When The Shooting Stops Read online

  Hours upon hours of such shots, many of them as spellbindingly beautiful as Flaherty had prescribed, shot by Flaherty’s young cameraman Richard Leacock, were stored in cans labeled “scenes for introduction.” If Helen wanted to select a dewy leaf or a muddy alligator, we might spend an entire day just screening the appropriate material. Her patience was extraordinary. She could sit and look for hours, hoping to find the single detail—the raised eyebrow, the bird ever so slowly rising out of the water—that would implant just the right meaning, just the sense of muted anxiety or primeval timeless-ness she needed to perfect a scene.

  The film presented more editorial problems than anything I’d ever imagined. Walking through miles and miles of takes and retakes were untrained local “actors”—people of the region—who performed Flaherty’s story about a half-wild Cajun boy whose father leases a piece of land to the oil company. Flaherty was a master at working with nonprofessional actors and astutely allowed them to ad lib their lines. But when retakes were shot, they ad-libbed different lines, making the job of selecting the best moments from each take and piecing together the ideal performance a nerve-wrecking enterprise. If Helen cut from a medium shot to a close shot of the actor who was speaking, the juxtaposition might work visually and fail verbally. If she tried to cover the rough edges by cutting momentarily to the reacting face of the actor who was listening, she often found the face so expressionless that the moment was dead. If she cut the sound track and rearranged whole sentences to make newer, livelier sentences, they would only in the end prove too long or too short to match the action. The more she experimented the more frustrated she became, until finally, very much against her will, she determined to put the sequence aside and hope for better luck in the future. Her solutions were ingenious. In several instances she found that by overlapping the voices as if they were interrupting each other, all the juggling would fall miraculously into place.

  But, of course, her problems didn’t end there. The pace of the nonprofessional performances was so sluggish that she had to trim them down in order to speed them up and maintain the rhythm of the picture, an intricate cutting process equivalent to the surgical paring of notes from an operetta. In traditional Hollywood method, an actor brought his face back to “rest” before changing expressions from one emotion to the next. But Flaherty just kept the camera running while calling instructions to the boy to alter his expression or change the direction of his head. The results left Helen little room for error in choosing the cut that would be both the right emotional length as well as the right emotion, for she had no padding on either end. In those days, every time you rejected a splice and recut something, you lost a single frame of film—such was the nature of the irreversible glue-splicing process we used—and the more you changed your mind, the closer you came to all-out panic. True, we could have ordered a reprint from the lab if she had cut herself into a hole. But when you wanted them to dig a single foot out of two hundred thousand feet and still wanted to stay on good terms with the lab and not get your negative scratched, you had to think twice before making that call.

  Day in and day out, month in and month out, Helen struggled to turn an untrained raccoon into a Hollywood actor, to build a climactic confrontation between the boy and an alligator with only a few shots that actually showed the two in battle (most of the alligator splashing wasn’t even shot at the same location), piecing together the introduction to create the hush of eternity promised in Flaherty’s and Leacock’s photography, and composing and choreographing the shots and the intricate sound effects for the finest piece of editing in the film, the sequence that became known as the “ballet of the roughnecks.”

  Although the oil rig had a dramatic presence when Flaherty first saw it gliding silently into the bayou, he discovered after shooting its operation for weeks in daylight that it was about as interesting to watch as an office building. Only after dusk, illuminated by the huge floodlights and with the sounds of drilling shattering the still bayou night, did the derrick come to life and infuse Flaherty with the exhilaration he had felt when it first appeared. Hours of film were shot of the huge drill hammering downward, of the men threading the chains that rapidly unraveled as the pipe descended, of the charged moments when another giant pipe flew up the length of the derrick to become part of the great downward plunging shaft, of the tense intervals when the men performed carefully timed and dangerous motions—securing each section of fast-moving tubing to the next, controlling the engine pressure—of the boy quietly climbing onto the rig, his bare feet shining against the black, oil-slicked platform, of the confident smiling faces of the workmen in the midst, of all the commotion. There were shots from the base of the rig looking up its towering height, shots from above as the powerful drill descended, and hours upon hours of clanging and rattling and whirring recorded on a dozen sound tracks.

  Helen first edited the visual sequence. Because it was strictly a cutting-room job, Flaherty had to leave its composition entirely to her, a situation that initially made him morose. He was further disappointed when he first saw the silent cut footage; but he was elated several months later after Helen added the sound. It was the climax of the film and it is still as stirring to watch today as the fiercely edited battle scenes from World War II.

  My job was to be able always to put my hands on whatever Helen wanted. To do this, I had to develop a photographic mental recording of everything we screened, to catalogue it, and to refile every snippet of it with an iron will that can only come from the fear of having to search through a two-hundred-thousand-foot haystack. We worked like a hospital operating team, Helen riveted to the Moviola, marking her cuts, me feeding her the shots she needed, putting away the trims, cleaning out the film barrels of the “maybes” that had become “no’s,” and, of course, scraping, gluing, and splicing her cuts.

  Each day we started fresh at nine, broke for an hour lunch, broke again at four for coffee or tea, and wrapped up at six—all 350 cans of film neatly awaiting our next stubborn incursion. The smoothness with which Helen and I worked was a revelation to me, and I was secretly thrilled to note at the end of each day that no matter how much film we handled, no matter how many splices we made, no matter how much frustration we endured, our cutting room never looked as if a stitch of work had gone on there.

  After seven or eight months of this, we had a two-hour rough cut of the entire film, but in the two years since he began Louisiana Story, Flaherty had used up his budget. Not only couldn’t we get all the finishing touches—lab work, the optical effects, the titles—but Virgil Thomson had yet to write the score and Eugene Ormandy had yet to record it, all of which meant a gap of something like fifty-eight thousand dollars. So Helen and I stopped working and took a vacation, while Flaherty went back to Standard Oil to promote more money. This took weeks of persistence on his part, since the people at Standard Oil were not jumping to lay out more money for a film they had commissioned almost three years earlier, and none of the executives would acknowledge having the authority to okay the funds. (A year later, when the picture was finished and it got a spectacular press, and Life magazine gave it a giant spread, and Standard Oil was mentioned everywhere, everybody in the company seemed to claim responsibility.)

  When the funds finally came through in the spring of 1948, I set about preparing a shot list for Virgil Thomson. It was a thrilling time because Thomson, who was one of my heroes, was coming into the cutting room regularly to look at the picture. The shot list was a laborious procedure. In seventy-five minutes of film there are hundreds and hundreds of shots, each of which had to be described one at a time in words, feet, and seconds. When at last I finished, I took the manuscript to the Chelsea Hotel, where Thomson was living, and the five-minute visit I expected turned into a three-hour conversation. He spoke at length about the scores he wrote for The River and The Plow that Broke the Plains, two thirties films by Pare Lorentz that are still considered classics of American documentary, and I left feeling significantly closer to the w
orld I longed to join.

  When the score was finished, I was sent by train to Philadelphia to deliver it to Eugene Ormandy at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Ormandy asked me if I would like to hear the concert that night, and he put me in a box above the stage. Moments like this, and the fact that I was getting my first screen credit, were the things that meant everything to me in these early days of my career. I was too young and naive to be aware of the emotional trials of being an editor, of the aggravations Helen had endured, of the difficulty of maintaining one’s identity. These issues were far, far away. The only career anxiety I understood was economic survival.

  Once completed, the picture was lauded everywhere. The nation’s great fabler had again made our mundane world sublime. When the second edition of The Film Till Now appeared in 1949, this is what it said about Louisiana Story:

  “There must have been thousands of ‘educational’ films produced during the last fifty years which tried to show ‘the wonders of industry’ through the eyes of a child. The wonders of industry as they presented them remained more incomprehensible than wonderful, and the children were those familiar textbook ones known as John and Mary Smith. Here the boy is as palpably real as the swamps he lives in, and the process of oil-drilling is observed and described with a clarity and drama unmatched in my experience of seeing films. This is a real educational film; it is also a poem, and the two things work together.”

  All the same, Louisiana Story did not give documentary filmmakers the momentum they expected, and despite Flaherty’s and Standard Oil’s happy collaboration, no similar private funding offers were made.

  Within a few years Flaherty died, Helen remarried and retired to Vermont (where she lives today), and, after kicking around in the nooks and crannies of New York’s nascent film industry, I went to work as a full-fledged editor for the medium that helped to kill the documentary film, TV.

  Setting up for “The Guy Lombardo Show.”

  9 ■ Making It

  The TV Pressure Cooker

  On Tuesday nights all through the fall of 1948 clots of people gathered outside the big hardware stores in Bensonhurst. For sixty minutes they stood immobilized by the magic rays emanating from the new mahogany-encased video sets on window display. They were watching the Milton Berle show, an incredible cultural phenomenon and the first national obsession since the war. Businesses all over the city closed early so that proprietors could rush home in time to join their families for this great communal event. Often they squeezed into their living rooms in the company of a dozen or more friends and relatives, for televisions were still rare in 1948 and those without muscled their way in wherever they could. In my family Aunt Bessie was the first to have a TV, and not since my brother’s bar mitzvah had I seen so many relatives in one place.

  By the early fifties almost every middle-class household had a television set, and shows like Milton Berle’s were creating the biggest and most lucrative advertising market ever known. The TV boom transformed New York’s film business from a sleepy little collection of documentarists, film services, and Hollywood representatives into a raging madhouse full of ambitious technicians, fast-talking ad men, desperate actors reaching for Eldorado, producers and directors replacing each other in an endless swirl of hirings and firings, and, above all else, pots and pots of money.

  Like thousands of other people who are drawn into the safe areas of publishing, music, or filmmaking, I began cutting TV commercials because I was overcome by insecurity. My father, who finally died in 1947, had been spiritually crushed by free-lance work, and I was haunted by his experience. Getting married when I was twenty-two and having two children by the time I was thirty only increased my anxiety.

  My fears were not entirely unrealistic, for I learned in the postwar years how difficult it was to make any headway in the film business. Aside from my year on Louisiana Story, my pre-TV experience consisted of a series of short-lived jobs alternating with periods of unemployment and one dreadful return to loading trucks in the garment center. There was Max Rothstein’s editorial service, where I cut Panagra Airlines travelogues of Latin America, excerpted “moral message” scenes from feature films for an outfit called Teaching Film Custodians, and synchronized the dailies for a Hollywood picture that was being shot in New York called Carnegie Hall; some on-and-off free-lance assignments making promos for Standard Oil out of Flaherty’s leftover film; a year at the United Nations film section, where I developed a reputation as a troubleshooter for my ability to take aimlessly shot footage of some “interesting phenomenon” and mold it into a usable short of some kind; and finally an editing job at a peculiar company called Obelisk Films, which consisted of five Jewish executives who produced Bible stories for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. When in 1950 I got word of a job opening with a new production company called Tempo, where the pay was $125 a week and the work was steady, I was primed to go.

  The company was set up by one of the top animation artists from Walt Disney. He had come East to make animated TV commercials, and because even animated commercials usually included some live action, Tempo needed a film editor. It was one of the first and it quickly became one of the biggest commercial houses in the business.

  Most of the commercials we produced were thirty- and sixty-second spots for products like Maxwell House Coffee, Vicks Vaporub, Ajax (bum-bum, the foaming cleanser), Colgate Dental Cream, and other household products. Technically speaking, these early ads were the simplest work imaginable. There’s a dancing coffee pot or some such thing with a jingle about Maxwell House exploding flavor buds; cut to a man tasting a steaming cup of coffee while his lovely, crisp wife looks on expectantly; cut to the best take of his reaction (“Hmm, that’s delicious!”); cut to the sign-off; and you’re through. But nothing is ever that simple in the advertising business.

  At noon the ad guys would march into the cutting room to view the work. A single executive could have looked at the spot a couple of times (two minutes), requested a change or two (ten minutes), and been out by twelve-fifteen. Instead, six high-priced executives butted heads over the tiny Moviola screen and discussed every possible “nuance” of the ad. “Is the wife’s smile convincing enough? Let’s see take seven on that again.” “Look at the way he holds his pinky—it bothers me.” “Would it be better if we had him say, ’Hmm, that’s delicious!’ with the accent on Hmm?” And so forth.

  Just the same, you’d imagine they’d figure out what “nuances” they wanted, tell me what takes to use, and be out by twelve-forty-five. But no. For I soon realized that while all this was painfully boring to me, the ad men liked to prolong their visits to the cutting room as long as possible, cherishing every volt of artistic energy that surged through their systems. Whether they were requesting a closer close-up on a tube of toothpaste or asking me to shorten the pause before the jingle (“Brush your teeth with Colgate!”) burst forth on the sound track, they always managed to sound as if they were constructing the Taj Mahal. In a single afternoon with a group of advertising executives, I heard the words “creative,” “innovative,” and “concept” more times than in the previous five years with professional filmmakers.

  Every few days another set of dailies came in for another product with another narrator reading a sixty-second message in an endless number of variations. I was amazed that they could go on for so long—seventeen, eighteen, twenty-six, thirty-two readings of the same paragraph and still they kept going. On one occasion I was confronted with twenty minutes of dailies in which a freckle-faced kid had to stuff himself with Instant Royal Pudding until he vomited. Twice a minute he’d stop shoveling, look at the camera, lick his lips, force a grin, and say, “Royal Pudding is so delicious!” or “Royal Pudding is so delicious!” or “Royal Pudding is so delicious!”—until he finally covered his mouth and puked off camera.

  With practically all these commercials, the most convincing reading came by the second or third try—a five-year-old could spot it—and by the fourteenth I had no idea w
hat I was listening to any more. But down at the studio it took three hours just to light the set and get everything ready. With executives from B. B. D. & O., or Benton & Bowles observing and correcting every move, the producer was not going to let the narrator or the actors do five takes in five minutes and then go home. It just wouldn’t seem right. It would be too simple. Somebody wouldn’t be getting his money’s worth. The deeper nuances wouldn’t emerge. Besides, the agency guys didn’t want to go back to the office. They wanted to stay right there on the set where they could be creative. So they spent hours telling each actor to be a little more exuberant, to be a little less exuberant, to try this word, to try that word—until at the end of the day they could finally return to the office and grumble, “We pulled it out of them.”

  But when all this material came into the cutting room the following day, in thirty-seven readings there was never one that was good enough to assure the ad men that they’d still have their jobs the next week if they chose it. So they had me splice together bits of takes fourteen, twenty-five, and thirty-two to make the Single Perfect Reading (which to me looked identical to take three) and finally departed in a state of hypercreative exultation. Any thought I had of redeeming the situation by cracking a joke or making light of the whole enterprise was out of the question. The agency guys were grimly serious about their calling.

  This kind of work was all right for a week or two. It had its curiosities. But after a few months at Tempo, I was morose and close to broken, for I knew I was using almost none of the skills that had landed me the job in the first place. At night bad dreams about exploding flavor buds and foaming cleansers with catchy jingles and forced smiles began to bother me. In the one nightmare I still recall, I was stuffed into a Maxwell House jar and exploded into ten thousand pieces when they poured the boiling water on me. At work, meanwhile, for the first time since I began cutting film I started to have daydreams about becoming a feature-film editor. During the next eight years those reveries grew into the most profound hunger I’ve ever experienced.