie made $20 million, barely covering its advertising budget. The studio wrote off the $36 million production costs as a loss.

In support of the film, writer/producer Naomi Foner (Running on Empty, 1988) wrote, “The movie did expose the inevitable results of multiple sex partners and drug abuse.” Perhaps understanding this himself, Flynt has said, “I will always hold myself responsible for Althea’s [AIDS-related] death.” The film’s moving final images weave these individual realities within the larger context of American society.

As Forman stated, “I don’t say you should like what Larry Flynt does, but I admire the fact that I live in a country where I can take Hustler and read it as well as throw it away. The fact that this is the freest country in the world doesn’t mean you can take it for granted, because we will never conquer the stupidity of fanatics and power-hungry megalomaniacs.”

August 1, 2016 0 comments

Expressionist Portrait of a Serial Killer

by Edward Landler June 1, 2016

written by Edward Landler 12 minutes read

by Edward Landler

From a black screen, a circle of children fades in and the little girl at its center sings a counting out song:

Just you wait it won’t be long

The man in black will soon be here

With his cleaver’s blade so true

He’ll make mincemeat out…of…you.

These words, in German, are the first spoken in Fritz Lang’s M, as it premiered 85 years ago in Berlin on May 11, 1931. Depicting the hunt for a fictional serial child-killer, the movie was an immediate success in Germany and its initial distribution in Europe brought it almost universal acclaim as a classic.

German audiences were familiar with the child’s song, a popular rhyme about a real serial killer, Fritz Haarman, known as the Butcher of Hanover, convicted and executed in 1925. Three weeks before M opened, yet another, Peter Kürten, called the Düsseldorf Monster, was convicted on nine counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder; he was beheaded on July 2, 1931.

M (1931 Germany)
Directed by Fritz Lang
Shown: Peter Lorre

The most prominent director in the German industry at the time, the Austrian Lang was attacked for capitalizing on these lurid crimes. The movie, however, transcends its sensational subject matter to offer a perspective on the loss of individuality in an urban mass society and the lure of authoritarian rule that still casts shadows on human society.

Adding to the film’s power, director Lang — with editor Paul Falkenberg — built on the visual expressionism of German silent films to create expressionistic audio material that expanded the movies’ means to portray a character’s emotional reality.

Lang’s work over the previous eight years — including the two-part medieval epic The Nibelungen (1924) and the futuristic Metropolis (1927) — had been produced by Germany’s largest film company, Ufa. By 1930, however, their association had become contentious. The director felt the studio had not adequately prepared for the coming of sound and, for his first sound film, he entered into an agreement with producer Seymour Nebenzahl of Nero-Film.

Nebenzahl had already produced G.W. Pabst’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box (1929) and Robert Siodmak’s People on Sunday (1930), written by Billy Wilder. Like Lang, some of Sunday’s creative team wound up working in Hollywood after Adolf Hitler came to power.

In a 1963 interview, Lang recalled, “I told the producer, ‘I can make whatever I please and you have nothing to say, except to give me the money…’ and he accepted this.” As for the story, Lang turned to Thea von Harbou, his wife and writing collaborator.

He asked her, “What is the most despicable crime you can imagine?” and they began to turn out a screenplay about poison pen letters. But, on May 24, 1930, Kürten was captured by the police.

Intrigued by the newspaper reports, the director shifted the script’s focus to a sexual deviant who kills children. The things that concerned him were, Lang said, “what drives a man to such a horrible crime and laying out the pros and cons of capital punishment.”

The filmmaker was further aroused by how the intense police investigation of Kürten’s crimes disrupted Düsseldorf’s “normal” criminal activity. The heightened surveillance imposed by the police led to gang alliances with the city’s beggars to help track down the psychopathic killer.

This theme of the common civic goals of legal authority and the underworld first emerged on stage in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera in 1928. Nebenzahl and Nero-Film also produced Pabst’s 1931 film version of the musical play just before M went into production. Asked in 1963 if Brecht had influenced him, Lang said, “Of course… Which of his contemporaries did he not influence?”

Determined to achieve authenticity in his film, Lang toured prisons, and explored Berlin to find the beggars’ social network. He spent eight days in a mental institution observing sex offenders, and interviewed psychiatrists about the mental states of compulsives. This experience, he later said, “convinced me of the injustice of the death penalty.”

Lang’s research also took him to Berlin’s Alexanderplatz police headquarters and London’s Scotland Yard for an intensive review of police procedures. He based M’s homicide detective, “Fatty” Lohmann, on the famed director of the Berlin Homicide Division, Ernst “Fatty” Gennat, who had been asked by the Düsseldorf police to work on the Kürten case.

M (1931 Germany)
Directed by Fritz Lang
Shown: Peter Lorre

At the American Film Institute in 1973, Lang claimed credit for writing Lohmann’s and the police officials’ dialogue. Von Harbou, he said, was responsible for most of the rest of the dialogue, including the serial killer’s gripping confessional speech in the criminals’ kangaroo court.

Wishing to cast the psychopath against the stereotype of the era, Lang said, “I used Peter Lorre, who nobody would think to be a murderer.” The movie’s success made the Hungarian actor an international star.

Born Laszlo Löwenstein, Lorre came to Berlin in 1928 to join the avant-garde People’s Theater, founded by Socialists in 1899 and subsidized by labor unions. This short, pudgy, bulging-eyed performer conveyed an emotional intensity in a variety of roles for the theatre — an exotic gangster in Brecht and Weill’s Happy End (1929), a teenager alarmed by his puberty in Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening (1929) and a sexist soldier in Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1928), an early feminist comedy.

Appropriately, Lang offered Lorre the role of Hans Beckert while he was rehearsing for Brecht’s A Man’s a Man (1931), in which he played a meek porter transformed into a ruthless killer after being recruited into the army. Every day during production of M, the actor returned to the theatre after the shoot to rehearse Brecht’s play and to appear in a Soviet farce about a Moscow housing shortage.

For three days after filming the kangaroo court scene, however, the actor could not appear on stage. Years later, in an account of the production, Falkenberg wrote, “Lang beat a performance out of Lorre in the film’s finale…past the limits of physical endurance.” The director ordered numerous takes of the actor being kicked in the shins with nailed boots and being thrown down concrete stairs into a wood pile, as vividly shown in the film.

Among other People’s Theater actors cast for M was Otto Wernicke, the admired “actor of the people” who played Inspector Lohmann. From Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater, Gustaf Gründgens brought a sophisticated air to the role of Schränker, the criminal leader. This actor later became a Nazi and was the director of the Prussian State Theatre under the Third Reich; the central character of István Szabó’s Oscar-winning Mephisto (1981) was based on Gründgens.

Adding to the film’s power, director Fritz Lang — with editor Paul Falkenberg — built on the visual expressionism of German silent films to create expressionistic audio material that expanded the movies’ means to portray a character’s emotional reality.

For extras, Lang hired professional criminals he had come across in his research; many of them can be seen among the crooks in the kangaroo court, filmed on location in an abandoned schnapps factory. While shooting this scene close to production’s end, word got out that the police planned to raid the set. The director managed to persuade his “jurors” to stay long enough for him to get the shots he needed before the police arrived. There had already been a high rate of turnover — 24 extras were arrested over the course of production.

The bulk of the shooting took place in a zeppelin hangar converted into a film studio outside Berlin. In 1965, Lang told Peter Bogdanovich that he had shot there before, but when he went to arrange for M — originally titled Murderer Among Us — the manager refused to rent the facility. He told Lang the picture shouldn’t be made because it would hurt many “who will become very important.” When the filmmaker asked “why a movie about a child murderer should hurt anybody,” the manager’s attitude changed and Lang got his lease.

Lang noticed a swastika button pinned under the manager’s lapel and realized the man had assumed from the title that the film would slur the Nazis. The director decided to rename the film. While shooting, and struck by the strong visual imagery of the white chalk ‘M’ impressed from a crook’s palm onto the back of the killer’s coat, Lang found his title.

The screenplay had been completed in November 1930 and the six-week shooting schedule extended from mid-December 1930 through early February 1931. Fresh from The Threepenny Opera, director of photography Fritz Arno Wagner and sound recordist Adolf Jensen went straight into production on M. Wagner had also shot Destiny (1921) and Spies (1928) for Lang.

Their collaboration produced the first full exposition of the style and techniques that became film noir. The shooting integrated documentary-style naturalism with dramatically lit expressionism. Complementing this, the audio emphasized specific street sounds over others to reflect the focus of a character’s attention. A key example is the absence of a score and the use of source music.

The only music in the movie were the tunes of street organ grinders and Beckert whistling Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” whenever his impulses overwhelmed him. Lorre was unable to whistle the melody, so the strains of Lang whistling are heard in the picture.

M (1931 Germany)
Directed by Fritz Lang
Shown: Inge Landgut

The crew worked from a detailed shooting script with elaborate notes on set design, lighting and editing. During the pre-production planning that produced the shooting script, Lang and editor Falkenberg invented the use of voiceovers, pre-lapping and post-lapping. These innovations, the director said, “not only accelerated the tempo of the film but strengthened the necessary association in thought for two juxtaposed scenes.”

The producer booked the May 11 opening for M before shooting wrapped, allowing barely 10 weeks for post-production, but the meticulous pre-production planning facilitated the editing.

A few days before the premiere, sitting with von Harbou and Nebenzahl in the office of the State Film Examiner, Lang recalled feeling “like a school child waiting for approval.” The censors’ verdict: “This film shows everything which we are opposed to showing in a picture, but it is done with such honesty and integrity that we don’t want to make a cut.”

M was released in Germany at 117 minutes. For exhibition in the US, the Production Code Administration required the deletion of all indications of the murderer’s sexual pathology and a 92-minute version of the film opened in New York on April 2, 1933.

After the Berlin premiere, a leading Protestant gazette editorialized that Lang had “very skillfully avoided taking a decided stand on the death penalty.” On May 21, 1931, reading his own views into M, Joseph Goebbels (later Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda) wrote in his diary, “Fantastic! Against humanitarian sentiment. For the death penalty! Well made. One day, Lang will be our director.”

With the 1933 instatement of the Third Reich, Goebbels made overtures to Lang about making Nazi films. The liberal director, whose mother was Jewish, left Germany to carve out a career in Hollywood. The Jewish Lorre also fled to America, stopping over in England to play an assassin in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 movie The Man Who Knew Too Much. Von Harbou divorced Lang, became a Nazi and continued to be a leading figure in the German film industry.

Goebbels banned M, as well as Lang’s last film before his departure, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), which premiered in Paris. In this film, M’s Inspector Lohmann contends with a criminal genius imprisoned in an insane asylum hatching plans to take over Germany — plans that writers Lang and von Harbou (before their divorce) virtually copied from Hitler’s writings.

In 1951, against Lang’s wishes, Nebenzal (now spelling his name without the ‘h’) produced an American remake of M, directed by Joseph Losey. Despite its Los Angeles location photography and surface fidelity, it cannot capture the original’s social authenticity, making its points with didactic dialogue rather than visual drama.

The last word on M remains Lang’s. Commenting on the film’s last line, he said in 1963, “The point of the film is not the conviction of the murderer but the warning to mothers, ‘One has to keep closer watch over the children… All of you!’” He added, ironically perhaps, “This human accent was especially important to my wife at that time, the writer Thea von Harbou.”

June 1, 2016 0 comments

Columns Tail Pop

Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Moulin Rouge!’

by Scott A. Jacobs June 1, 2016

written by Scott A. Jacobs 5 minutes read

by Scott A. Jacobs

A bright, white light was shrouding my vision. The thundering applause from several thousand hands was engulfing my hearing. All I could feel was the thumping of my heart as the adrenalin was coursing through my veins like a tidal wave. It was in that moment, playing the role of Curly in Oklahoma! during my senior year in high school, that I knew I wanted to be an entertainer. Prior to that spectacular moment, I had been an avid video game player. My goal was to major in business, minor in Japanese and then get involved in the video game industry.

With only three semesters left in pursuing my BA in theatre and vocal performance, my love for performing was waning; however, my desire to stay within the entertainment industry was still strong. I loved being able to transport people out of their everyday lives into a world where they could forget all of their problems. I thought, “Maybe I’ll do something in the film industry.”

The head of the theatre department suggested finishing my BA degree and pursuing an MFA in film since most universities focus more on their masters students. Taking that into consideration, I signed up for an entry-level film course where I got to watch movies, discuss them and read a textbook that covered all aspects of filmmaking. A friend mentioned to me that I had to see Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! At that point, I was consuming anything and everything that I could.

A cathartic explosion of emotion would be the best way of describing how I felt after watching this film. I couldn’t stop talking about it with my friend, who knew more about the filmmaking process than I did at the time. He told me that the things I was gravitating toward the most all dealt with the visual effects and the editing.

Beneath the colorful complexities of the production, Moulin Rouge! tells a very simple story about love and all the trials and tribulations that come with it. Christian (Ewan McGregor) is a budding writer who moves to Paris to pursue a writing career amidst the Bohemian revolution. Christian meets Satine (Nicole Kidman), an actress at the Moulin Rouge nightclub, and quickly falls in love with her. A duke agrees to invest in the struggling nightclub — but only if Satine is his and his alone. A love triangle ensues between Satine, the duke and Christian. Ultimately, Satine has to make the difficult choice between following her dreams of being a real actress or following her heart.

While there are so many brilliantly choreographed scenes, the one that has always stuck with me is the can-can dance. The sequence itself is merely 65 seconds long or 1,560 frames. Within that short amount of time, there are 85 edits. This ratio, for lack of a better word, is insane. Through the masterfully executed editing by Jill Bilcock, ACE, not once are viewers discombobulated to the point that they aren’t able to keep track of what is happening. They can be completely consumed by the visuals and feel as if they’ve just stepped foot into the Moulin Rouge.

A cathartic explosion of emotion would be the best way of describing how I felt after watching this film. I couldn’t stop talking about it with my friend, who knew more about the filmmaking process than I did at the time. He told me that the things I was gravitating toward the most all dealt with the visual effects and the editing. At this point, I was hooked. I began my research on what was entailed in being an editor and a visual effects artist. While I loved visual effects, editing was definitely more up my alley. To discover that a job existed that bridged the gap between my love for playing video games and my fairly new love for theatre was astounding to me.

Of course, Moulin Rouge! could not have come alive without the visionary director Luhrmann, who incorporated so much into this film from the Hollywood undertones to the stylings of painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — who was the original painter to decorate the actual Moulin Rouge and was played by underrated actor John Leguizamo.

Moulin Rouge! was the first musical in 10 years (since Beauty and the Beast) to receive a Best Picture Oscar nomination and the first in 16 years (since A Chorus Line) to get a well-deserved Best Editing nomination. Although it did not win either, it breathed new life into the genre and opened the doors for the modern-day musical. Little did I know that this film — and the work of Bilcock — would end up opening the doors for me as well. It inspired me to delve deeper into the art of film editing to a level I never knew existed.

Several years later, I found myself in Los Angeles pursuing my MFA in Film Editing from the American Film Institute. Since graduating in 2007, I have been fortunate enough to be constantly working in editorial and doing what I love. Along the way, I also found my “Satine” who inspires me everyday and shows me that the greatest thing in life is to love and be loved in return.

June 1, 2016 0 comments

Book Reviews Columns

Forget It, Jake

by Betsy McLane June 1, 2016

written by Betsy McLane 7 minutes read

Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles

by Jon Wilkman
Bloomsbury Press
Hardback, 326 pages, $34.00
ISBN # 978-1-62040-915-2

by Betsy A. McLane

At a preview screening of the film Chinatown in summer 1974, an official from the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is reported to have remarked, “It’s totally inaccurate! There was never any incest involved!”

That anyone employed by the DWP might quip that the corruption and villainy portrayed in the film is true reveals how deeply the history of Los Angeles is tied to its endless demand for water. The film is set in the late 1930s, and the events that inspired it — the so-called California Water Wars of the Owens Valley — actually took place primarily between 1902 and 1928. Such mixing and mashing of facts and fables, timelines and personalities is what makes Hollywood myths, and Chinatown, produced by Robert Evans, written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski, offers the screen’s greatest mythic vision of Los Angeles. All were nominated for Oscars and Towne won Best Original Screenplay. Behind the neo-noir atmosphere and twisted characters of Chinatown is a true story, even more complex and deadly than Towne’s, but few remember it today.

In Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles, Jon Wilkman does a masterful job of culling fact from legend. His focal point is the St. Francis Dam break of 1928 and the resulting floodwall that swiftly and terrifyingly killed hundreds in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. Few people now think about the disaster, although the former dam site is not far from the thousands of vehicles traveling every day on Interstate 5 near Santa Clarita. The dam was masterminded and supervised by self-taught engineer William Mulholland — Hollis Mulwray in Chinatown, portrayed by character actor Darrell Zwerling as a champion of good who is murdered because he wants to stop the building of another dam that might also break.

FloodpathCoverFinal(RGB) The real Mulholland was far more complex, more of a combination of the Mulwray and Noah Cross (John Huston) characters in the film, sans the incest. He not only designed and supervised the building of the “monster” San Frisquito Canyon dam, he was directly responsible for envisioning the entire water supply for a booming Los Angeles, including Lake Hollywood and the revolutionary, gravity-driven Owens River Aqueduct. LA still uses his aqueduct.

Mulholland arrived in Los Angeles at age 22 in 1877, worked initially cleaning ditches and ultimately became the Chief of the Bureau that became and remains the all-powerful LADWP. His rise parallels that of the city from small town to major metropolis. The ballyhooing of civic leaders, then and now, who promote a sun-filled, shiny future as they profit from real est
ate speculation — from Hollywoodland in 1923 to Playa Vista today — could not exist without Mulholland’s passion for water. He and the movie character Mulwray share that passion, and it proves to be the undoing of both. Mulwray is found drowned in one of his own reservoirs; Mulholland publicly accepts the blame for the Saint Francis disaster and is forever shattered. It is no wonder that in Polanski’s anamorphic vision, local history is obscured by layers of smoke and the low-key Oscar-nominated lighting of cinematographers Stanley Cortez, ASC, and John Alonzo, ASC.

Just as the sound design in Chinatown uses a finely mixed refrain of dripping, bubbling and running water, Wilkman’s research is thorough and meticulous. He carefully organizes and presents thousands of details. An off-screen comment about Mulwray in Chinatown (“The guy’s got water on the brain”) certainly applied to Mulholland — and can also be said of Wilkman, an experienced chronicler of Los Angeles history. He is the co-author of two pictorial books about the city and is the producer/director of several historical documentaries, including Moguls and Movie Stars, a TCM series about American movies.

The often-disputed facts and colorful tales surrounding the dam failure have obviously been an obsession for Wilkman for years. Was it an earthquake, angry ranchers with bombs, faulty dam design, or low-grade, cheap cement that created the disaster? He considers these theories and, along the way, makes valuable contributions to California history in the form of interviews with some who remembered the flood, including Mulholland’s granddaughter and biographer Catherine. Those interviewees are dead now. W
ilkman allows them to speak and counterpoints their personal stories with research from newspaper archives, official reports and government documents, books, articles and scholarly theses. He also recruits expert observations from the sciences of engineering, water management, geology, seismology and dam building. All of this makes for fascinating reading that only occasionally — primarily in the book’s last quarter — becomes more dry than entertaining.

While Wilkman is excellent at painting portraits of the many men who both supported and decried Mulholland and his plans, their names and changing titles sometimes get confusing. A useful map of the flood area brackets the book on the insides of its cover, but a list of who’s who among these characters and when they did what would have been a useful addition. It is sometimes necessary to refer back and forth to be precise about events. The final chapter, “After the Fall,” in which Wilkman reveals the most current computer-modeled theories about why the dam collapsed (do not peek ahead and spoil the story), becomes a bit preachy, but this in no way detracts from the excellent research or the page-turning drama. There are also enough photographs to provide visual context.

The author uses his vast array of primary resources to make several observations about the St. Francis Dam disaster that resonate today. One is that water and energy have always been and remain chief concerns in Southern California, and that our need for these has radical impact on the environment and on people’s well-being. Another is that haste and pressures to save money may be in the interest only of certain individuals; in other words, we need always be on the lookout for possible corruption. A third point is that it is the poor and people of color who bear the greatest misfortune in a disaster — man-made or otherwise. In 1928, many of the flood victims were Mexican farm workers who lived in low-lying camps along the Santa Clarita River; many remain among the unknown dead.

As private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson in an Oscar-nominated role written expressly for him) investigates Mulwray’s murder, he is drawn under the dry LA River’s Hollenbeck Bridge. Here lived a local drunk, who died from drowning, providing a clue about the mysterious presence of water during a drought. In today’s Los Angeles, it would be the thousands living in homeless encampments that die in a torrent. And in perhaps the most timely point, the unchecked hubris of one individual and his political supporters (whomever they may be) can only lead to tragedy.

Looking back to understand the present may not be a strong point of Southern California’s culture, but Wilkman makes its history meaningful in a way that demands our attention today. He may regret the obfuscation of fact by the compelling mythmaking of Chinatown, but the film is brilliant in its historical complexity. Wilkman painstakingly dissects the debate between populists and private corporations over government-sponsored public works projects in the 1930s. Polanski and company capture the essence of that debate in a courtroom scene in which a giant portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt looms as Gittes listens while city leaders rousingly endorse the new dam, and Mulwray refuses to build it.

Floodpath and Chinatown each offer insight, and the reader is well advised to experience both.

June 1, 2016 0 comments

Columns My Most Memorable Film

Joanie Diener on ‘Hemingway & Gellhorn’

by Peter Tonguette June 1, 2016

written by Peter Tonguette 10 minutes read

by Peter Tonguette

The wordsmith and the war correspondent were an item for not even a decade. Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn made each other’s acquaintance in 1936, married in 1940 and divorced in 1945. The two packed a lot into those nine years: He penned the acclaimed novels To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls, while she documented the latest developments in World War II. They each journeyed to write about the Spanish Civil War.

Joanie Diener

The subject matter appealed to Joanie Diener, MPSE, who was hired to work on the made-for-television movie concerning the couple’s personal and professional association: Hemingway & Gellhorn, which debuted on HBO in 2012.

“I had read a lot of Hemingway’s books when I was growing up, but I didn’t really know about Martha Gellhorn,” Diener says. “And I loved this strong female character in battle with Hemingway.”

Clive Owen was cast as Hemingway and Nicole Kidman as Gellhorn, but almost as impressive as the film’s on-screen characters (which also included David Strathairn as John Dos Passos and Molly Parker as Hemingway’s previous wife, Pauline) was its off-screen talent, including director Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff; The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and picture editor Walter Murch, ACE, MPSE, CAS, as well as composer Javier Navarrete, music supervisor Evyen Klean, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Douglas Murray, and re-recording mixer Lora Hirschberg.

“Besides the subject matter, it was the people I was working with,” Diener says. “Working with Walter was kind of like going to grad school again.”

The native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was raised in Southern California and attended the University of California, Berkeley with an eye toward a career in music. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in music, Diener immersed herself in early music and musicology as a graduate student at Boston University. “Music is what I studied,” she reflects. “I was a big lover of film.” Following school, and several years of performing as a singer-songwriter, it was suggested that Diener merge her education with her enthusiasm. “Someone advised me, ‘Wow, you should be a music editor,’” she remembers. “The person told me it would teach me about how films are made, how films are put together — and how music works with film.”

Diener’s involvement in Hemingway & Gellhorn sprang in part from relationships she had established earlier in her career. She had been a music editor on HBO’s The Rat Pack (1998), on which she worked with Klean, and on The Warrior’s Way (2010), a Chinese-language film scored by Navarrete. And her husband — composer and former music editor and arranger, Mark Adler — knew Murch from working on The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and The Godfather: Part III (1990). On the latter film, Diener was brought in as an additional music editor.

Hemingway & Gellhorn. HBO/Photofest

The confluence of collaborators served Diener well, in spite of the fact that HBO was initially seeking a music editor based in Northern California, the site of shooting and post-production (the mix was completed at Skywalker Sound). “It was kind of a perfect triangulation, because I knew different principals, and Javier thought it would be fun to have me,” she reflects. “I was lucky that I got to go up there because they were looking at local people.”

In July 2011, Diener traveled to San Francisco to begin what ended up being a three-month stint on the film. The work environment, involving a multitude of voices, differed from past projects. Navarrete was present throughout post-production, and Murch and Kaufman contributed a steady stream of ideas. All four worked in close proximity. “I knew that Walter would be very hands-on with many facets of the music and sound,” Diener observes. “He basically puts his stamp on a lot of stuff, in a good way.”

Diener — joined by Kaufman and Navarrete — spent a total of two 12-hour days in Murch’s editing room for music spotting sessions. “By the way, Walter is just like Hemingway — he stands when he works,” Diener remembers, referring to the author’s aversion to sitting while writing. During the spotting sessions, it was decided which scenes required music composed by Navarrete and which called for source music. “I was writing everything down in longhand,” Diener adds, “and from those notes I generated our detailed spotting notes, which served as our roadmap for the rest of post-production.”

In the end, that roadmap had many detours: Hemingway & Gellhorn included 100 cues: 55 score cues represented about 56 minutes of screen time and 45 source cues represented about 48 minutes of screen time. Diener says it is one of the most music-heavy films on which she has worked — apart from actual musicals like The Music Man (2003). “I think it may take the cake because of the way it was designed,” she comments. “It’s Phil, it’s Walter.”

While he was cutting, Murch made modifications to early versions of Navarrete’s score, including combining or pitch-shifting specific cues. “Sometimes, I’d leave at midnight and he’d still be standing in his room working,” Diener says of Murch. “He would take a lot of our work, and even the sound editor’s work, play with it and then put it back.”

Hemingway & Gellhorn. HBO/Photofest

But Diener appreciated Murch’s brainstorms. “For me, sometimes if it’s really working, I don’t mess with it,” Diener comments. “But he likes to see, ‘Well, what other things can we do? Where can we take this that it hasn’t already gone?’”

It was the music editor’s task to assure that the experimentation sounded effortless. “The hard part was that there were certain spots where he did wonderful, creative, crazy things in Final Cut Pro, and then Phil fell in love with them,” Diener says. “When we eventually had the final recordings of all of Javier’s music spread into lots of music stems, I had to recreate what Walter had done with Javier’s synthesizer mockups.”

For example, for a scene in which Hemingway experiences a kind of nervous breakdown while fishing, Murch enhanced the music to match the writer’s garbled mental state (even merging the sound of a fishing line with the music). “Walter did some really wild stuff; he layered a couple of different demos of Javier’s, and some of them, unfortunately, we didn’t even find in the final music,” Diener remembers. “That one was really crazy.”

The film’s abundance of source cues also proved daunting, with snippets of music selected to go along with dozens of scenes, from historical montages to scenes of Hemingway and Gellhorn at home. “In some cases, Walter actually grabbed stuff off of YouTube,” Diener says. “A lot of times this was kind of an archaeological dig because we had to figure out what it was, where it came from, and how to either use it or recreate it.”

The folk song “Red River Valley” was always intended to be featured but required substantial post-production finessing. It is heard early in the film, when Gellhorn is aboard a train en route to cover the Spanish Civil War and is seated across from a young fighter, called Brooklyn, who starts to sing the tune while accompanying himself on guitar. The music, which continues to play over several subsequent scenes, echoes the hope and excitement of the era of Hemingway and Gellhorn’s relationship.

Unfortunately, the production track was not useable. “They were originally talking about replacing his voice,” Diener recalls, “but Phil and Walter loved his vocal quality, which was very natural.” But when the actor re-recorded the song, he did so at a different tempo. “It was very tricky because I had to take his singing and literally match it to his mouth,” Diener says. “I’m a singer myself, so I’m very picky about that. I look at it sideways, I squint at it, I walk away, I come back.” The actor also replayed the guitar. “Some of it was a little rough, and sometimes I had to change the chord or the note,” she adds. “A lot of editing was required to match the picture.” The result, however, is a haunting mood-setter.

Later in the film, the tune returns in the form of “Jarama Valley,” a variant of “Red River Valley” that came about during the Spanish Civil War; an injured Brooklyn sings the song while recuperating. “Javier’s score enters and weaves around the song,” Diener remembers. “He scored it to a different version with a different chord progression, so I had to actually cut his orchestral piece and change the harmonic structure a little bit — to make it sit right in with Brooklyn’s singing and guitar-playing.”

Joanie Diener and composer Javier Navarrese with their Emmy Awards for “Hemingway & Gellhorn.”

Nimble music editing was also needed in a bravura sequence in which Hemingway and Gellhorn meander through a Chinese market following their meeting with Chinese ruler Chiang Kai-shek. Out of each doorway, corridor or window are snippets of music, necessitating the use of many cues. “Phil wanted it to feel like you were just surrounded and enveloped by all these different sounds and textures,” Diener recalls. “They said, ‘We need things coming from each little shop and different windows and areas.’ It was complicated because I had to set it up in such a way that it all wove together.” The only visual suggesting music was of a man playing the erhu, a Chinese two-stringed bowed instrument. “There was no sound for that,” Diener says. “Evyen sent me several erhu pieces and I was able to create something that matched the on-camera erhu player.”

Despite the labor-intensive post-production, Diener was continually moved by the lead characters; for example, she was touched each time she watched the scene of him pleading with her not to divorce him: “Open up, Mrs. Hemingway,” he says, knocking on her door. “Mr. Hemingway loves ya.” “I remember crying,” Diener says. “I saw that scene so many times, where he’s banging on the door and begging her to open the door, and it got me every time.”

When the Primetime Emmy nominations were announced, Hemingway & Gellhorn received recognition in 15 categories, including Outstanding Miniseries or Movie. In the end, the film won two Emmys, both honoring the film’s soundscape: Navarrete was awarded for Outstanding Music Composition and Diener was included in the group awarded for Outstanding Sound Editing. She also received a Golden Reel Award (her fifth) from the Motion Picture Sound Editors for her work on the film.

Of course, the plaudits the movie received could not compete with making it. “It was one of the more engrossing, satisfying, enriching experiences I’ve ever had,” she effuses. And, reflecting on the long hours spent in close collaboration with Navarrete, Murch, Kaufman and others, Diener invokes the film’s protagonists: “We were definitely in the trenches — just like Hemingway and Gellhorn.”

June 1, 2016 0 comments

Features

Not Your Grandfather’s ‘Roots’

by Laura Almo June 1, 2016

written by Laura Almo 15 minutes read

by Laura Almo • portraits by Gregory Schwartz

“Behold, Kunta Kinte…”

If those words ring a bell, you were around for Roots, one of the most forward-thinking and groundbreaking events in the history of television. Executive produced by David L. Wolper and based on Alex Haley’s bestselling book of the same title, Roots aired for eight consecutive nights on the ABC television network in January 1977. The 12-hour miniseries, which won nine Emmy awards, depicted the horrors of slavery to American audiences in ways never seen before.

Airing only a dozen years after the struggle for racial equality and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which forbade discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin — Roots had the network worried about how audiences would respond to a television show where blacks were portrayed positively, while whites were depicted in a negative light. So instead of airing the miniseries over many weeks, as originally planned, ABC virtually buried it in an eight-night run in the middle of winter, assuming few people would watch and that Roots would ultimately be but a blip on the television radar. But the response was quite the opposite: Millions of viewers tuned in and ratings were through the roof, making the miniseries one of the most successful television events of all time.

Although Roots entered the American lexicon, the production itself has not withstood the test of time. A new generation has little interest in sitting down to watch this eight-part series. But it is a story that must be told. And retold. And that it will when the updated Roots — co-executive produced by Mark Wolper, son of the late David L. Wolper (see sidebar, page 40) — premieres simultaneously on the History, A&E and Lifetime cable channels on May 30, running four consecutive nights.

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When viewers tune in to the 2016 version of Roots, they will see the same characters and the same story, which is the saga of Kunta Kinte’s African-American family from the mid 1700s to the Civil War. However, with quicker cutting, contemporary music and young, up-and-coming actors, the new Roots is told in an entirely updated style.

“It’s sort of like a retelling of the original, only with 2016 sensibilities; it’s far less apologetic and more honest,” says James Wilcox, editor of the second night’s episode. “The original Roots was done with the sensibilities of where the country was racially in 1977, what television would allow, and the sophistication of the audience in terms of what it could understand about filmmaking.”

Nearly 40 years later, the updated version doesn’t hold anything back about the horrors of slavery, nor the racism the characters endured. The 2016 Roots was made for a new generation, one that has grown up with civil rights and cultural diversity, but has also witnessed racial profiling, police brutality and uneven economic policies.

The new version is comprised of four separate films, each featuring a different director and editing team. As is the convention, each director chose his editor and, in turn, each editor chose his assistant. Production manager Karen Mayeda oversaw editorial and post-production.

Originally scheduled to air in early 2017 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the broadcast of the original Roots, the airdate was moved up when executives liked what they saw. Post-production went into accelerated mode to meet the new deadlines.

Each of the four episodes is stylistically different, and this was important for the retelling of Roots, according to Wolper. “When you do a series, you usually have a style that any director or editor that comes in has to follow,” he explains. “We didn’t do that. In this show, we said, ‘Do whatever you want,’ so there are four distinct films, four directors, four editorial styles.” There are universal themes and a continuity built into the nights through story and music.

<em>Clockwise from top left: James Wilcox, editor; Neil Mandelberg, editor; David Beatty, editor; Marty Nicholson, editor; Greg Babor, editor; Susana Benaim, assistant editor; Victoria Grimsley, assistant editor; and Agustin “Auggie” Rexach, assistant editor.</em>

Clockwise from top left: James Wilcox, editor; Neil Mandelberg, editor; David Beatty, editor; Marty Nicholson, editor; Greg Babor, editor; Susana Benaim, assistant editor; Victoria Grimsley, assistant editor; and Agustin “Auggie” Rexach, assistant editor.

Night One

Marty Nicholson, ACE, Lead Editor
Greg Babor, Editor
Philip Noyce, Director

Greg Babor, editor, Night One.

Night one is the “parent of all episodes,” according to lead editor Marty Nicholson. It is in this episode that Kinte is captured and sold as a slave. “Night One establishes the story and has to travel through the rest of the episodes,” says Nicholson. “It is big and compelling and has to get your attention right away.” The saga begins in Africa and incorporates the same iconic scene as the original Roots, in which the protagonist’s father holds him up to the night sky full of stars and powerfully declares, “Behold, Kunta Kinte, the only thing greater than you,” illustrating the importance of identity, a theme throughout the miniseries.

But the storytelling and filmmaking is different. “It’s a much more energetic and visceral style,” Nicholson continues. “It does not let you sit back; it challenges you. It’s very Kunta-centric. Philip Noyce never wanted it to be out of Kunta’s point of view. He always wanted it to echo and have the presence of Kunta Kinte’s African spirit — even when he was in America. The challenge of the editing was to maintain this vision.”

Director Noyce, who shot in both Africa and the United States, was chosen in part because of his first-hand knowledge of and deep connection to, Africa (his wife, Vuyo Dyasi, with whom he has two children, is from South Africa). It was photographed with two color palettes — one for Africa and one for the US, reveals Greg Babor, who was bumped up from assistant to editor in December because of the accelerated post-production schedule and his prior relationships with Nicholson and Noyce.

<em>Marty Nicholson, lead editor,</em> Night One.

Marty Nicholson, lead editor, Night One.

“The most fascinating thing about Night One is the contrast between worlds — the color palette, the cutting style and the songs are very different and show the contrast between the beauty of Africa and the horror of the United States,” Babor says. “The idea is that the audience wants to get back to Africa as much as Kunta does because it is a much more beautiful place, as opposed to the current situation Kunta was forced into.” Night One ends with another iconic moment from the original: Kinte is forced to say that his name is “Toby.”

Night Two

James Wilcox, Editor
Agustin “Auggie” Rexach, Assistant Editor
Mario Van Peebles, Director

Agustin “Auggie” Reach, assistant editor, left, and James Wilcox, editor, Night Two.

The second episode picks up with Kinte in the United States ten years later. If Night One is about the tragedy of slavery and trying to hang on to one’s identity, Night Two is about resilience, endurance and finding a reason to carry on. For editor Wilcox, “Night Two is an emotional rollercoaster. It is a first-hand look at what happens to Kunta Kinte when he gets to America and is forced to accept his fate as a slave.”

Director Mario Van Peebles brought his experience as an African-American father to Roots, which helped shape the relationship between Kinte and his daughter, Kizzy. Wilcox says they were “hell-bent” on showing the full experience of how one could bear this type of situation, and how humor would play a part in that. “As time goes on, Kunta Kinte has a larger, more profound reason to think beyond himself and to live — which is ultimately a family,” he explains.

Our movie shows Kinte marrying Belle, Dr. Waller’s nursing assistant, and their daughter Kizzy growing up from childhood to young adulthood. There is much physical and emotional violence, but there is humor mixed in with the drama. “It’s not silly, but there’s some situational life stuff that comes up that allows you to laugh,” Wilcox adds. “You’ll also cry and be saddened, and then you’ll feel a sense of triumph. There are small victories mixed in so there are a lot of different flavors.”

The editor describes the cutting style of Night Two as “messy drama,” such as starting in the middle of scenes and getting rid of unneeded expository. “We wanted to show the audience early on that, wow, this is different; this is not your grandfather’s Roots,” he explains. “You are thrown into the middle of it; it’s highly stylized, highly cinematic and it’s got a lot of different gears to it. And it never slows down until the movie is over.”

Night Two also includes new historical information that has been uncovered since the original Roots, explains assistant editor Auggie Rexach, who has been Wilcox’s assistant editor for two years. “The 2016 version feels like you’re right there with everybody, and those events are happening to you,” says Rexach, who adds that one of the biggest challenges was to distance himself from his 2016 mentality. “I tried to get into a mindset where I’m not judging these characters, or bringing my 21st century cultural baggage to how these characters would react, because it’s an unthinkable situation.”

For Wilcox, it was an opportunity to bring his cultural background to the project: “This sense of where our people have come from, what our journey has been, how to appreciate what our ancestors went through, and how strong we must be to endure what happened during that period.”

Night Three

Neil Mandelberg, ACE, Editor
Victoria Grimsley, Assistant Editor
Thomas Carter, Director

Neil Mandelberg, editor, and Victoria Grimsley, assistant editor, Night Three.

At its heart, Night Three is about the attempt to stay together as a family but ultimately being pulled apart. “It’s certainly not as physically brutal an episode as it is psychologically brutal; it’s actually the most intimate of the four. It takes place on a smaller plantation run by Tom Lea, a poor landowner who fathered Chicken George because he regularly raped his mother Kizzy,” offers editor Neil Mandelberg. While Nights One and Two are the story of Kinte, Nights Three and Four take the audience through the life of his grandson Chicken George. In Night Three, Chicken George seems to have it easier than the other slaves because he’s not toiling out in the fields in the blazing sun. Instead he’s training birds and traveling to cockfights with his master — the outcome of which will change his life forever.

Director Thomas Carter, who is known for his sports films, treated the cockfighting scenes like sports coverage, according to assistant editor Victoria Grimsley, who says that those scenes were the most artistic — and the most challenging — part of the episode. “They’re really flashy with quick cuts and a lot of speed ramps going from fast to slow, and fast again,” she explains. “Most of them were shot in slow motion so Neil could make them regular speed or slow them down again.” Grimsley also reveals that there was a lot of footage to wade through for this episode. Not only were there many takes because of the variable frame rates, but also because of the difficulties of filming a cockfight. “Birds are not supposed to connect [their feet are not supposed to touch one another] so they’d have to reshoot,” she says. “And then the birds would get tired and they’d have to switch them out for new birds.”

“Because our script, director and cast delivered strong characters and performances, the most significant challenge we faced in Night Three, aside from the cockfights, was the movie’s length,” Mandelberg explains. “The length was longer than we hoped for and because this is a historical film, you can’t just chop, you have to let it live. Our challenge was finding the best length movie we could without giving up pieces of these characters and their story that are so important to the growth and arc of their lives, which in our case continues into Night Four.”

The producers and studio were very supportive through it all, according to Mandelberg, who adds, “I’m very proud of Night Three of Roots; this movie is beautiful and powerful.”

Night Four

David Beatty, Editor
Susana Benaim, Assistant Editor
Bruce Beresford, Director

Susana Benaim, assistant editor, and David Beatty, editor, Night Four.

Closing out the miniseries, Night Four covers the Civil War, emancipation and reunification of the family. This episode runs the gamut from action/battle scenes with many extras to small, intimate scenes. And like the miniseries as a whole, it doesn’t gloss over the violence, cruelty and brutality. “This episode definitely has some scenes that are graphic and emotionally difficult to cut, including a horrible massacre of black soldiers who had surrendered after the Battle of Fort Pillow,” says editor David Beatty. “But it also has poignant, intimate scenes of Chicken George reuniting with his wife after a forced separation of 20 years.”

Beatty explains that when Chicken George is finally able to reunite with his wife, the reunion has to take place at a distance because the plantation owners will not allow them to physically be together for the first day. “They have to see each other from a great distance throughout the day, waiting until nighttime to be reunited,” he adds. “It’s actually a very moving, extended delay where they’re so close, yet so far. It’s a wonderful sequence. Then we get to see him reuniting with his surviving children. The emotional context is so poignant and winds up being a major theme in this night.”

Directed by Bruce Beresford, Night Four concludes with the character of Alex Haley going through the process of learning about his ancestors through writing the book Roots. “Our finale is a very moving moment,” Beatty reveals. “Haley has the feeling of being reunited with his ancestry.”

The cutting style of Night Four is more conventional — and less stylized — than the other nights. “Bruce’s taste as a filmmaker is more classical, almost striving for an invisible simplicity that just tells the story very well,” says Beatty.

Still, there is a lot of action that moves the story forward pretty dramatically, according to assistant editor Susana Benaim, who recently participated in the ACE internship program. “I would say it’s more linear but absolutely appealing to a younger generation in terms of the content and the fact that there’s very little we’re holding back. I think that comes from a script and a crew that really wants to showcase what really happened in Alex Haley’s world.”

Retelling History

Retelling Roots comes with a heavy burden and responsibility. This is not just a remake; rather, it’s a retelling of a seminal television event that changed not only television but the nation. You want to do right by it. The collective hope is that it will reach a new generation and have its own form of timelessness.

“We all dream of working on legacy projects, and this is a legacy project,” comments Rexach. “This is something that I will always be proud to say I had a hand in crafting. I feel humbled to be here and honored to work on such an important story.” This is a feeling undoubtedly shared by everyone on the new Roots.

June 1, 2016 0 comments

Features

Sabine’s Plan

by Rob Feld June 1, 2016

written by Rob Feld 12 minutes read

by Rob Feld • portraits by Sarah Shatz

Veteran New York indie film editor Sabine Hoffman, ACE, discovered film editing and began her career as a student in Berlin. To make her rent, she worked at a music club before finding jobs on film sets: driver, script supervisor and finally assistant director, which is more of a creative collaborator position in Germany than it is in America. When she was invited into an editing room, Hoffman suddenly saw her different interests in art history, music, photography and theatre converging. “I realized that film editing is all about language, rhythm and music, and I could bring all my interests together,” she recalls. “It was a magical discovery.”

She worked as an apprentice editor in Germany, but started editing student films herself when she moved to Boston to intern with Robert Wilson at the American Repertory Theater. From there, she took on indie films but found her most frequent collaborator when producer and InDigEnt founder Gary Winick introduced her to Rebecca Miller, who was looking for someone to cut Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002). Hoffman took the job and the film went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Sabine Hoffman.

Hoffman recently completed her fourth film with Miller, Maggie’s Plan, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and opened May 20 through Sony Pictures Classics. The film follows Maggie (Greta Gerwig), a New York woman intent on having a baby utilizing sperm donated by a college acquaintance. Just — and the word just cannot be overemphasized — as she attempts the self-insemination, she falls in love with John (Ethan Hawke), a brilliant but self-indulgent anthropology professor apparently in a stifling marriage with intimidating Danish uber-academic Georgette (Julianne Moore).

There was plenty of behavior and performance to track in the dialogue-heavy story, with the first cut coming in at 140 minutes before being trimmed down to 92 minutes. Any one of the actors could be the story’s center of gravity, and Hoffman credits the collaborative atmosphere that she and Miller maintain to finding the balance they felt served all masters.

“My motto for Maggie’s Plan in particular was, ‘I want you to have your cake and eat it too,’” says Hoffman. “That’s what it should be.” CineMontage interviewed Hoffman in Manhattan in March about the new film as well as her career and her frequent collaborations with Miller.

CineMontage: Did you go through a traditional apprentice process in Germany and do you remember a “light bulb moment’ that came from the experience?

Sabine Hoffman: Yes, an amazing German editor/director, René Perraudin, mentored me, and I remember his generosity. I was overly eager and one day made a big mistake because of it. Some people were very upset and I had to undo everything I had done. I felt very ashamed and sad. I wanted to quit forever, and it was he who said, “Don’t worry, I understand why you did it. This is a learning moment — just don’t forget about it.”

Communication is everything. Ask about things when you are curious and try to build bridges of communication. As an editor, I would like my cutting room to be a magical kitchen where it is safe to experiment. Be open to ideas and invite them, because it’s not necessarily me who is going to have the best one.

CM: Do you feel something has been lost going from those days of 40 tracks on a mag to working in digital?

SH: I’m not sure if we’ve lost so much because we’ve gained so much — like the ability to explore versions and layer things in ways that were not as instantly possible before and, thanks to digital, I will always do a first draft that has everything in a scene as written. But if I discover something new, or something doesn’t work, it is easy to create alternatives.

Maggie’s Plan. <em>Sony Pictures Classics</em>

Maggie’s Plan. Sony Pictures Classics

In terms of training however, yes, traditional ways of learning from somebody and how they mentor you have shifted. It still can happen; you can get an opportunity to work with somebody as an assistant and if you’re good and talented, they will make sure that you can learn with them. I think part of being a member of ACE is that mission — you want to give back to a new generation of filmmakers. I also teach at times, which has been incredibly rewarding. For future editors, I would advise working on student films if you want to improve your craft, find assignments, help somebody. It’s only through practice that you can improve.

CM: Were you aware of a breakout moment for yourself, career-wise?

SH: I would say my first break was Jeff Lipsky’s film, Childhood’s End [1996], and then Alex Sichel’s All Over Me [1997], my first film at Sundance. Also, Morgan J. Freeman’s films Hurricane Streets [1997] and Desert Blue [1998]

Maggie’s Plan. Sony Pictures Classics

CM: With all these Sundance films, did you find it easier to get work?

SH: I wish it was so easy. It wasn’t and it still isn’t. There are a lot of great people out there. Two years ago, I got a call for a wonderful project that was another extension, as it was my first musical. The Last Five Years [2014], based on Jason Robert Brown’s Broadway musical, was directed by Richard LaGravenese. He is an amazing director and a great inspiration to me. Our initial meeting came thanks to Dolly Hall’s recommendation to Richard, who had produced All Over Me. You would never think 15 years later that would come around but it did.

CM: Your collaboration with Rebecca Miller has spanned four films now. How has your working process evolved over time?

SH: When Gary Winick introduced me to Rebecca for Personal Velocity, it was still in the script stage, which is how all of our collaborations started. Personal Velocity was based on a collection of short stories she had written. That was a wonderful experience because Rebecca was quite inventive within the financial limitations. It was also the first film that was shot digitally on consumer DV cameras; Ellen Kuras won the cinematography prize at Sundance. Rebecca designed some scenes in stills because we didn’t have time and money to shoot everything normally. Later in editing, we had to decide how the scenes function and what is important about them. And that’s what we always look for — finding the essence of the moment and the character to build from; how can we tell this effectively? That’s a wonderful process to engage with.

CM: How did your process evolve after that?

SH: I usually read the script in an early draft. We talk a lot about it, not so much for me to give notes but to understand the characters and story. I feel it’s important to get involved as early as possible in the world of the story, to understand it and the motivations and intentions of the director. I want to be in her head before we start shooting, because during the shoot, there’s little time to have intense conversations.

For Maggie’s Plan, Rebecca invited me to be part of a week of breakdown meetings with Sam Levy, the cinematographer. At that point, we already had a lot of locations, and Sam had taken videos. They also had already worked over several months on the visual language and had developed many references. There was a whole world emerging already in the imagination of things and it was wonderful to come in and be able to think about how we were going to get from here to there, and what may still be missing.

During the shoot, sometimes you need an extra transition or something is missing. To be able to respond to that, prep is everything — both creatively and technically. During the shoot, I usually send drafts of scenes to Rebecca so she can evaluate them, get a sense of how moments might feel connected and give notes.

Maggie’s Plan. Sony Pictures Classics

CM: What was the great challenge of Maggie’s Plan?

SH: There was some time pressure. The shoot was 24 days and I showed Rebecca a first assembly a week after. Then we cut for 11 weeks and locked picture. The script was long and the first assembly was 2:20. It was all wonderful, funny dialogue, but the film is now at 92 minutes, so we cut out 40 minutes of dialogue, which just emerged from our process. It just felt more and more right. We worked on balancing the characters and different storylines.

I’m grateful for the trust that comes from this being our fourth collaboration, but there’s no space to get lazy. You always have to give your best. When you have the opportunity to create a safe environment to experiment without being ashamed to have an idea, you can bring out things. The wonderful thing about Rebecca is that she is incredibly fearless in the cutting room. She’s not precious about her scenes. She wants it to be truthful, so most of our time is spent looking at scenes and saying, “This is nice but how can it be better?”

CM: Is this basically a model of working that you try to replicate?

SH: Yes, of course. I do like to come in early, understand as much as possible and work parallel to the shoot to understand what’s being shot; to know when you need something that isn’t there. In my collaboration with Richard on The Last Five Years, we started working before the shoot. The time structure is complex, as one character’s storyline moves forward, while the other one’s moves backwards. We had footage from rehearsals so we looked at that to understand the intentions of the characters and the tonality ahead of time. When you have a good first assembly that isn’t too far from the script, and at least captures most of the ideas, that’s very helpful. Then you have to throw it all out.

One of the biggest things to remember is to keep a beginner’s mind. You know everything about why you had to cut it this way, but then you have to throw it out and look at the film as if you’ve never seen it before. You must force yourself to be innocent again and not be precious or take things personally. Being righteous about anything doesn’t help at all. That’s one of the many qualities I admire about Rebecca: She’s completely open about making it the best it wants to be while still fighting for the things that are important to her. She’ll never say, “I love that line, let’s keep it.” She’ll say, “I wrote it but it’s already in the novel and we may not need to say it here,” or “These looks tell us more than the line did.”

“The best edit is the one that your brain does. It’s not only about having fantastic shots.” – Sabine Hoffman

CM: Relatively speaking, there are not many female directors working, but you have collaborated with many. Do you find a difference in the experience?

SH: It’s hard to say because I’ve had wonderful collaborations with both male and female directors, but I do feel women directors kick ass and need to kick ass more because the industry is not female-friendly, if you look at the statistics. We are shamefully underrepresented.

CM: What makes a great edit?

SH: Filmic storytelling is the synergy of sound and picture. The magic of editing is juxtaposing images and information; it’s all about teasing the brain. The best edit is the one that your brain does. It’s not only about having fantastic shots. It’s in the accumulation of information about a character, contrasted with something else. Our brain is so quick, it always wants to know what’s next. So how do we guide our audience and our own brains in the process? What information do we want to reveal at what point? It keeps changing in the shaping. It’s not the plot that does it, it’s the emotional journey that we take as an audience. Sometimes you think it’s a plot problem, but it’s really an engagement problem.

If you can engage an audience by creating a personal moment for a character early on, it can go a long way. But you have to find it. We took some beautiful moments out of Maggie’s Plan because they were in the way of feeling something more important. Find what makes you respond — which might also be a sound. But often it’s how you see it and not what you see.

June 1, 2016 0 comments

Departments Letters to the Editor

Fog of War Moviemaking, Getting Testy

by uncredited June 1, 2016

written by uncredited 3 minutes read

The Fog of War Moviemaking

Peter Tonguette’s My Most Memorable Film column, “Walter Murch on Apocalypse Now” (CineMontage Q1 2016), was a great peek into the editing of a legendary movie. But I noticed that part of the story was missing…

Editors Evan Lottman, ACE (who passed away in 2001), and Barry Malkin, ACE, were in the Philippines with director Francis Ford Coppola and got the film all the way to the first assembly. From what I understand, their assembly is the legendary six-hour cut that went missing at some point. I wonder if that cut served as a starting point — instead of the 1.25 million feet of work print arriving uncut, as the article implies — or if it was already gone when the new editing team arrived to do its magic.

Evan mentored me when I moved to New York City in 1996, and often entertained those around him with stories of his time editing Apocalypse Now in the Philippines. He told of actors (like the Playboy Bunnies in the movie) enlisted to sync dailies in the Quonset hut that served as the edit room. He also talked about befriending legendary photographer Mary Ellen Mark when she arrived after curfew and went straight to the edit hut, seeing the lights on. The editing crew was still awake and hard at work, of course.

In an unusual twist for an editor, Evan was cast as background for that big stage scene — those Bunnies again — and can be seen smiling in the front row as the action goes down (see accompanying photo).

Lottman and Coppola parted ways when the film got back to San Francisco, and the new team took over, ultimately crafting the incredible film we all know.

Evan reconnected with Mark in 1996, giving her a whimsical memory of their time on the film: a candid photo of a monkey grabbing her nose. In that spirit, I’d love to restore the memory of his work on the movie, and provide readers with a picture of him on the front row of a wild performance on the set of Apocalypse Now.

Sheri Bylander,
Picture Editor
Brooklyn, New York

Getting Testy

Reading the Op/Edit column “Get Retested!” about test screenings in the last issue (CineMontage Q1 2016) caused me to chuckle a little bit, but not because of the way it was written.

It just brought back a memory of many years ago, while I was working as a recordist on Dub Stage C at the Goldwyn Studios. We were working on a feature that was not particularly good, but everyone on the movie was really nice to work with. It was a movie for TriStar Studios, the logo of which had a large white horse with wings that would fly onto the screen.

Well, the movie went out for a test screening over the weekend. On the following Monday, the re-recording mixer shared the results from one audience member. The questions were simple and this person really came through for the filmmaker.

The first question was, “What did you like about the movie?” His answer was “Everything before the horse.” The second question was, “What didn’t you like about the movie?” His answer: “Everything after the horse.”

It is the best line I have ever heard, and to this day I laugh when I think about it…

Gary Ritchie,
Recordist (retired)
Sherman Oaks, California

June 1, 2016 0 comments

Features

Unafraid of the Obvious: Editor Dylan Tichenor Dials in ‘Triple 9’

by Rob Feld February 1, 2016

written by Rob Feld 14 minutes read

by Rob Feld

To be birthed from the world of director Robert Altman and his legendary editor Geraldine Peroni, ACE, is a unique experience for a young editor. Such was the gestation period as an apprentice editor for Dylan Tichenor, ACE — an environment of multi-character storytelling, which lent itself well to his own sensibilities and would apply to much of his future work.

Tichenor came to edit some of the more notable work of a who’s who of directors with starkly identifiable styles, like Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Kathryn Bigelow, Mike Figgis, Ang Lee and M. Night Shyamalan. He recently completed his second film for John Hillcoat: Triple 9, which opens February 26 through Open Road Films.

The film is a dark noir, which follows the storylines of an Orthodox Jewish Russian mafiosa (Kate Winslet) who runs her bloody operation out of a kosher butcher shop; a cop (Chiwetel Ejiofo) who is part of a murderous ring of corrupt police officers and has a child with Winslet’s character’s sister; a tough, incorruptible rookie to the group (Casey Affleck); and his cynical cop uncle (Woody Harrelson). There’s a lot to track, a less-than- visual MacGuffin, and a challenging rhythm to maintain between explosive action and expository dialogue. It’s obvious why Tichenor would be a good choice for the job.

CineMontage: Your background is a rare one, beginning under Geraldine Peroni for Robert Altman. What did you take from that experience?

Dylan Tichenor: I remember early on getting her approach to performances. It was a wonderful environment and I was fortunate to have fallen in with them. Gerri cut from her gut: “What’s my emotional reaction to this moment from this person?” And I naturally understood why she picked moments she did. We both looked for the extra moments that were not necessarily present, but that could reveal a little more depth and add some contrast or other harmonic of emotion to the scene. Those things can create a more interesting depth and tension. Maybe it’s something I got from her.

Gerri was working on Brokeback Mountain when she passed away, and Ang Lee asked me to take that over. I didn’t want to do it because it felt really emotionally charged. I didn’t know how to deal with it. Ang was very open about it and said, “You should come try it. At a certain point, it’s just going to be about the work.” Truthfully, it turned out to be the best way to spend time with Gerri — thinking about her life and personality. In a funny way, we were working together. It was very rewarding and I never would have expected it would be anything other than a painful thing to do. It was also quite comforting and educational. The work turned out well [it earned him ACE Eddie and BAFTA Awards nominations] and it was a good feeling.

Triple 9. Open Road Films

CM: Keeping emotionally open to the footage you watch over and over again, do you try to make intuitive, quicker decisions before the feeling dulls with redundancy?

DT: I try to identify those moments that I respond to when I’m watching dailies early on, and make a lot of notes that are very specific. Then I try to remember that feeling I had when I refer to them because, after you put it together, you’re trying to make the rhythm of things work.

At that point, the storytelling has to become lean and effective, and a lot of those moments that were intriguing have no place in the scene anymore. So I try to start with them and keep them if I can. Usually the feeling remains; it’s just that you’ve become a little more inured to it because it’s boiled down to the more mechanical aspects after you’ve gone through it a few times. You have to try and trick yourself into seeing it for the first time every time you see it. But you also have to trust that you’ve done the process in such a way that you’re retaining as much of those interesting bits as you can.

CM: Can you differentiate the sort of footage you get from Kathryn Bigelow, Paul Anderson, Ang Lee and Wes Anderson?

DT: With those four directors, I could almost assuredly pick out a shot in dailies from each of them. Kathryn’s Zero Dark Thirty was a tremendous amount of footage, shot multi- camera, all of it documentary vérité style. There were fewer planned shots with beginnings, middles and ends of things. It was more a collection of documents of the moment.

Wes would probably be on the other end of that spectrum. He is very clear and purposeful in his shot gathering. He probably storyboards more than anybody.

Back in the day, Paul used to be more scripted, more pointed in his shot construction and scene storytelling. And I think that he has become more open and artistically freer as he’s become more and more comfortable with the art of filmmaking. He knows how he wants it to feel, he knows the ingredients he is going to use, but he’s very free to go with the flow, and mix and match.

I made one movie with Ang and my feeling is that he’s a master storyteller. He once asked me why I hadn’t used a certain way of cutting something, and I said, “Well, I didn’t want to be too obvious.” He said, “Don’t be afraid to be obvious. If the story is good, and if what you’re trying to do is strong, there’s no reason not to be obvious. Just tell the story directly.” I got what he was saying, and he was very right about that particular thing. I had outsmarted myself, second-guessing what I was trying to do. But his point has really stuck with me. Directors, actors, writers — all of us in our different disciplines — try to jump through hoops to not do the thing that is expected, but you can also wind up trying to sidestep the fact that maybe there isn’t a new idea there.

CM: Like many of your projects dating back to your Altman days, Triple 9 is a film with many storylines and characters. Is that something that you enjoy juggling?

DT: Yes, I constantly do that. Like almost all films, and some more than others, there was a lot of rearranging and rebalancing. How much of this storyline do we need? Do these beats need to be connected together, or do we intercut them with beats from other threads? How do we achieve a synthesis, a resonance between the stories, and have them flow together in a revealing way that maintains and builds tension?

Triple 9. Open Road Films

I do respond to those sorts of stories; certainly working with Altman, that was the norm. Also, I come from a family with a lot of people and had lived in some communal living situations when I was a kid, so maybe I have an affinity for having lots of people around.

CM: What are some of the difficulties in editing these type of stories?

DT: There are particular challenges and pitfalls with multi-character stories. You can cut away and achieve some measure of release and contrast by going to another story, and that can elevate both stories by showing similarities and differences between moments, characters and situations.

But it can also just become a bowl of spaghetti, where you have a bunch of threads that aren’t necessarily relating very well, and you’ve got to get from the beginning to the end of each one. They may cross-cut around, but it isn’t necessarily achieving any magic. That said, I enjoy a pretty straightforward, more single- or dual- character type of story, as well. I don’t think I particularly go for multi-character projects in a conscious way.

CM: What was the greatest challenge of Triple 9?

DT: Letting the audience know who the main character was. It’s a very difficult thing in multi-character stories. In this one, we are introduced to Chiwetel Ejiofor, then Casey Affleck, then Woody Harrelson. There are other people involved but those are our three main characters. Their fates are obviously going to intertwine and we’re going to pace out how we’re going to give you information about each one.

What you want to do is set up questions and intrigue for the audience. Then you want to answer them and weave a story that way. That was certainly a challenge in Triple 9. I also think the balance of action and dialogue was a challenge. This has a go pace, then a slower pace; go pace then slower pace. Trying to manage that overall balance was a challenge, but I think managing the information was the most difficult on this — confusion over what this “box” is they’re trying to steal, why they want it and who wants them to get it. Sometimes in movies, you have a lack of character motivation, where you don’t understand at all why a character needs to do what we’re saying they need to do.

Triple 9. Open Road Films

CM: How did you solve that problem?

DT: Often I’ve run across this on other projects, and it happened in Triple 9. In an attempt to solve that problem, you ask, “What is motivating our main character to do A, B or C?” The writers come up with several answers and they all go in the film. And this becomes equally problematic: He’s doing it for the money and also doing it for his son, and then he’s doing it because they threatened to kill him, and then he’s doing it because… And you sort of go, “Well, what is it? Because now I’m not sure what to care about or how to look at this.” That became an issue for a few characters in the movie. We tried to make sure we were clearly asking ourselves, “What are the stakes? Why do people care about what they care about?” and “How is it going to intertwine with other people?”

CM: Do you think a lesson for writers then is to really choose one thing and let that be it?

DT: I think that is a lesson. This relates a little bit to what Ang Lee was saying: “Don’t be afraid to be obvious.” What that can also mean is, “Be clear.” A character can certainly have more than one motivation. Often the way it works is that a smaller motivation leads to a big motivation, leads to a bigger motivation; as stakes ramp up, things become important on different levels. That can work effectively. Also, there can be a main motivation and then corollary feelings about things that contribute to the same desire.

But if you have story threads and beats that say, “He’s doing it because of this. And then, well, he’s also doing it because of this other thing. And in case you are wondering why he’s doing it, he’s also doing it because of this…” That’s when it becomes a problem, when we just sort of seem to be piling on. So you want to be clear, and it takes experience and a little bit of trial and error. The process of editing is a lot like the process of writing, where you sometimes just have to put the thing together and feel it out and say, “What does this make me think? Does this work properly this way? No, it doesn’t, let’s rework that.” That happens in editing quite a bit, where you are rebalancing what the forces of drama are in the scenes and arcs.

CM: What sort of footage did you get from Hillcoat? Is it pretty malleable material?

DT: Quite malleable. With most people these days, especially shooting with Alexa, there’s a lot more footage. Material is gathered and then put together in the cutting room. In assembly, I will pick what I think the best, most interesting bits are, and will see how much of that sticks to the end — usually a good bit of it. I think John did a great job with Triple 9 by blending drama and action. I think there’s some fun action, but also some compelling drama — and even some comedy. It’s not a blend you often get.

Dylan Tichenor. Photo by John Clifford

CM: How do you feel about the increasing tendency for directors to shoot so much footage and just send it to editorial?

DT: My experience is that increasingly, decisions are being made more in the cutting room and less on the set. It costs no more money now to shoot 20 minutes of something than it does to shoot two minutes of something. I think we get a lot more unscripted and vérité moments in all sorts of movies. I’ve had so much footage on some of these projects that it can be overwhelming. It’s exciting to have that many options but it’s also, “Well, we have this many options…”

It really makes the dailies process and choosing things from the beginning quite important, because you can’t replace everything all the time, and you have to start somewhere. It’s your sensibility and your state of mind that are going to dictate how the scene first turns out. And in a lot of cases, that will largely be the shape of it in the end. It’s great that those of us in editorial have such a say in the storytelling. What I’m noticing, though, is maybe a homogenization of styles, where many projects are tending to the hand-held, roving, medium shot as coverage for a lot of things. Whereas 15 or 20 years ago, there would be more deliberate decisions made. I think now you can gather much more material in the same amount of time, so that gives many more options, flavors and colors. And we sort it out later, theoretically spending more time in the cutting room.

CM: That was my next question; are you getting more time to figure it out?

DT: No! You tell people, “Look, there’s so much footage. It just takes a while to go through and understand, and I want to make good decisions from the beginning.” They nod and go, “Of course, of course,” but I don’t think they really understand how, from my perspective, the craft or process has changed. It’s exciting and great to have such possibilities given to you, but it’s especially great when you feel the freedom to make the best thing out of that. You’re less locked into things, but at the same time you are responsible for more of the decision-making. It’s a trade-off, but I’m up for it!

February 1, 2016 0 comments

This Quarter in Film History

The Cowboys and the Divorcée

by Edward Landler February 1, 2016

written by Edward Landler 11 minutes read

by Edward Landler

Written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Arthur Miller, directed by Oscar winner John Huston, and starring two Hollywood legends — Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe — The Misfits premiered in New York City February 1, 1961.

The difficulties surrounding the shoot slowed production, adding over a half million dollars to the budget and giving United Artists’ publicity campaign an unwelcome notoriety. The picture went on to gross a then-impressive $1.2 million during its first weekend of release in 145 theatres. With mixed reviews, though, it only took in about $4.1 million during its entire initial run, not much over its final $4 million budget — “a lot of money in those days for a black-and-white film,” said director Huston in his 1980 autobiography, An Open Book.

Yet The Misfits endures as a powerful exposition of America’s failed aspirations to love and to fulfilling work. The collaboration of the personalities involved created a movie that resonates today more greatly than how the sum of its parts were viewed 55 years ago through the lens of a troubled production.

The idea for the film was sparked early in 1956 when Miller established residency in Nevada to divorce his first wife. Staying outside Reno, he hung out with a veteran cowboy, a part-time auto mechanic who owned a Piper Cub, and a rodeo rider. The three took the writer out to watch them capture wild horses to be slaughtered for dog food, and they talked a lot about a young woman the three of them all knew.

The Misfits. United Artists

After getting his divorce, America’s foremost playwright married Monroe, Hollywood’s most prominent sex goddess, on June 29, 1956. Variety announced their wedding with the headline: “Egghead Weds Hourglass.” In 1957, while in London with Monroe to film Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl, Miller wrote a short story about three Nevada cowboys hunting mustangs and reflecting on their experiences with a young divorcée to whom they were all attracted.

The story, titled “The Misfits,” appeared in Esquire magazine in October 1957. Miller saw it as “a story of three men who cannot locate a home on earth for themselves…and a woman as homeless as they but whose intact sense of life’s sacredness suggests a meaning for existence…”

In January 1958, back in New York, Monroe lost a child early in pregnancy. Miller, in his 1987 memoir Timebends: A Life, recalled a friend, photographer Sam Shaw, visiting with them in the hospital. Shaw told Miller that he thought his short story “would make a great movie and…a woman’s part she could kick into the stands.”

A few days later, the writer started expanding the story into a screenplay as “a kind of a gift…the expression of a kind of belief in her as an actress… Whatever Marilyn was, she was not indifferent; her very pain bespoke life and the wrestling with the angel of death.”

Nearing the end of the first draft in July 1958, Miller thought of Huston to direct. Recognizing Monroe’s potential, the director had cast her in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) at MGM, causing 20th Century-Fox to put her back under contract. Miller wrote that the director “was one of her few good Hollywood memories.”

Miller shared the completed draft with Frank Taylor, editor-in-chief at Dell Books. Taylor had worked in Hollywood for a few years and produced Mystery Street (1950) at MGM, where he got to know Huston. Volunteering to produce The Misfits, Taylor sent the script to the filmmaker who agreed to direct immediately.

By the early part of 1959, Lew Wasserman of MCA (three years before acquiring Universal) had lined up Gable, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach and Thelma Ritter for the cast. Their contracts, combined with Huston’s, Monroe’s and Miller’s, brought the above-the-line budget alone to more than $2 million.

Scheduled for a September 1959, shoot in Nevada locations, the start was delayed because of conflicts for the principals. Monroe’s Fox contract committed her to star with Yves Montand in Let’s Make Love (1960), directed by George Cukor, and Gable had signed to do It Happened in Naples (1960) with Sophia Loren.

The Misfits. United Artists

Production finally began on July 18, 1960. The night before, the director had asked the native Paiutes of Pyramid Lake to perform a rite for good weather. An hour later it rained. The real problems, though, were temperatures rising to 110° and further delays caused by a company flu epidemic, Huston’s emphysema and gout, a forest fire, Monroe’s state of mind and the deterioration of her marriage.

United Artists arranged for Magnum Photos to send successive pairs of its world-renowned photographers every two weeks to cover the entire shoot. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Inge Morath were Magnum’s first team. Morath’s famous portrait of star and author in their suite at Reno’s Mapes Hotel reflects the discomfort between the couple.

Production started efficiently with Huston and cinematographer Russell Metty shooting scenes around Reno a few days before the major stars’ first call dates. Less than a year earlier, Metty had shot Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), for which he would win an Oscar. Miller described him as “a tough old hand…[who] rarely used more than three lights for his shots and set them up in a matter of minutes.” The writer also liked how he gave “the film the look of a reported event rather than a fiction.”

Aware of Monroe’s reputation for being late on the set, Huston wrote in his autobiography, “I had the daily call changed from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., hoping this would make things easier on her. It didn’t.” Still, he kept treating her respectfully as a professional in a role that had been tailored for her and tried to get her to fight through her problems with a fine performance. Monroe, however, would only discuss her performance with the personal acting coach she insisted upon for the production, Paula Strasberg, wife of Actors Studio director Lee Strasberg.

Called “Black Bart” by the crew for dressing only in black in the searing heat, Strasberg was at one point barred from the set itself by the director. Meanwhile, Monroe’s anxieties kept leading her back to the sleeping pills she thought she needed for a good night’s sleep, making it more difficult for her to find a consistent thread in her performance the next day.

Miller hoped making the film would help bring his wife and him closer together, but instead she moved out of their suite and moved in with acting coach Strasberg. Monroe would rage at him for his rewrites of the next day’s scenes. And he knew Monroe’s off-hand comment about her last scene with Gable — which would not be shot for weeks —was about their marriage: “Marilyn, with no evident emotion, almost as though it were just another script, said, ‘What they really should do is break up at the end.’”

Throughout the shoot, Gable was patient with the delays, partly because he was getting $25,000 for every day they went over schedule. Yet the well- seasoned professional was always gentle with the co-star 25 years his junior who had idolized him as a young girl. Graciously, he even kept visiting journalists entertained while she struggled to pull herself together for interviews.

Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Misfits. United Artists

Aggravated with the delays, Huston distracted himself by staying up all night at the local craps tables. The next day, he would occasionally fall asleep in his director’s chair and lose track of which scene he was shooting. Producer Taylor later told Gable biographer Lyn Tornabene that, at times like these, it was Gable’s composure and good humor that served as the guiding spirit for the production.

Despite his own drug dependency, Clift turned out to be a solidly reliable performer and Monroe formed a bond with the sensitive actor. With his help, she succeeded in completing a five-minute long conversation scene with him in six attempts, with two perfect takes. Ironically, Clift’s drug use proved to be a serious hindrance to his performance as Freud (1962) in Huston’s next feature.

Five weeks into shooting, Metty expressed concern that Monroe’s close-ups were clearly showing her drugged exhaustion. On August 27, the movie star was flown to a private hospital in Los Angeles to be weaned from barbiturates under the care of her personal physician. Using storyboards prepared by art director Stephen Grimes, second unit director Tom Shaw started shooting the horse roping scenes with stunt doubles on a dry lake bed east of Carson City, today officially known as Misfits Flat.

Meanwhile, Huston went into the cutting room to work on the first cut of what had been shot with editor George Tomasini, ACE, best known for his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on nine films over 10 years. Using outtakes, the editor miraculously salvaged scenes of sustained dialogue, creating coherence from material marred by Monroe’s paraphrased speeches and omissions of words and sentences.

The actress returned to Reno on September 5 and filming resumed the next day. With call times set for noon every day, the physically demanding mustang scenes with the principal actors on Misfits Flat were completed slowly over about 15 days. Despite the heat, Gable insisted on doing some of the less strenuous stunts himself.

Except for three days of retakes later in the month, October 17 was the last day on location and the company returned to Hollywood for shooting at Paramount Studios. Production wrapped on November 4, the 90th day of shooting — 40 days over schedule.

Editor Tomasini had been continuously working on the first assembly during shooting and was prepared to show most of it on that last day. Before leaving the lot, Gable told Huston, “Hell, John! If the studio is unhappy about the cost, I’ll buy this picture for $4 million. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Two days after, on November 6, the Oscar winner for It Happened One Night (1934) suffered a heart attack and died 10 days later. Miller later wrote to biographer Tornabene that Gable “defended the original script even after I had lost the will to and ceased to care very much except that the project be finished as well as it could be.”

Huston wanted to rush the picture into release before the end of the year for Gable’s work to qualify for Academy consideration. Alex North, the film’s composer, completed the score in three weeks but was unable to record it until December 29.

The Misfits. United Artists

Before release, however, the film faced censorship issues concerning its treatment of animals and, of course, sex. Having supervised all of the movie’s animal scenes, the American Humane Association issued a statement which described, step by step, how the action was arranged and filmed, declaring that “no animals were cruelly treated or injured.”

The Production Code Administration objected to the “over-emphasis of nudity” and Monroe’s “bikini-type costume.” The movie received its Seal of Approval with the note: “Approved with replacement of breast shot.” Meanwhile, the Catholic Legion of Decency gave it a B rating only after the number of times Monroe’s fanny is slapped in the “paddle ball sequence” was cut down from six to two.

Oddly, these objections point up one of the central themes of The Misfits — the ways that men view women as objects. The three modern cowboys, portrayed by Gable, Clift and Wallach, relate to Monroe’s Roslyn Tabor as a creature fulfilling their own personal emotional needs — not as a human being with her own needs, concerns and desires.

Gable would have celebrated his 60th birthday on the day the movie opened. Monroe attended the New York premiere on a pass from a psychiatric hospital where she was under treatment for barbiturate dependency; 12 days earlier, she and Miller had gotten a divorce in Juarez, Mexico. The Misfits was also Monroe’s last completed picture; she died from a drug overdose on August 5, 1962.

February 1, 2016 0 comments

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