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Peter Tonguette

How the Post Team of ‘Ferrari’ Worked Together to Bring an Auto Epic to Life

by Peter Tonguette March 8, 2024

written by Peter Tonguette 10 minutes read

By Peter Tonguette

In the world of international motorsports, the glamorous drivers, glitzy sponsors, and incredible racecars draw most of the attention, but any real auto racing fan knows that it’s the pit crew that does the heavy lifting.

The pit crew ushers the racecar into place to refuel, to detach and discard worn tires, to affix new tires, and to send the momentarily sidelined racer back to the course in good shape. If the pit crew has done its job, no one will have noticed their expeditious handiwork.

Something of the same spirit of committed professionalism and grace under pressure characterizes the post-production team on Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” released to theaters late last year. The Neon release stars Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, the stylish, sophisticated automotive pioneer who, as the film opens, finds his attention split between his racecar empire and his muddled personal life: He is bereft over the loss of his son with his wife, Laura (Penelope Cruz), while also maintaining a relationship with his mistress, Lina (Shailene Woodley), with whom he also has a child. This is a personal psychodrama set amid the world of high-octane racing.

For Mann, the film is the fulfilment of a long-stated wish to make a cinematic portrait of Ferrari in full: his life, his loves, and his cars. The filmmaker demanded the sort of authenticity for which he had become famous on such earlier triumphs as “Heat” (1995), “The Insider” (1999), and “Ali” (2001). On this film, engine sounds had to be authentic to the cars being depicted on-camera, and the Italian-inflected English dialogue had to sound realistic but intelligible. All of this, and more, had to be achieved on a schedule far more compressed, and a budget considerably more limited, than the filmmaker’s large-scale studio pictures.

Consequently, Mann assembled a team of post-production pros. Many had worked with Mann in the past — some for decades, others for a shorter period — along with those who were new initiates. Together, they took charge of “Ferrari” in post-production in much the same way that the pit crew is responsible for a car mid-race: they refueled the film, changed its tires, and assured that, when it prepared to make its rounds on the course of the year’s best pictures, it was in tip-top shape.

CineMontage recently spoke with some key members of this “pit crew”: picture editor Pietro Scalia, ACE; supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Tony Lamberti; supervising sound editor Bernard Weiser; re-recording mixer Andy Nelson; music editor Paul Apelgren; and production sound mixer Lee Orloff.

CineMontage: Pietro, “Ferrari” is your first film with Michael Mann. What interested you about the project?

Pietro Scalia: I’ve known Michael for many years, and over the many years he’s been trying to put this movie together, he would contact me. I was very flattered by that. I knew of the project and the long gestation of it. Having the opportunity to work with a master, and somebody that I admired for so long, I’m happy that finally it was ready to go. I loved the script, and I had seen the evolution. I was amazed how he was able to crystallize this story so beautifully.

Pietro Scalia.

CineMontage: How did you work together in putting the picture together?

Scalia: One of the things we had to adapt very early on is the communication in the form of notes from Michael. Before he would shoot, he would share all his research and notes. During the shoot, he would note things that he liked, but when we were in Modena [Italy], it was a very tight schedule. He would come in on weekends, but he didn’t have much time to review the material. He said, “Just go ahead and follow the notes. We’ll review it on the weekends.” That gave me the kind of initial freedom to tackle the scenes, having all the information that I needed. Then we would review them on the weekends and, to my surprise, he liked these scenes, which gave me confidence.

The real editing part of it with Michael was after the shoot in Italy, when he returned to L.A. He literally went back to all the dailies, he commented on them, he recorded his reactions — very, very specific. His assistants would transcribe them, and we would get these notes. We created this giant library of notes. That’s his process. He has everything catalogued and noted.

Tony Lamberti.

CineMontage: Are Mann’s notes about his favorite takes or moments he likes?

Scalia: Exactly that, but also very, very specific. For example, in going through the takes, he noted his preferred takes, but then also the specific sections where he would stop the dailies and give you specific timecodes.

He would revisit older cuts, view them again, and sometimes make combinations. It was a continuous fine-tune to remove everything that’s in excess. How does this compare to that one? Sometimes we’d have three or four different cuts of the same scene at the same time. There are sequences that I cut 50 times.

CineMontage: Tony, you first worked with Michael on “Blackhat” (2015), and you learned about “Ferrari” while working on a director’s cut of the earlier film.

Tony Lamberti: He had this alternate edit of “Blackhat” that he showed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and on those weekends when I went in to work on it, he had all the materials out for “Ferrari.” His offices were filled with these giant poster boards of locations. He had build-sheets for the cars.

All the cars that are moving on-screen are actually replicas of the real cars. He had to build them from scratch in order to be able to mount cameras to them and put them through the rigors of production. The real cars are worth tens of millions of dollars. I’ve never worked with a director who just goes so deep into every single detail.

CineMontage: That meant you had to record the sounds of the real cars — not the replicas seen on-camera, but the actual cars they represent, right?

Lamberti: Specifically, the engines. The cars that were the replicas had little four-cylinder turbo engines in them, so we could run them all day long and beat them up, but the sound was not the real sound. The way that Michael’s attention to detail plays out is: “We’ve got to have the authentic sounds,” so that when a real racing driver watches this movie, they’ll be transported back. We started chasing down cars, and we had many, many avenues we were chasing down. The big challenge for me was: “How do you convince collectors and museums to allow you to record their highly valued cars”?

CineMontage: Once you managed to line up the real cars, how did you mic them?

Lamberti: So now we had all the cars wrangled. I had a shot list of everything that needed to get shot, and then the cutting room sent clips of the racing scenes so they could actually see on-screen what action needed to be shot. We had all the pieces in place. And then it’s just taking out the driver and performing those things. We were very, very specific: “We need starts, idles, aways.” All of these things needed to be done at at least 5,000 RPMs and above. We had all these stipulations; we need to have these cars revving their highest revs and doing these different actions. Then it was up to the guys to go out in the field and record it.

Michael has done enough amateur racing to really know what’s going on, and he’s been a Ferrari guy forever. Not only did we have to get the sound of the engines right, but we had to get the performances right, and what we liked to call racecraft. So all of those downshifts, all of the upshifts, all of the accelerations and decelerations — they all had to be absolutely spot-on to not only what we were seeing on-camera but when we’re not seeing things on-camera.

Bernard Weiser.

CineMontage: Lee, the recording of the dialogue scenes came under your purview.

Lee Orloff: It’s always about authenticity with Michael. As far back as anything I’ve ever done with him, he doesn’t build sets. If there’s a real location that we can go to, where the event takes place, we’ll be in Chicago for “Ali”; we’ll be down in Pascagoula, Mississippi, for “The Insider” in the courtroom. Once you realize that that’s his approach, you read the script and you know: “OK, so we’re going to be there.”

When it comes to racecraft, there’s no way that he’s going to allow anything on the soundtrack to be anything short of absolutely authentic. And this is stuff that’s sometimes barely in the picture, but it’s happening in the background. We’re having a conversation between Enzo and a driver on a racetrack, and the Maserati and the Ferraris are doing the time trials. He created that so that each one of those shifts, and everything in the track, supports that whole sense that you’re in the place. This is the way it would be if you were there.

Andy Nelson.

CineMontage: Bernard, you had previously worked with Mann and with Tony on “Blackhat.” What was the setup like on “Ferrari”?

Bernard Weiser: Tony and I knew that, for Michael, having the two of us be supervisors was the way to go. We knew the demands that we were walking into. I’d say this show proved us correct with that view of it. Michael likes to have direct contact. As a result, I was the one that, when I started, was immediately embedded with the picture department, starting at the very end of January or beginning of February. My cutting room was right next to Pietro and right in the middle of it all. That way, Michael could walk from room to room and discuss what he was thinking.

Andy Nelson: My experience with Michael is that everything’s evolving. In other words, he doesn’t finish a cut, come to the stage, and start mixing the sound. He’s finishing the movie in all these areas at the same time. We’ll put up a sequence on the screen and we’ll work on it with him, but it’s informing him, as we’re doing something, of what he thinks he should do pictorially. It literally comes alive on the big screen at that moment in time. He’ll move the picture editing department over to the dub stage, right next to where I am, and he’ll be back and forward because the cut will change. You have to be ready to work in a very fluid style with him.

Weiser: The first thing Michael said to me the first day I was there was that his biggest concern was the understandability of the dialogue. This was a twofold problem: You had the Italian actors speaking English, many with a very heavy accent, and then you had the English-speaking actors trying to speak English but with an Italian accent. CineMontage: How did you
address the issue?

March 8, 2024 0 comments

In Memoriam

IN MEMORIAM: Mo Henry, Negative Cutter, 1956-2024

by Peter Tonguette February 21, 2024

written by Peter Tonguette 7 minutes read

By Peter Tonguette

As one of the most admired negative cutters in Hollywood, Mo Henry made the “final cuts” on some of the most successful movies of the last four decades.

As a negative cutter, Henry was responsible for assuring that the cuts decided on by the picture editor and director in the workprint were recreated, with pinpoint accuracy, in the original camera negative. Her credits stretch as far back as Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” (1975), her first film, and continue through Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza” (2021), her last. In between, she served as negative cutter on such beloved and acclaimed movies as Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” (1995), Michael Mann’s “Heat” (1995), David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” (2001), and, among her own favorites, the second Harry Potter movie, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (2002).

Henry died on January 14 at the age of 67 in Los Angeles, where she had lived her entire life. She is remembered among her many colleagues not just for her talent and professionalism, but her dedication to her craft.

“Combining those two dangerous words ‘negative’ and ‘cutter’ to describe Mo Henry seems wrong, because she was the most ‘positive’ ‘joiner’ you would ever want to meet and work with,” said picture editor Walter Murch, ACE, who worked with Henry on several films, including “Apocalypse Now Redux” (2001).

Henry belonged to what might be considered the first family of negative cutters. One of four children born to Mike and Patricia Henry, her father was a negative cutter; her aunt—her father’s sister—was a negative cutter; and her son, Logan Henry, is a negative cutter.

Despite this heritage, Mo did not necessarily dream of a life working with reels of film. Mo just simply wanted a job, and her father was aware of an opportunity at Universal. “She moved out of her parents’ place the day she turned 18, and her dad got her a job,” Logan Henry said. “At the time, she was just young and needed something to do, but she really blossomed in the industry and she really took to it.”

In a 2015 interview with CineMontage, Henry said she was well-suited for the job. “I had the right personality and I was accurate,” she said. She began working with opticals on the 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, she recalled. Then came “Jaws.” Although the film would become one of the signature blockbusters of its age, she was entrusted with negative cutting on the film because no one realized how good it was at the time. “My boss, who happened to be my dad, asked me to start on it,” she told CineMontage. “He said, ‘It looks like it’s headed straight for TV, so if you make a mistake, nobody will know.’” After the success of “Jaws,” Henry worked, often uncredited, on other major feature films, but she eventually landed at Quinn Martin Productions, which was her entrée into television programming, which she enjoyed.

After all, the difficulty of work in her profession was determined by the number of cuts she had to make, and TV shows in those days did not have an overabundance of them. “I loved cutting ‘M*A*S*H,’” she remembered to CineMontage. “It was only half an hour and the style was lots of long takes. Each reel had very few cuts, so it was fun to work on.”

‘Looks like it’s headed straight for TV,’ the boss said. It turned out to be ‘Jaws.’

In the mid-1980s, Henry took a sabbatical to pursue interior design and real estate, which had been her original aspiration. After a while, though, she felt compelled to return to filmmaking. She went to work for a commercial production company, first as a P.A. and then as a production coordinator, and eventually resumed her career as a negative cutter at Universal.

Following numerous entreaties, legendary negative cutter Donah Bassett persuaded Henry to work for her company. “From then on, I cut features exclusively,” Henry told CineMontage. “I had never had to deal with things like multiple-language soundtracks, multiple elements like interpositives, internegatives, and overlays.” Yet Henry absorbed it all, and Bassett eventually asked her to take over the company. She bought the company in 1995.

Although Henry enjoyed negative cutting as a craft, she relished running her own business, which was known, for the entirety of its existence, as D. Bassett & Associates. Henry nurtured relationships with executives and won contracts from major studios; Warner Bros. was among her company’s biggest clients during the peak years of the mid-to-late 1990s. “As a business-owner, she really hit her stride and just had a pretty well-oiled post-production machine,” Logan Henry said. “Those were the busiest years, and really a boom for her business.” High-profile productions from those days include everything from “Batman Forever” (1995) to “Twister” (1996), “Air Force One” (1997) to “Lethal Weapon 4” (1998).

At its peak, D. Bassett & Associates did the negative-cutting on about 30 titles annually—with as many as four or five being worked on concurrently—and employed as many as eight full-time negative-cutters, Logan Henry said. “She became a very, very skilled cutter,” he said. “She had a very strong reputation for just not making mistakes.”

Her rule for her employees was: one missed cut on a project would be over-looked, but a second missed cut meant you were out the door. “The missed cuts that any of her employees did throughout her tenure you could count on two hands,” Logan Henry said.

Among the most challenging projects of Henry’s career was “Apocalypse Now Redux,” director Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious reediting of his 1979 Vietnam War masterpiece. “On that film, she had to take B-negative 35mm stock that had been stored for 20 years in limestone caves in Pennsylvania, and integrate it with the fragile, dirty, much-printed original negative of the 1979 ‘Apocalypse,’” Walter Murch said. “Did her hands tremble? I was not there to see her actual cutting, but I doubt it.”

In fact, Murch recalled, contact printing had rendered the first reel of “Apocalypse Now” so dirty that normal cleaning would not suffice; hand-tweezers and Q-tips did not work, either.

“Mo suggested: ‘Hot alkaline bath,’” Murch recounted. “Francis Coppola, risk-taker, was immediately interested. ‘Sounds like Medieval torture,’ he said. ‘Hot alkaline will puff up the emulsion, softening it,’ Mo explained, ‘and then we gently agitate the bath water as the film runs through the rollers, and the dirt just floats off the softened emulsion.’ ‘What’s the risk?’ wondered Francis. ‘A one-in-ten chance that the emulsion will get so soft that it unbinds from the acetate, and reel one comes out as clear leader, with the emulsion just a rainbow puddle at the bottom of the tank.’ Francis, who trusted Mo, as all of us did, said, ‘Let’s do it!’ And so it came to pass: reel one went through the hot alkaline bath and . . . emerged beautiful and clean, emulsion still bound to the acetate. To Mo, smiling and implacable, this was business as usual.”

After the digital revolution, the traditional negative-cutting business at D. Bassett & Associates slowed down, though she remained available for directors who preferred to work in film—including Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan—as well as for archival work with studios. And, at the tail end of her career, she took on a project arguably unique in all of film history: the assembly of Orson Welles’s long-unfinished film “The Other Side of the Wind,” which was shot in the early-to-mid 1970s and finally released by Netflix in 2018.

“I don’t know if any other film project has been as complex—no doubt one of the reasons that Orson was unable to finish the movie,” said picture editor Bob Murawski, noting that the film had been shot in 35mm, 16mm, Super 8, color, black-and-white, and other formats. “And much of it had been cut up into tiny pieces many decades before we ever got involved. Mo fearlessly took on the almost impossible task of organizing and reassembling all of it, a meticulous process that consumed many months before I started, and continued all the way through our editing process. It is safe to say that Orson’s movie could not have been finished without the mighty work of Mo Henry.”

Mo Henry looked back on her life and accomplishments with satisfaction.

“The experiences she had and the relationships she built over the years was because of her work,” Logan Henry said. “She certainly didn’t have an ego about it at all, but she was grateful for what the business gave her throughout her life.”

February 21, 2024 0 comments

TEAM SPIRIT: Picture editors David Canseco, left, Todd Zelin, Joseph Ettinger, and Justin Bourret.

Behind the Scenes Features

For the Post-Production Team of HBO’s ‘Righteous Gemstones,’ the Devil’s in the Details

by Peter Tonguette February 1, 2024

written by Peter Tonguette 12 minutes read

By Peter Tonguette

Its characters may or may not be righteous, but over the course of three ecstatically entertaining seasons, HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” is clearly one of the most riotous, raucous, and rowdy shows on television.

The comedy tells of the family life, business operations, and assorted scandals of the Gemstone family, televangelists who seek to reach souls over the airwaves and in-person at their megachurch, the Gemstone Salvation Center. The imposing patriarch is Eli Gemstone (John Goodman), but circling around him are a constellation of memorable characters, including his offspring: associate pastor Jesse (played by series creator Danny McBride), youth pastor Kelvin (Adam DeVine), and church singer Judy (Edi Patterson).

Watching “The Righteous Gemstones,” viewers might often have the feeling that the Gemstones’ sacred and profane travails might lead just about anywhere, but the show is the product of the disciplined and creative work of a group of collaborators committed to a unique comic vision.

Produced by Rough House Pictures — the production company founded by executive producers (and frequent show directors) McBride, Jody Hill, and David Gordon Green — the show is shot (and often edited) on location in South Carolina.

The postproduction team is led by picture editor and co-producer Justin Bourret, ACE, who has worked on the series since the pilot. Joining Bourret on recent seasons are editors David Canseco, Joseph Ettinger, and Todd Zelin. Re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor Nicholas Renbeck, MPSE, has been with the show since the beginning.

CineMontage recently asked the editors to discuss the virtues and vices of the Gemstones and the joy of bringing their travails to life.

CineMontage: Justin, what excited you about working on the pilot?

Justin Bourret: I had met Danny and the whole Rough House gang on season 2 of “Vice Principals.” They liked my style, and several years later, when the pilot for “The Righteous Gemstones” came up, I got a call that Danny wanted me to edit it. The script by Danny was really well done. I got a good sense of each character, and the story was nicely laid out. These scripts, in general, are really tight. I came out a couple weeks early to help with the camera and makeup tests, and I was able to see the table-read. It was like magic. I could tell right away that all of the actors that he picked just gelled together.

A scene from “The Righteous Gemstones.” PHOTO: HBO

CineMontage: Is it tough to edit pilots?

Bourret: They are a hard nut to crack because, even on some really good shows, the pilot may be good, but you don’t really have a sense of what the show is going to be about until a couple of episodes in. The pilot for “The Righteous Gemstones” gave a great sense of character and story, as well as nailing the tone, which is this sort of tight-rope we have between comedy and drama.

CineMontage: How would you characterize the tone?

Bourret: We are making a comedy, but it’s a comedy where if you stripped away all the jokes, you would still have a very interesting drama or other type of film. Each season sort of takes on a different genre. Season 1 had this Coen Brothers-style, blackmail plot. It also had a little Western flair to it. Then, season 2 had the gangster thing going on, and then season 3 delves more into family dynamics and the militia.

CineMontage: Joe, you came onto the show on season 3 after being a fan during the first two seasons. What did you respond to as a viewer?

Joseph Ettinger: As a viewer and as an artist, I love dark comedies. I find a lot of joy in storytelling that has dramatic irony or dissonance. These characters are almost comedically monstrous, and yet you can’t help but cheer for them in a weird way. That’s such an interesting fine line to walk. It’s such a challenge creatively to create that tone and atmosphere for the show.

CineMontage: David, is it a challenge to get audiences to invest in characters who are so outrageous?

David Canseco: A lot of it comes from Danny and the writing and the directing. But John Goodman is really our foundational rock. He really grounds the show. We need to make sure that we beat out these character moments so we understand what’s going on. You need to believe that these characters are real in some sense, and then that lets us get away with the comedy. Bourret: You are doing a balancing act. You have a full scene that’s very funny even if it’s dark, but then on a dime, you have a scene that rips your heart out. What you always have to keep in your mind as an editor is what you are trying to relay in a scene and how that is going to affect not only the scene that came before but scenes coming later.

CineMontage: In general, what is the workflow like on the show?

Bourret: Like many TV shows, we work in blocks. Most of the episodes were shot together throughout the whole shooting schedule, so we were a little all over the place. Some days one editor would get hit a little hard, and there would be a week where the other editors would get hit a little hard. As they’re shooting, we’re editing and immediately showing scenes to one another, to the director, and to Danny.

Canseco: They shoot a lot of footage. Normally, for a day of shooting on a TV show or a movie, you get two-and-a-half or three hours. This show pushes four or five hours. The scripts are loaded, and there’s a decent amount of improv. Once we have an editor’s cut, it’s rare for something to be under 40 minutes, and usually it’s closer to an hour.

CineMontage: Are there particular scenes where the actors do get a chance to go on riffs?

Todd Zelin: Probably the scenes that have the most improv are the scenes at Jason’s Steakhouse. First of all, those scenes take 12 hours to shoot, so that’s a full day for the actors. It’s one of the few times that our amazing cast is all together in one room. They definitely riff and play off each other. One of the big indicators of whether or not they like the idea they’ve come up with on-set is they’ll do it over and over again in every take to make sure they have a version of it in every angle. Then they’ll come up with new things here and there, one-offs that they’ll say just once on an improv run.

CineMontage: How do you handle that material as an editor?

Zelin: For my editor’s cut, I’m going to deliver the best version of what’s on the page plus what I just think is funny. If they’ve done a certain improv run over and over, I’ll know that at some point they will want to see a version of that improv run cut together and maybe multiple versions of it. Once we’ve screened it, I’ll try different versions of the same improv. Sometimes someone will say, “I just want something punchy here.” I’ll go back in and I’ll look: What else is here? What else did they do?

CineMontage: Joseph, talk about how the post team works together.

Ettinger: So much of the tone of the show is set in the edit bay, and we are super-fortunate to have a group of editors that work in collaboration. Editing can be an isolating job sometimes, and certainly not every show has a sense of community. This is definitely a show where, when I was finding my footing or feeling a little insecure about some of my first cuts, I could take them to the other guys and talk through stuff. We bring in assistant editors. We bring in PAs. A good idea can come from anywhere.

CineMontage: There’s a cutting room set up in Charleston, South Carolina, right?

Canseco: We all kind of pepper in at the beginning. Everybody who works on the show is in LA, but once the schedule comes up, we all just find our way out to Charleston in different ways.

Some people drive out because they have pets. We go to this very small town that doesn’t have a lot of filming, and we kind of take it over. We work out of a shopping mall.

CineMontage: Is that helpful?

Canseco: You definitely feel like you’re part of this weird community that we’ve built.

CineMontage: Justin, what’s it like editing John Goodman’s material?

Bourret: You can tell when you’re editing someone who is a seasoned actor like he is. He knows exactly where his character is going, and he also knows when he’s in a close-up. It’s definitely an art that I have noticed in actors who have been around.

Ettinger: The cast is phenomenal. In particular, I love getting Edi’s dailies. She is a joy to cut because she always gives you so many options and you have varied perfor-mances to operate with. Especially with the unique tone of the show, these actors are so dialed into what this world needs to feel like. You rarely have moments where you’re struggling to find the right beat.

Zelin: The actors give amazing performances. They’re hitting the drama hard when they need to, and they’re hitting the comedy hard when they need to. Part of what makes it work is the show takes wild swings back and forth. You’ll go from heart-wrenching when Eli is in the hospital after getting attacked by the cycle ninjas, and then you cut outside to everyone freaking out and puking. You’re always playing in those extremes.

CineMontage: Nicholas, what are you trying to accomplish on the show from a sound perspective?

Nicholas Renbeck: I hope we are able to give the show, in some subtle sense, its own personal sonic voice. We thought a bit about bugs and birds of South Carolina, how those sounds come out when the Gemstones are in nature, or on their compound, and definitely in the nighttime scenes. Sometimes we can push the sounds of, say, crickets and cicadas to help add to the tension of a scene. There is definitely the idea of wealth vs. poverty with the Gemstones that I like to explore when possible. In the Salvation Center, the family compound, and Jason’s Steakhouse, we look to make things sound a bit more pleasant, and have some fun playing with the megachurch audience’s reaction and interactions with the family on stage. We contrast that with when the family is in a poorer location — say, a roadside motel, where we’ll push the highway traffic sounds, rattier-sounding cars, unpleasant air-conditioning units. Plus, every season there are fun vehicles to give voice to. There are a lot of action sequences for a 30-minute show.

CineMontage: How do you work with the overall post team?

Renbeck: Danny works very closely with the picture department as they put things together. A majority of the time, they are choosing how they see the show moving along sound-effects-wise, and they put in placeholders. Some of the stuff is just right to begin with and we just need to sweeten it a little bit, and other times the sound department will fill it out a lot more. Before each episode, Justin and I will have a conversation on what we need to accomplish. We’ll go through every single episode before the sound crew starts on it. For something like the locust swarm at the end of season 3, we definitely needed to discover what that was going to sound like.

CineMontage: What are we hearing during the locust swarm?

Renbeck: Oh, the Foley and sound effects team went full-on there. We definitely have a lot of sound elements playing at that point, more than I can totally recall. We had actual tracks of locusts flying, pumped up with crickets and grasshoppers along with some evening peepers, and a 17- year cicada recording I had recorded a few years back, which adds an eerie, sort of otherworldly effect to the swam. Rachel Wardell, our sound effects editor, very creatively added in some stampeding animals, a motorboat engine, and processed helicopter blades to give the whole swarm a bit more body and shape to it. Whenever the swarm would “reach out,” like a hand of God trying to grab someone, we added a low-end bass drop effect to give it a final sell. On the Foley side, our team of Marko Costanzo, George Lara, and Ailin Gong did a fantastic job covering the hundreds of locust wings, flybys, and insect impacts. (Ed. note: To read more about Ailin Gong and her work, please refer to the “What Our Members Do” feature on page 20.)

CineMontage: Justin, is “Gemstones” a show that changes a lot in post from a picture-editing perspective?

Bourret: The scripts are very strong. Sometimes we rearrange scenes, but it’s more about cutting out things that we just don’t need. We say, “Do we need to say that line that many times?” Or “This scene says it better than that scene, so let’s eliminate the middle scene.” Danny lets the editors bring their own sense of style. He loves style and creativity. Every once in a while, we get a scene that maybe is not popping the way we wanted it to, and he’ll turn to us to come up with creative ways to execute what he was looking for. Sometimes it may be to make a montage out of something that wasn’t a montage.

Ettinger: It’s a testament to Danny’s ability to bring people into the world, and that includes the actors, the DPs, and everyone who has to buy in. If I were in his shoes, I don’t know if I’d be able to describe what I wanted. He does such a good job of communicating that vision and getting everyone onboard, and that’s a huge part of the success of the show.

February 1, 2024 0 comments

Behind the Scenes Interview Web Exclusives

Affonso Gonçalves Talks Editing Todd Haynes’ Drama ‘May December’

by Peter Tonguette January 23, 2024

written by Peter Tonguette 10 minutes read

By Peter Tonguette

From the life and death of Karen Carpenter to our inability to function in the modern world to stories of love affairs thwarted by society, filmmaker Todd Haynes has always had a penchant for high drama.

His earlier films — including the aforementioned “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” (1987), “Safe” (1995), and “Far from Heaven” (2002) — established that pattern, but his latest film confirms it. “May December” — which Netflix released to widespread attention and acclaim in late November — enlarges the sort of story that would normally be tabloid fodder to operatic proportions.

Julianne Moore (the earlier star of “Safe” and “Far from Heaven”) stars as Gracie, a woman whose life was derailed following the revelation of an illicit (and illegal) relationship with a teenager, Joe (Charles Melton) — a young man whom she subsequently married. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, an actress who has been tapped to play a character based on Gracie in a new movie.

The contours of Gracie’s crimes as depicted in Samy Burch’s screenplay are said to be inspired by the real-life case of Mary Kay Letourneau, who was the subject of a thousand newsmagazine segments in the 1990s and 2000s. In the hands of Haynes and his frequent collaborator in the cutting room, picture editor Affonso Goncalves, ACE, the material becomes as strange, disturbing, and darkly comic as anything in memory.

Over a series of collaborations reaching back to “Mildred Pierce” (2011) and including the acclaimed “Carol” (2015) and “Wonderstruck” (2017), Goncalves is uniquely attuned to Haynes’ style. The editor recently spoke with CineMontage about their latest cinematic undertaking.

CineMontage: You and Todd Haynes have worked together a long time. What about the two of you click?

Affonso Gonçalves: We watch films the same way and we like similar kinds of films. Todd has this encyclopedic knowledge of film, which is really amazing. We both have a deep love of film. We have that communication. He can make references and talk about movies that he loves and ideas that he has, and I know exactly what he’s talking about. I think that helps because then I know what he’s looking for.

For every single film we’ve worked together on, he’s done extensive research for the film. He has film references, music references, and literary references. He gives those to all of us — his main creative partners. It’s great, because you know what he’s going for, but it’s really fun because it enriches my knowledge of film and filmmaking.

Affonso Gonçalves, editor of “The Lost Daughter.” PHOTO: Matt Infante.

CineMontage: What were some of the reference points for “May December”?

Gonçalves: He made a lot of references to [Ingmar] Bergman films, where he saw similarities — not only the mirror scenes, but films with women who mirror each other’s relationships. And [Jean-Luc] Godard and Joseph Losey. Then we started cutting, we kept thinking about those films.

Of course, this film has a very interesting tone. Ultimately, it’s a serious film with a serious subject matter — it’s a very morally dark and complex story — but it’s also funny. We had to shift. [Humor] not something we’re used to, or Todd is used to shooting, so it was really interesting in the cutting room for us to explore and, whenever we could, lean into the humor. And with a film like this, it really helps.

CineMontage: How did you bring that quality to the forefront?

Gonçalves: I think through the sharpness of the edit. In [Haynes’s] other films, there’s always sort of a lingering quality — the moments you get to experience and savor. Here, it’s a little bit different. We have so many scenes that are in one shot and things happen within the frame, and it is what it is; we just have to be careful when we’re coming in and we’re going out. Everything else has a little more pace, a little more sharpness. We get out a little faster than you expect. We talked about punchlines, which usually was not something that we’d talk about.

CineMontage: How do you and Todd work together? Do you cut as they’re shooting? What happens when Todd comes in?

Gonçalves: He’s shooting the film and I’m cutting. I was in LA, he was shooting in Savannah [Georgia]. When he finished shooting, I had a cut of the film. Todd doesn’t really watch dailies. He took a couple of weeks off. We sent to him DVDs of everything that was shot, so after he took a little break, he watched all the footage by himself and took notes, and he sent that all to me. By that time, I was in Portland, where he lives, so then I built a cut based on his notes. Then he came in and we worked off of that. We also had my cut, and we kind of used both of them.

Then that becomes the third cut, which is the final cut. It’s very hands-on. He comes in at 9 and he leaves at 7. We go through very, very detailed notes about every performance, every cut, the scenes, and the structure of the film. That part is similar in every film that we’ve done together.

CineMontage: Was “May December” a movie that changed a lot, or were the bones obvious from the beginning?

Gonçalves: The bones were there. It’s not a film that we did a massive restructure on. We lifted some scenes. We may have changed them a little bit around, or used different lines, but it was pretty close to the script. The work that we really did was work closely with performance, which is always something that we spend a lot of time on.

CineMontage: The movie is anchored by Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. What was it like working with their performances?

Gonçalves: Once you pick one performance, everything else has to fall in line with that [within a scene]. It can’t be that one [performance] is too big and one is too small. Once we committed to Julianne’s performance, if the scene is anchored on her, everything else has to follow. Which is really interesting, because Natalie is kind of performing a performance by Julianne. Me and Todd have to really gauge: “Is this too much? Did she get it too close? Is the lisp too strong?” It’s really carefully building the right arc of the character and arc of the change.

CineMontage: Throughout the film, we hear the theme from Joseph Losey’s 1970 masterpiece “The Go-Between.” Was it a temp piece first? When did you decide to commit to that music?

Gonçalves: That emerged because Todd, while he was researching the film, decided to watch “The Go-Between.” It was a film that he really liked, and he hadn’t watched it in a long time. He immediately fell in love with the soundtrack to the point that he actually added it to the script. He also played it on the set for the actors.

I knew that we wanted to use [“The Go-Between”] as a temp, and I temped the film with it. It was really interesting because, when you watch [“May December”], it’s not something that comes to mind. One, it’s specific to the [Losey] film, and two, it has a specific sonic language that is not something you think of when you’re watching “May December.” The challenge was how do we fit this to the scene? So you sometimes cut in a way that’s going to fit, or you start the music a little later, or you don’t use the entire piece or just one hit.

CineMontage: There are a lot of colors to this film: it’s about moral issues, it’s also about show business and the media. What do you hope people take from the movie?

Gonçalves: I love the film. I feel like a lot of people are understanding the moral conundrums of the film. You come in with one idea, and it’s super-slippery because you can’t really trust the film — you have to make up your own mind of what’s right, what’s wrong, what is it that happened, and who was right. It’s so much about boundaries being trampled on.

As I’m working on it, I have to make my own decisions. I have to make my own judgment call. And, at the same time, I have to be true to the story and to the film, and I can’t pick sides. That’s the great thing about being an editor.

January 23, 2024 0 comments

Behind the Scenes Features

Past Production: How the ‘Maestro’ Team Recreated the Music – and Marriage – of Leonard Bernstein

by Peter Tonguette January 22, 2024

written by Peter Tonguette 13 minutes read

By Peter Tonguette

In the dictionary, the noun “maestro” is a term used for a classical-music conductor. The word confers a certain authority: the maestro, or conductor, is the center of gravity and the center of attention. After all, the conductor stands at the podium, and until he or she taps the baton and motions to the assembled orchestra players, no music is made. There is a bit of magic to being a maestro: he or she is the person who summons forth sounds from an otherwise silent page.

The new Netflix drama “Maestro” takes as its subject one of the most notable maestros in the annals of American music, and certainly one of the most visible: the conductor Leonard Bernstein. As played by director, producer, and co-writer Bradley Cooper, Bernstein is a volcanic, volatile, and unforgettable force — not just a gifted conductor, but a composer of renown (“Candide,” “West Side Story,” the score to “On the Waterfront”), a TV host (“Young People’s Concerts”), an attentive father, an adoring husband to Felicia Montealegre (played in the film by Carey Mulligan), as well as an enthusiastic participant in affairs: as the film opens, Bernstein, who was bisexual, is shown in the throes of a intense relationship with an old friend, the clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer).

Yet the movie “Maestro” did not arrive on screens as the product of a single person. Perhaps Bradley Cooper was the conductor of the project, which was co-written with Josh Singer and which had at one point been planned as a directorial vehicle for Martin Scorsese (who remains a producer on the picture). But the film itself came to life thanks to the creativity and industriousness of a highly committed creative team, including picture editor Michelle Tesoro, ACE, executive music producer and supervising music editor Jason Ruder, and sound designer and supervising sound editor Richard King.

Tesoro first entered Cooper’s orbit following her work on Sean Penn’s film “Flag Day” (2021), which she had helped recut. Cooper had given Penn notes on various passes on the film.

“When Bradley saw my pass, which was the final pass of the film, he asked Sean, “Who edited this?’” Tesoro said. “At the time, he was still developing ‘Maestro,’ and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in helping him work on a sizzle reel, which we ended up calling a proof of concept.” Tesoro put together test footage that displayed the convincing makeup designed by Kazu Hiro to transform Cooper into Bernstein at different points in his 72 years. (The conductor was born in 1918 and died in 1990.)

Although the “maestro” in the title is Bernstein, Cooper never intended to make a movie focused on a godlike conductor. Instead, the script gave equal time — maybe even more than equal time — to Bernstein’s wife Felicia, who had to navigate her love for her husband with the knowledge of his bisexuality. “Bradley set out to make a movie about marriage,” Tesoro said. “When he came aboard to be a co-writer, he and Josh rewrote the story to focus on Felicia and the marriage. That was what he found to be the most compelling story that he could tell.”

During postproduction, Tesoro never had to strain to give weight to Felicia’s side of a scene because her perspective was already central to the script. “Sometimes, we really leaned so heavily into Felicia that it seemed like it was all her story,” she said. “Then we had to backtrack and maybe put Lenny more into it to have the balance. Even if they did some improvisational scenes, it was always leaning towards her, or the two of them, or the family as a whole.” Bernstein’s three children are played by Maya Hawke, Gideon Glick, and Alexa Swinton.

The film, which was photographed by Matthew Libatique, ASC, transitions between 1940s-era black-and-white sequences in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, later color sequences also in 1.33, and a few bookend color segments in 1.85. The height of the 1.33 aspect ratio was especially useful during scenes of Bernstein at the podium. “When he’s conducting, you can really take advantage of the height,” Tesoro said.

Although the choice to alter the size of the image, as well as to incorporate both black-and-white and color, was a bold one, Tesoro said that her goal was to make the transitions seamless. “Typically, I always aim for the invisible,” she said. “I don’t want to lose your attention. We experimented with certain kinds of long dissolves or superimpositions, but the film would just kick it back, like, ‘This is not what I want.’” Cooper favored long takes that observed the complicated characters instead of commenting on them. “It’s a more observational style, instead of saying, ‘Oh, now look here,’” Tesoro said. “He always felt that if we had more coverage, it would feel like a movie and it wouldn’t feel like you’re witnessing real people and real situations.” A greater degree of intercutting between the black-and-white and color sequences was originally anticipated, but during postproduction, it was decided to let the two sequences play out with a minimum of switching back and forth.

Michelle Tesoro.

The shooting schedule ran from May through the end of July 2022, and then picked up again in September when additional locations became available. “I was always very close to picture,” Tesoro said. “That was probably informing [Cooper] of how things were coming together.” The interruption in filming offered the unique opportunity for director and picture editor to live with the film as it was coming into focus. During the pause, Cooper had the chance to take stock of which to-be-shot scenes were needed and which possibly weren’t; in the end, one sequence was scrapped altogether. “We kind of knew what the movie was and were really honing it,” Tesoro said. Each time filming picked up again, Tesoro was left even more impressed with the makeup design. “Every time he went back, the makeup just got better and better,” Tesoro said, pointing to one of the last scenes shot: an interview with a very aged Bernstein in a red sweater. “When I saw it, I went, ‘Holy moly.’ Many times with makeup, there are wig fixes we have to do. There are little things we have to do. Here, there was nothing we had to do. We color-timed it, which you would do with someone’s regular face.”

In fact, the interview sequence was so compelling — and provided such an insight into the character of Bernstein — that Cooper and Tesoro moved the scene to the very start of the picture (which would have originally opened with a scene, still in the film, of Bernstein being invited to conduct the New York Philharmonic). “The red sweater scene was meant to go at the very end of the film in the timeline of the film,” Tesoro said. “But we were looking for a way to ground the film in the story of Lenny and Felicia, so the byproduct of it is you are confronted with the makeup, with what Lenny looked like at that time. This was a way of saying: “This is Lenny, not Bradley Cooper.’”

Throughout the film, major structural elements stayed the same, but the film was refined and individual scenes altered or cut until late in the process. Tesoro began to see the film as a bit of a symphony of Bernstein’s life. “The music of Leonard Bernstein, as we used it in the film, completely dictated the editing,” Tesoro said. “That doesn’t mean that we edited the picture to the music, but in thinking about his music and thinking about how we were editing the story together.” The film uses Bernstein-composed music as its score, some of which Cooper had already spotted and some of which the director was saving for the right moment. “It was more about waiting for the right moment when we had the right sequence where we wanted to try to add music,” Tesoro said. “We’d go through the cues that weren’t used, or weren’t spotted for other places, to see which one would make sense not only in the timeline of Bernstein’s life but the emotion and mood that the cue would bring.” The interplay between music and picture was akin to a “conversation,” the editor added.

In several sequences, the music itself takes center stage, especially a performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 2” (the “Resurrection Symphony”) at the Ely Cathedral in England — a performance that, at Cooper’s insistence, was recorded live. Cooper turned to Ruder, the music editor with whom he had worked on his first feature as a director, “A Star Is Born” (2018).

“I got an early copy of the script that was in progress, and he said, ‘Look, we’ve had so much success on ‘A Star Is Born’ with live vocals and doing things live on set. What do you think about tackling this in the same fashion?’” Ruder said. “I got excited and extremely scared at the same time. I said, ‘You mean with full orchestra doing Leonard Bernstein?” . . . It sounded absolutely amazing, and it sounded like one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever heard of in our line of work.”

Cooper decided that any music shown to be performed live on camera would be recorded live on set. “We never let go of his vision: ‘If we see it, we’ve got to capture it live,’” Ruder said, and that especially applied to the sequence of Bernstein conducting Mahler at the Ely Cathedral. “The tech scout was an intricate piece of the puzzle,” Ruder said. “Ely is not the best-sounding [venue]. It’s beautiful, but it’s just like this enormous cavern. We were like, ‘This is going to be hard to record.’”

The filmmakers partnered with classical recording engineers at a company called Classic Sound. “I said, ‘Have you recorded anything at Ely?’ And they said they had done years ago a couple of recordings,” Ruder said, noting that Classic Sound uses Puremix rather than Pro Tools. “I thought, ‘These are our guys,’” Ruder said. “We discussed how to sling microphones. We figured out whether any microphones would be in frame. There were a couple you could see in the archives [of the actual performance] . . . . We came up with a strategy to shoot, and it actually, magically, worked out.”

When it came time to film the scene, Cooper, inhabiting Bernstein, stood in front of musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as a chorus of singers, who then performed selections from the Mahler symphony. “We kind of mapped it out roughly, because we were short on time,” Ruder said. “Bradley was very good about: ‘This is the section. Let’s map out the measures.’” Multiple cameras, used in several different setups, captured the scene. “When you have that many players and singers live, it’s kind of a wild animal,” Ruder said. “It was really down to a few magic takes, to be honest with you.”

For scenes that used Bernstein’s music as score, however, Cooper and Ruder discussed using the original masters from the composer’s recordings. “All we had is stereo masters,” Ruder said. “I thought, ‘Surely some sort of multi-tracks that exist, and that might help us make a little more of a 7.1 or an Atmos mix.’ But we really couldn’t get our hands on them.” Then the idea emerged for the London Symphony Orchestra to recreate the pieces. Conducting consultant Yannick Nezet-Seguin used the actual Bernstein recordings, which were being used as the film’s “temp score,” as a reference. “Yannick really studied the scenes that we had put together and the actual recordings that we were working with,” Ruder said. “At that point, we were able to do an Atmos scoring session and bring it back to a dub stage.”

The sound world of the film often had to be subservient to the music, as in a dream-like scene in which Lenny and Felicia find themselves onstage in a performance of the classic Bernstein-scored ballet “Fancy Free.” “With those more dreamlike or imaginative moments, like ‘Fancy Free,’ there’s very little Foley, if any,” Richard King said. “It’s all production sound and it’s all music. Even a lot of the production movement, like footsteps, were taken out.” During the Mahler scene, too, any background sound has been eliminated. “The world kind of comes back after [the musicians] finish,” King said. The scene was a delightful detour for Tesoro as well. “I love cutting ballet and dance,” she said. “I worked on a television show that was all ballet dancers years ago. You have to be able to see the whole body and know where to go. It was such a joy to cut this sequence because I knew how to do this. The music is always there, and it’s really a little microcosm of their story.”

On the other hand, scenes of the Bernsteins’ day-to-day domestic existence were full of the everyday noise of life. “There are several different locations that we are in in Connecticut and Long Island and Manhattan, and we have a good sense of where we are sonically,” King said, also pointing to scenes at the Tanglewood music venue in Massachusetts, where Bernstein conducted and taught. “Tanglewood had its own kind of sound to it. You’re using different birds and different types of wind through different types of trees,” King said.

One especially impressive scene has very little sound at all: a devastating moment when Felicia sits in a doctor’s office, her husband beside her, to learn that she has breast cancer. “Everybody knows the cold feeling of a doctor’s examination room,” King said. “Foley in that scene was really important — just the contact between Felicia and Leonard. They’re holding one another and touching one another and hugging after she gets the news. It’s a very emotional film.”

And it’s a picture that continued to evolve until the very end. “It’s like a sculpture,” Tesoro said. “You have to start off with this idea of what it’s supposed to be, and as you continue to carve, things just start to become more clear every time. You have to go through the process of all these steps that come in between. Or us, even during the last two months, there were certain puzzles that hadn’t been solved.” Two sequences that originally stood independent of each other — of Lenny ending his relationship with David, and of Lenny talking with Felicia about getting married — are now intercut. “But intercutting the scenes a little bit more, you’re seeing more clearly the dissolving of the relationship with David into something else, but you’re also seeing the evolving of the relationship with Felicia,” Tesoro said.

Perhaps it’s even fair to say that the maestro was overseeing the production — from afar.

“The whole goal was: ‘How do we keep Lenny’s heartbeat and human nature alive through the whole thing?’” Ruder said. “That was the goal from day one, five years ago.”

January 22, 2024 0 comments

Book Reviews Features

Book Review: How ‘The Exorcist’ Became THE Monster Horror Hit of the Early 1970s

by Peter Tonguette January 10, 2024

written by Peter Tonguette 12 minutes read

By Peter Tonguette

The late filmmaker William Friedkin was fond of describing his 1973 horror masterpiece “The Exorcist” as being a meditation on “the mystery of faith.”

Undoubtedly, religious conviction — and its lack — is at the heart of the story of 12-year-old Regan (Linda Blair), the precocious but well-adjusted daughter of divorced actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) who unaccountably undergoes severe behavioral changes — and, during several famous sequences, gravitational changes — that are eventually attributed to demonic possession. A neurotic Jesuit priest, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) is put on the case, and in ecclesiastical partnership with a battle-seasoned exorcist, Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow), liberates Regan and confirms his own, previously dubious faith.

Yet the “mystery of faith” isn’t the only mystery that hovers over “The Exorcist.” Perhaps the biggest unsolved question is how such an unlikely project became not only one of the genuine box-office sensations of the 1970s but the cornerstone for a seemingly endless succession of sequels, prequels, reboots, imitators, and outright copycats?

In an engaging and enlightening new book about the “Exorcist” franchise, veteran entertainment journalist Nat Segaloff establishes the many challenges, stumbling blocks, near-misses, and even occult occurrences that might have derailed the film. Consider the literary background of screenwriter and producer William Peter Blatty, who was a serious and committed Catholic but who, until writing the novel upon which the film was based, had proven himself only as a writer of comedies. No less uncertain was the film’s casting, special effects, editing, and music, any one of which could have derailed the whole enterprise.

Then there were the ominous on-set occurrences, including a stage that was consumed by fire, a severe back injury experienced by Burstyn following an ill-advised stunt, and the death of supporting actor Jack MacGowran within weeks of the completion of his scenes. “Such negative energy in that film!” said Shirley MacLaine, a longtime crony of Blatty’s on whom the writer based Chris MacNeil (but who was ruled out for a role in the film). For her part, Burstyn put it this way: “We were calling on some very heavy energy. People might say dark forces, but that might be too dramatic. I don’t think you fool around with those kind of energy fields without having some sort of manifestation, and we had a lot.” Even so, the film was a gigantic commercial success whose intellectual property is still being harvested — see, for example, this fall’s release of David Gordon Green’s “The Exorcist: Believer”— and whose behind-the-scenes stories remain fascinating enough to produce a book such as this one.

To be sure, the drama surrounding the making of “The Exorcist” has been amply recounted in innumerable documentaries and making-of featurettes, but Segaloff is an author uniquely well positioned to retell well-trod stories fully and well. The author of an earlier biography of Friedkin, Segaloff had firsthand access to both the famously mercurial and volatile filmmaker as well as to writer-producer Blatty, and his own involvement with the release of the original film renders him an eyewitness to its iconic status: In 1973, the year that the picture was released, Segaloff was working as a publicist for the Sacks Theatres chain in Boston.

“Ticket holders waiting in line for the next performance would see the distressed faces of those leaving and pump themselves into a frenzy even before the lights went down,” Segaloff writes of the initial, admittedly over-the-top audience response to the film. His own reaction was more measured but no less appreciative. “I tried to understand why people of faith seemed disturbed in ways that other people were not,” he writes. “I also saw that the artistry and thought that went into the film were genuine.”

In a series of swift, well-delineated chapters, Segaloff maps out the backstory, production, and still-ongoing legacy of “The Exorcist.” Arguably the Rosetta stone of the project is a 1949 newspaper article about an alleged exorcism that caught the attention of a young Blatty, then a student at Georgetown University. Raised in the Catholic Church, Blatty strayed from his faith only in the strictly professional sense: instead of becoming a priest, as was expected of this last-born of five children, he became a comic novelist (“I, Billy Shakespeare”) and screenwriter traded in farces, including Blake Edwards’s “A Shot in the Dark” and “Promise Her Anything,” starring Warren Beatty and Leslie Caron.

HIGH PRIEST: William Friedkin directing “The Exorcist.” PHOTO: PHOTOFEST.

Yet Blatty’s faith remained with him, even if only scant traces could be discerned in his work up to that point. But in 1969, he was still profoundly distraught by the death of his mother two years earlier. “I would say in my case, my grief could be described by an outside observer as neurotic [and] overdrawn,” he said. In response to his grief, Blatty remembered the real-life exorcism he had once read about and set about fictionalizing it for his first non-comic novel, “The Exorcist.” By his lights, the novel would not only be a gripping, chilling tale but would achieve something even more profound: prove the existence of a higher power. “Here, at last, was tangible evidence of transcendence,” Blatty said of the real-life case. “If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting.”

Proof of a higher filmmaking power, at least, may be discerned in the numerous bits of chance and coincidence that helped get the movie made, including Blatty’s initial instinct to hire Friedkin, who, at the time that the manuscript for “The Exorcist” was being circulated, was completing what would be his breakthrough film, the Oscar-winning “The French Connection.” In seeking Friedkin’s services, however, Blatty was not merely latching onto the directorial flavor of the month but following his gut. Years earlier, when he was still in the employ of Edwards, Blatty had crossed paths with Friedkin, who had reacted unfavorably to a script Blatty penned for Edwards — a script about which Blatty shared Friedkin’s low opinion. Holding the director in high regard for his rather merciless honesty, Blatty came to believe that Friedkin could make “The Exorcist” into an authentic and believable film.

Crucial to that believability was the film’s casting. Although superstars such as Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson lobbied for the part of Father Karras — and Stacy Keach had been cast in the role — Friedkin would hear of no one but Jason Miller, a Catholic University of America-educated playwright who had the manner and countenance of a man of the cloth. Meanwhile, the search for a young thespian to play Regan had largely been a frustrating, fruitless affair until the almost-accidental discovery of Linda Blair. “There came a time when I thought we were not gonna be able to make this film with a twelve- or thirteen-year-old,” Friedkin said, but when Blair’s mother arrived unannounced with her daughter in tow, the director had the foresight to agree to see her — another miracle, at least of the casting gods? Casting Max von Sydow as Father Merrin was comparatively straight-forward, although the Swedish actor made no bones about the fact that he did not share his on-screen character’s religious convictions. Although he had been cast as Jesus in George Stevens’s “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” von Sydow told Friedkin, “I played Jesus, but I didn’t play him as a Christian, I played him as a man.”

In Segaloff’s telling, the editing of the film was its own series of trials. The supervising film editor of record was a newcomer named Jordan Leondopoulos (whose scant subsequent screen credits go no further than 1981), but the bulk of the editing fell to Norman Gay, Evan A. Lottman, ACE, and Bud Smith, ACE. Ruthless with his own work — and, by extension, Blatty’s — Friedkin lopped off a number of scenes during post-production, including Regan’s “spider walk” down a flight of stairs and a theologically weighty discussion between Karras and Merrin. Blatty never reconciled himself to these cuts, and by the turn of the millennium, he had managed to cajole Friedkin into reinstating them. Prepared by Friedkin’s then-regular editor Augie Hess, this cut was dubbed “The Version You’ve Never Seen” when it was released in theaters in 2000. “The first thing to say is that it is not the director’s cut,” said film critic Mark Kermode. “If anything, it is the writer’s cut.” Burstyn was opposed to the after-the-fact tinkering. “I like the original the way it was,” she said.

As would become typical for a Friedkin production, the soundtrack was given enormous scrutiny. Volunteering to drink, smoke, and consume raw eggs to sufficiently distort her voice, legendary actress Mercedes McCambridge was called in to dub the lines spoken by the demon-possessed Regan; McCambridge’s voice, in turn, was further augmented by “the squeals of pigs being led to the slaughter, voices played backwards, different microphones, and various levels of distortion on the combined tracks.” Famously, a score by Lalo Schifrin did not pass muster with Friedkin — “He took the roll of [sound] film, took it out in front of Todd-AO, right in the street, and just threw it into the parking lot,” recalled editor Smith — but providence was on his side when he happened upon an eerie recording by Mike Oldfield titled “Tubular Bells,” the sounds of which are still synonymous with the film.

Perhaps the various on-set accidents and strange goings-on suggest that “The Exorcist” was a cursed film — or, as Burstyn put it, one that was interfering with nefarious energies — but it’s clear from its many strokes of creative good fortune that it was also a blessed one. Certainly the executives at Warner Bros. had reason to be thankful: on its original release, the film grossed $193 million. Yet if the public responded to the picture, a cadre of Hollywood old-timers felt it was an example of how far their industry had fallen. Although the film was nominated for 10 Oscars — including Best Picture, Director, Actress for Burstyn, Supporting Actress for Blair, Supporting Actor for Miller, and Editing — veteran director George Cukor is said to have proclaimed: “If this thing wins an Academy Award it’s the end of Hollywood.” (The film walked away with two Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay for Blatty and Best Sound for Robert Knudson and Christopher Newman.) Yet despite its excesses, shock effects, and occasional gross-out moments, the film is notable for having by and large honored the seriousness with which Blatty first undertook the project. “I didn’t set out to scare the hell out of people as you do with a horror film,” Friedkin said. “I set out to make a film that would make them think about the concept of good and evil.”

“Cursed,” however, might very well be the right word to describe the subsequent entries in the “Exorcist” canon, most of which were beset by post-production drama. In 1977, John Boorman made as his follow-up to his masterpiece, “Deliverance” (1972), the first sequel to “The Exorcist,” “Exorcist II: The Heretic.” This highly imaginative, ostentatiously stylized film has long had admirers in high places — New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wrote that “the picture has a visionary crazy grandeur (like that of Fritz Lang’s loony ‘Metropolis’)” — but Boorman’s initial 117-minute cut prompted fierce audience blowback. “I saw this film at a night-before preview, and the audience started laughing at the movie well before I was inclined to,” said film scholar Tim Lucas. The perception that the film was a stinker was so pervasive that Warner Bros. compelled Boorman to make post-release cuts that resulted in a 110-minute running time. “Whatever [the audience] laughed at, he cut,” Segaloff writes. “Some of the excised footage made it into the final version eventually released on home video, some did not.” Reflecting on the experience, Boorman said: “The sin I committed was not giving them what they wanted in terms of horror. There’s this wild beast out there which is the audience. I created this arena and I just couldn’t throw enough Christians in it.”

Thirteen years later, Blatty, who had not been involved in “Exorcist II,” agreed to transform his novel “Legion” into “The Exorcist III,” but the project was betwixt and between: although “Legion” had featured characters from “The Exorcist,” it was in no way an obvious continuation of the earlier story. Executives from Morgan Creek were dismayed. “The problem, the company realized, was that a film with the word ‘exorcist’ in the title needed an exorcism,” Segaloff writes, pointing to $9 million worth of rewrites and reshoots that included the fantastical notion of Jason Miller (Father Karras in the original film) being cast in a role already occupied by Brad Dourif; in the final film, the actors alternate. A similar fate befell Paul Schrader’s “Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist,” which Morgan Creek was sufficiently dissatisfied with to shelve and supplant with an entirely different prequel, the film that became “Exorcist: The Beginning,” directed not by Schrader but by Renny Harlin. For those interested in the vagaries of modern Hollywood, as well as the power of editing to make or break a movie, the multiple versions of “Exorcist II,” “The Exorcist III,” and the “Exorcist” prequels all exist on DVD and Blu-ray.

The “mystery of faith” may confound humanity for the rest of time, but this book proves that the mystery of good (and bad) moviemaking is almost as intractable.

“The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear”
By Nat Segaloff
311 pages, Citadel, $28, 2023

January 10, 2024 0 comments