When The Shooting Stops Read online

  In 1951 I moved to Transfilm, the largest production company in New York, located, oddly enough, in the same offices where I had once worked for the OWL I was brought in to cut commercials, having developed a reputation for being fast and reliable. But I soon proved that my training and talents went beyond commercial work, and when Western Union contracted with Transfilm for a fifty-thousand-dollar industrial documentary, I landed the assignment. The other three editors in the company, all of whom had seniority over me, resented this, and I was at a loss for how to react. Trying to be falsely humble and one of the guys struck me as the lowest form of appeasement. I turned aloof in response to their hostility and told myself I didn’t give a damn what they thought. I became feared, disliked, and isolated, and sometimes felt as if I were walking right over them for my own success. But I shoved all that aside. The Western Union film was a serious assignment, and I considered myself an editor for the first time. Despite the office politics, I couldn’t wait to begin work in the morning.

  Alistair Cooke was hosting a quality CBS program at this time called “Omnibus,” one of the showpieces of television’s Sunday-afternoon “cultural ghetto.” In 1952 the producers began coming to Transfilm for special projects—a short on tugboats, a documentary on William Faulkner, who had just won the Nobel Prize—and again I was selected to edit. The “Omnibus” directors were invariably astonished by my knowledge of music and film structure, and in a short time they were treating me as a collaborator rather than a technician. Three years later, when I set up my own editorial service, “Omnibus” hired me as supervising editor.

  Late in 1952 Gene Milford, an established motion-picture editor of twenty years standing both in Hollywood and New York (in 1932 he was nominated for the first editing Oscar), a man I had met a few times and always thought of as the person to call if you were an editor looking for work, recommended me and another young editor, Sid Katz, to cut a new Sunday-afternoon CBS series called “The Search.” The show would take viewers to a different university each week and report, documentary style, on all sorts of current research.

  Sid and I cut “The Search” for the better part of 1953 and 1954. Seat-belt research at Cornell, brain research at Tulane, a passionately cut show on speech-defects research at the University of Iowa. The directors and cameramen—many of them old acquaintances from the OWI—shot as much as twenty hours of film for each half-hour program, giving Sid and me substantial editorial challenges. “The Search” years still stand out as the most sane and rewarding of this entire period; but the show was a loser and was killed after a single season.

  When the end came, I couldn’t face another company job with office politics. If I had to cut crap again, I wanted at least to be working for myself. At the time Sid and I were using cutting rooms that CBS had rented for us in the studio district on Twelfth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, and I said, “Sid, let’s just stay right here and set up our own editorial service.” That’s what we did, and, as it turned out, we timed the TV wave right at its crest.

  When Gene Milford came back to New York from the West Coast in 1956 and paid his young proteges a visit, he found us really swinging, with three employees and more business than we knew what to do with. All sorts of commercial work—Jergens, Buick, Texaco, Philip Morris, Robitussin; independently produced pilots by old-time stage personalities and by newcomers, like Dick Van Dyke; industrials; promos; everything. Milford, who figured he was about ready for another stint in New York, said, “Hey, you guys’ve got a terrific thing here—I’d like to become the third member of this company.” And thus MKR Films was formed.

  Gene’s presence meant more expansion and more work—mostly for me and Sid, since Gene was already in his mid-fifties then and inclined to long lunches and other perquisites of established success. Nonetheless, as part of our company he cut three Elia Kazan pictures, Baby Doll, A Face in the Crowd, and Splendor in the Grass. (In 1954 he’d won the editing Oscar for Kazan’s On the Waterfront.) His reputation brought in more TV pilots, and soon we were cutting regular weekly shows as well, such long-forgotten programs as “Wanted” and an early “I Spy” with Raymond Massey.

  The next five years were a blur of ceaseless pressure and nonstop work. We cut everything. Somewhere in the midst of cigarette ads and TV comedies I cut a series of documentaries for a medical advertising firm that included all sorts of bloody tumors and explicit operations I would have averted my eyes from in a theater. It was just part of the numbing quantity and diversity of material that passed through our cutting rooms during those boom years. I would have been giddy—or in this case nauseated—if our frantic schedule hadn’t pushed me completely beyond feeling.

  I once suggested to Gene and Sid that we stop accepting so many jobs, but they said, “Ralph, if you’re not expanding, you’re going backwards,” an American business maxim I’ve never fully understood. But I was just thirty-two and still basically insecure; and despite our frenetic pace, windfall incomes, and a month’s backlog of work, as far as I knew the entire television industry could sink into the Atlantic the next day and I’d be back loading trucks in the garment center. To escape that clawing financial insecurity, I was ready to subvert my personal life, and to some extent I did. In any case, my protests were few and muted, and we never turned away a job. Although we stuck to our own accounts, in an emergency we’d split a job three ways and each edit a separate portion. I never got home before eight, and worked around the clock when necessary. And MKR Films quickly became the biggest editorial service in the city.

  I was becoming known in the business now as someone for whom no deadline was impossible, and as a “creative” editor who could take a grabbag of miscellaneous footage and turn it into an entertaining short. At “Omnibus” Boris Kaplan, the film supervisor, had a fondness for odd bits of film, some of which came to him over-the-transom from wayward or would-be cameramen. Marching school bands in New Jersey, traffic cops from all over Europe with their crazy arm motions—he’d screen this material for me and ask if I couldn’t make a five-minute “thing” out of it. The attitude seemed to be, “Give it to Rosenblum, he’ll put some music to it, turn it into a little ballet, and we’ll throw it on the air for some variety.” The montages I cut were presented as novelty items and spoofs and not taken seriously by anyone, but audiences always got a kick out of them, and they were a great source of secret satisfaction to me.

  “Omnibus” also made endless unreasonable demands, something that seems inevitable in an industry surrounded by hungry peripherals ready to do twenty-four hours of slave labor at a moment’s notice. In 1958 Alistair Cooke returned from the Brussels World’s Fair with over eight hours of film. The raw footage came out of customs on a Tuesday night: Kaplan screened it for me all day Wednesday, at which point I had just two days to get something assembled for airing the coming Sunday. It was one of those situations in which I said to myself, “What difference does it make? My nerves are shot anyway.” I worked through the next two nights, and a twenty-minute film on the World’s Fair went to the lab on Friday.

  For two seasons I cut the “Guy Lombardo Show,” a program that was put together the way airplanes are built. The show consisted of several instrumental and vocal numbers introduced by Lombardo, shots of the band, and shots of dancers in the ballroom.

  At the beginning of each thirteen-week segment, the producer, a brusque, beefy character named Herb Sussan, called everyone in for a week of shooting. First the band went into a sound studio to produce the perfect sound track, or “playback” track. From there on the tape recorders were turned off and silent filming commenced. They ran through each number again and again, as first the entire band was shot, then the horns, then the saxophones, then the two pianists, until every group of musicians was filmed playing that one number. This process was repeated for each piece they played and went on day after day for a week. The accumulated film filled an entire rack in my cutting room.

  On another rack I’d have several reels of Guy Lombardo do
ing the introductions. Each take would start with him saying, “Thank you, thank you,” to the imaginary applause that I would put in later, and then he would say, “And now the band will play ‘Nola.’ . . . Thank you, thank you, thank you. And now the band will play ‘Boo Hoo,’ composed by my brother, Carmen. . . . Thank you, thank you, thank you. And now the vocal trio will sing ‘It Had to Be You.’ . . . Thank you, thank you, thank you. And now our guest vocalist, Eugenie Baird, will sing ‘April in Paris.’ . . . Thank you, thank you, thank you. . . .”

  A third rack was filled with the dancers. The dancing was all shot in one day. Sussan would put a cameraman on a ballroom dance floor with several hundred extras. Ten minutes of tango, ten minutes of foxtrot, ten minutes of waltz, ten minutes of cha-cha, ten minutes of mambo, ten minutes of polka, a half hour for lunch, and then back to the floor again. At the end of a single week of shooting, I had all the material I needed to assemble the next thirteen shows.

  I found the Lombardo show very boring to cut. It was like painting by the numbers. Every time the saxophones played, I had to cut to the saxophones; when the brass played, I cut to the brass. And when the band had been on for X number of minutes, I cut to the dancers. Once I tried to make it just a little more interesting, and instead of cutting to the trumpets when they started playing, I cut in a little sooner, when they were in their seats getting ready to play. One guy was shaking the saliva out of his horn, which brass players always do, and I thought, hey, this livens things up a bit.

  I still remember the morning I screened this segment for Sussan. He was leaning against the wall cleaning his pocket comb of a formidable accumulation of wax and hairs, paying about as much attention to gliding the crud out with his thumbnail as he was to the material on the screen. Suddenly we came to my trumpet improvisation, and Sussan straightened up and stopped picking. “Hold it right there,” he said. I stopped the projectionist, and he pointed the comb at me: “This is not one of your fuckin’ documentaries, kid. I don’t want to see a trumpet player spritzing in my living room. Get it? When he starts playing, that’s when you cut to him.”

  In fifty-two shows the only number I ever enjoyed cutting was a song by Marion Hutton, who came on once as the guest vocalist. The guests for all thirteen shows were shot in succession, and for these sessions three cameramen were used. Hutton was exciting to look at, and with the advantage of three camera angles, I was able to produce a fantastic cut. But when Sussan saw it at the screening, he told me to go back and re-edit it. “Take out some of those cuts,” he said. “You made it too exciting.” I was dumbfounded, but he had a point. I had made the band look boring by comparison: “You don’t mess with a multi-million-dollar institution, kid.”

  After MKR disbanded in 1961, I did a few more jobs for TV. One was a group of five pilots that screenwriter-turned-TV-producer Robert Alan Aurthur was preparing for CBS at United Artists Television. The scripts were by a group of unknown authors—Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Neil Simon, and N. Richard Nash—and the concepts were exceptional. Had even Aurthur’s most pessimistic predictions come true, I could have been a TV supervising editor for the rest of the decade. But James Aubrey, then the president of CBS, had his own production company (a secret that later became a scandal) and favored himself with contracts. None of Aurthur’s pilots sold.

  In 1963 and 1964 I worked as the supervising editor for “The Patty Duke Show.” The show started off in a state of panic, with producer-creator William Asher so paralyzed with uncertainty that the first installment didn’t come out of the lab until the day it was aired. Panic prevailed throughout the rest of the first season, as we operated without a single show in backlog. Shows like this have a rigid division of labor. Several installments are produced in tandem, with two or three directors working in rotation. Although each show is produced to the same strict formula, the tension level can be overwhelming. The enormous amounts of money involved, the anxiety over ratings, reviews, and the reactions of the sponsors, not to mention the ever looming and irrevocable deadlines, make a weekly television series the most ulcerogenic atmosphere I’ve ever known.

  The supervising editor takes over the director’s role in the TV cutting rooms. At “Patty Duke” we also had two associate editors. One would be finishing an installment while another would just be starting, and a third cutter did nothing but synchronize dailies all day long. When each cut was down to thirty minutes, I screened it for the producer (who after the first week was no longer William Asher). With his criticism and suggestions, I brought it back to the cutting room, where it was trimmed down to the standard twenty-six and a third minutes. From there it went down the assembly line to the sound-effects man, the music editor, and finally the lab.

  If the network takes a prospective show seriously, the panic can begin even before the pilot is completed. While I was cutting the pilot of “East Side, West Side” for David Susskind, the CBS executives were already approaching their list of cereal companies, car companies, and gasoline companies for sponsorship and pressuring us to finish. As it turned out a cereal company took the show before the pilot was even completed, whereupon Susskind asked me to become supervising editor. I turned him down. I’d had it with TV.

  Sidney Meyers ended up supervising that show for one season. He had edited a great deal of television material and a few features since the war, with just an occasional opportunity to direct. The last picture he cut was Tropic of Cancer in 1969, the year he died. Sidney and I hadn’t really kept in touch, and I couldn’t be sure what was going on in his mind. Had he come to hate the business? Hate the cutting room? I didn’t know. But one day a couple of years before he died I was in a recording studio somewhere, and there was Sidney, a man listed in Sadoul’s Dictionary of Film Makers as “a major contributor to the independent, realist school of filmmaking,” hunched over a synchronizer winding film. Without thinking, I blurted, “Jesus, Sidney, what are you doing over a synchronizer?” He looked at me and didn’t say a word, but his look told me everything.

  In 1958 Herb Leder, an executive at Benton & Bowles, decided to leave advertising and become a director. He got hold of a gangster property called Pretty Boy Floyd and asked me to be the editor. Ever since the early fifties, when I first started meeting feature editors and discovering that they had no more on the ball than I and often considerably less, I’d been aching for a chance like this. I determined to make Pretty Boy Floyd the classiest-cut gangster picture in history.

  Now, it turned out that Floyd was pretty awful in almost every respect. But this did not discourage me. For I was still young and utterly consumed by the specialist’s mentality. When I went to the movies with friends who were editors, all we saw were the cuts—the rest of the picture didn’t exist. So the fact that Floyd’s script was absurd, its staging inept, and its performances wooden was hardly a deterrent. I was going to take all this junk into the cutting room, edit it in a classy way, and make a first-rate picture out of it.

  The editing took about three months, and I believed the whole time that I was turning out a masterpiece. It wasn’t until the picture hit the theaters that I saw how mistaken I was. I’ve seen it a couple of times on television since then and it’s still an embarrassment. Pretty Boy Floyd was terrible when it went into the cutting room, it was terrible when it came out, and it taught me some humility regarding the limits of my trade—for a film to be good, everything has to be good. Be that as it may, I had devilish fun cutting it, and believed I was getting close to the big time.

  I had now edited one gangster picture. Therefore, in the eyes of the industry, I was a gangster man. In 1959, when Twentieth Century-Fox decided to shoot a picture in New York called Murder Incorporated and was fishing about for a local editor, I was the natural choice.

  Murder Incorporated was based on actual gangland activities in Brooklyn in the thirties and particularly the famous incident in which a top prosecution witness, sequestered in a hotel room, was thrown umpteen stories to his death while police guards stood outside h
is door. My experience with Pretty Boy Floyd in no way prepared me for this picture. Floyd was filmed in a few weeks on a small, independent budget, was composed of scenes that rarely had more than two actors, and was shot in a conventional A-B-C fashion: for each scene I was provided with a long shot of the two actors and close-up of each. It was the simplest and fastest piece of feature cutting imaginable, and, contrary to what I thought, I had barely been introduced to real dramatic editing.

  The scenes from Murder Incorporated were better written, more intricate, and frequently involved more than two people. They were shot with seven or eight camera angles, and each actor was completely covered whether he was speaking or not. I was thus confronted with a dizzying quantity of film, like nothing I’d seen since Louisiana Story. But unlike documentary cutting, dramatic editing is not a matter of piecing together miscellaneous bits of film. It requires the judicious selection of the best takes of each performance and the best angles, decisions regarding whether to focus on the actor who is speaking or play the dialogue over the person listening, and a constant attention to tempo—when necessary by splicing out all the pauses in a conversation to accelerate the pace. I faced subtleties I never knew existed: we could shift the dramatic emphasis from one actor to another or change the entire point of view of a scene. I learned that if scenes were too long, there were ways to shorten them by cutting out dialogue, something I never even considered when editing Floyd. Because of my documentary training, once I began to recognize the places where trimming was needed, I didn’t think to wait for the director’s instructions. I’d search the script for sentences or whole paragraphs that I could safely delete, and begin to devise new transitions to cover the cuts. Burt Balaban, the young director, encouraged my contributions. We worked like buddies, partners, and it never occurred to me that this was anything but the standard practice.