From The Dust, I Emerge — How I Began

I know that I should be doing it, but I’m not going to be exactly introducing myself here in this, my first blog entry for Film Industry Blog. There are those of you who might know me from my blog Hollyn-wood (http://normanhollyn.wordpress.com — visit early and visit often) or from various other parts of my life.

But those of you who don’t know me, and I’m sure that there will be plenty, will get to know me much better if I tell you a few stories about editing. And so that is what I’m going to do.

When I started in editing, back in New York in the mid-1970s (go ahead, YOU do the math), there was a plainly established path to the Holy Grail — that is, becoming an editor like Dede Allen. You worked as an apprentice and then an assistant editor for many years (usually eight or ten), filing away pieces of 35mm or 16mm film into tightly wound rolls, usually held tight with a cardboard tab or with a rubber band. You kept logs that enabled you to easily find those pieces as quickly as possible when your editor needed them. He or she (and there were women editors — I assisted several, one was doing the first music videos, another, Lynzee Klingman, was editing her second film with the great Milos Forman) would call out that they needed “17B. take 3” and I’d have to get it for them — the quicker the better.

At other times I would be on the phone with the processing lab, asking for another print of “113C-1, from camera roll A163, key number B32X134589, shot on July 2nd” and “can I get it that evening please since we’re screening for the producer tomorrow?”

But, by far, the best part of the job was standing next to editors like Alan Heim, Lynzee Klingman, Evan Lottman or Barry Malkin, feeding them pieces of film that had been draped in squat bins as they needed them. I would make a game of it sometimes, trying to figure out just what piece of film the editor and the director would need. They were talking about slowing down a character’s reaction to the danger — would they need more at the beginning or the end of a shot of that person? Would they want to look at an alternate take, so they could check if there was a slower performance, rather than simply extending what was there? Or would they want to look at one of the other characters in the scene — to cut to them, to slow down that character’s perceived reaction time? There were so many choices.

And, as I listened to each of the editors talk to directors like Sidney Lumet, Milos Forman, Alan Pakula or Francis Coppola I slowly began to learn just how film was shaped and reshaped — crafted — to become the best possible work that it could be. It was, in every respect, a true “apprenticeship.” It was my film school. It was my library of books on editing (this was way before Walter Murch, of course).

Things have changed, of course, both with me and with the industry. What I hope to do, over the next however-many-it-takes blog entries, is to give all of you a sense of where the film editor sits in the world of filmmaking today (and it is a pretty good place, by the way), what it takes to do what we do, and where it’s all going.

And, I suppose, I’ll continue the process of introducing myself along the way.

See you next week.