When The Shooting Stops Read online

  No matter how you cut it, really dead material can never be brought to life, but if the raw footage has quality, it faces almost infinite possibilities during the months it passes through an editor’s hands. But because an editor’s prerogatives depend so much on his relationship with the director, it is impossible to say what his contribution is to any given film. A director may demand absolute control of his picture and give the editor little room to offer creative solutions; or he may walk away, leaving no more than a handful of instructions and an occasional word of encouragement. Under the old Hollywood system editors were often considered strictly mechanics and not expected to offer ideas. But during certain periods, like the heyday of the silent film, the era of the great producer-tycoons, and throughout much of TV’s history, certain editors have achieved immense authority and power. In recent years, as the studio system has crumbled and as filmmakers have become more and more inclined to break out of the confines of the script, the editing profession as a whole has begun to come into its own. But even today the situation varies dramatically— from a picture like Apocalypse Now that spends years in the cutting and goes through several generations of editors to a less complicated picture like Slow Dancing in the Big City, which director John Avildsen virtually edited himself.

  Because so much goes on in the cutting room, because it is a major center of film creation, an inevitable tension infects the director-editor relationship. Directors never give special mention to their editors when they lope up to receive their Oscar—lest an overeager critic surmise that the film had been in trouble and was saved by heavy editorial doctoring. And editors, understanding the explosive ego issues involved, wisely stay true to the bent for anonymity that led them to their chosen profession.

  When it comes to awards for editing, editors are the first to snigger. “We editors know,” says Tom Priestly (This Sporting Life, Marat/Sade, Deliverance), “that we cannot really judge each others’ work without knowing the original material. Many a lousy film has been brilliantly edited, and many a brilliant film has been just competently put together.”

  Nonetheless there are certain films that people in the industry know were “made in the cutting room.” This inner-circle recognition offers an editor one of his rare opportunities for ego flight. Among the pictures I’ve worked on, The Night They Raided Minsky’s is certainly the foremost example.

  Norman Lear (left) and William Fried kin on the set of THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY’S.

  (Courtesy United Artists Corporation)

  1 ■ The Night They Raided Minsky’s

  Part I: A Month for Nine Minutes

  When Norman Lear, Billy Friedkin, and I gathered to screen the first cut of The Night They Raided Minsky’s on a Friday afternoon in the fall of 1967, we were as far apart as three collaborators could be. I was invigorated and optimistic, having just finished a hard-paced three weeks in the cutting room, paring down some forty-odd hours of raw footage into a manageable two and a half. Friedkin, the director, who would later make The French Connection and The Exorcist, was edgy and preoccupied. He was leaving for England to direct another picture, and although he was already half gone in spirit, he could hardly forget that this film—or whatever became of it—represented the first major opportunity of his career. Lear, the producer and co-author, reverberated with high-pitched anxiety. He had already spent over three million dollars of investor money to finance Minsky’s, making it the most expensive movie ever produced in New York; his director was about to take off for good; and he was beginning to dread that he had gambled too heavily—that this dangerously old-fashioned story would never be perceived as the exciting “New Look” in filmmaking he had promised.

  From the very beginning, the idea behind The Night They Raided Minsky’s had been to create an “old-fashioned musical with a New Look.” The producer, the director, and the people at United Artists were excited by the prospect of the New Look, although what it was and how it was going to be accomplished no one knew. If a New Look could really be said to exist at that time, it was flickering about in four recently released movies that were having a big impact on the industry: The Knack, the two Beatles movies, Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—all directed by Richard Lester. The techniques Lester used with astonishing success had never been seen in commercial films. Actors walked forward and then suddenly backward. People and things popped out of nowhere and jumped around like animated figures. Had anyone dared to acknowledge that the New Look we hoped to achieve in Minsky’s was essentially a Lester Look, we all might have been saved some anguish; but such an acknowledgment would have been considered inappropriate, if not blasphemous, and so it barely crossed our minds.

  To anyone with film sense, the Minsky’s script quickly revealed exactly how important the New Look was to Lear. It is an insipid story about an impossibly innocent Amish girl, played by Britt Ekland, who bounds into New York City in 1925 looking like a ripe fruit. Seeking to escape her stern and joyless father in order to dance Bible stories on stage, she goes straight to the Lower East Side and the cynical but childlike world of Minsky’s Burlesque Theatre, where a pair of vaudeville actors, Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom, vie for her affections. The knavish Robards is also involved in a plot to put Ekland on the stage as “Madame Fifi,” who, according to Minsky’s crash advertising campaign, will do the “dance that drove a thousand Frenchmen wild.” The idea is to goad the overzealous head of the city’s vice squad into calling a police raid, only to embarrass him with an innocent Bible Dance. But Ekland, hurt by being played for a fool and incensed over being called a “whore” by her father, goes out on the midnight stage and, incited each step of the way by a riotously libidinous audience, begins bumping and grinding and tossing off pieces of her clothes. When she looks offstage and sees Robards sneering in disapproval, she throws out her arms to him, thereby dropping the front of her dress. And thus, presumably, the striptease is born. Various connivances and conniptions go on in the background, not the least of which involves Minsky’s orthodox Jewish father, played by Joseph Wiseman, and Ekland’s orthodox Amish father, played by Harry Andrews in wrathful pursuit. It is all very trivial and predictable, and clearly in need of something—the New Look perhaps—to snap it into shape as a piece of compelling cinema.

  But as Minsky’s father would say, compelling the first cut wasn’t. What we witnessed for those two and a half hours was some of the least compelling footage any of us had ever seen. There was no pace, no suspense, and not a moment of believable dialogue. Britt Ekland managed to do approximately what was expected of her, gliding through the entire film like a star-stunned ingenue, while Jason Robards, who had been capable of credible performances in other films, waltzed through his part in this one. The vaudeville numbers had genuine quality, but they didn’t fit anywhere in the script, and the only interesting dramatic sequences were provided by the marginal character actors. The footage of the re-creations of entire blocks of the old Jewish ghetto in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, including pushcarts, store fagades, elevated subway, and six hundred extras, offered a devastatingly expensive backdrop for a silly, inconsequential musical film that could barely be watched for two minutes without a total suspension of one’s critical faculties.

  The screening over, we sat silently for a while as the extent of Lear’s desolation gradually surfaced. “Could you, Billy,” he asked Friedkin, “could you do something? Could you and Ralph go back into the cutting room and work tonight and Saturday and Sunday and maybe do some kind of big save by the time you leave on Monday?”

  His words had a more chilling effect on me than the screening had had. We couldn’t pull it off in two days—that was desperation talk. Besides, I didn’t want to give up the weekend. And neither, it turned out, did Friedkin. So we talked for an hour or two more and then parted—Friedkin for London, where he would direct the film of Pinter’s A Birthday Party, I for home, where I would forget the whole thing, and Lear for a torturous t
wo days of suspended animation.

  The next week was gloomy, Lear and I spending several days discussing the film in a general way, hardly knowing what we were going to do to put a New Look or Any Look into two and a half hours of slightly horny kiddie theater. Later in the week we arranged another screening and invited David Picker, an executive vice president of United Artists. “In all my years in film,” Picker said afterward, “this is the worst first cut I’ve ever seen.” As we trudged out of the screening room, Picker tried to reassure Lear: “Look, there’s no real deadline on this picture—whatever you need, whatever you want to do . . .” his voice tailed off, “. . . whatever you want to do, go ahead and . . . take your time, and do it.” And he walked away.

  There are three or four big film libraries in New York, each holding millions of feet of film, all of it cross-indexed in scores of ways. The libraries specialize in old black and white film, much of it shot from the period before World War I through the years of the Depression. If you need footage of the opening of a dam in California, a flagpole sitter in Chicago, striking workers in New York’s garment center, the collapse of the “Galloping Gertie” bridge in Washington, bizarre feats performed on the wings of airplanes, or old newsreel footage of any of the world’s former political, scientific, or cultural elite, it is bound to be wound around any of their thousands of reels.

  Grasping for an inspiration, I visited one of the libraries and asked to see a few reels of the Pennsylvania Amish. The men with beards and primitive dress, the horse-drawn carriages, the straight-backed women outside spotless farmhouses hardly suggested the New Look that Lear was pressuring me for, but I ordered a couple of scenes and started work on Minsky’s first ten-minute reel. It was December 1967, the beginning of one of my longest stints in the cutting room.

  The process of turning a first cut into a finished film always proceeds one reel at a time. Each scene is carefully tuned before the next one is tackled. It’s the way I imagine a cobra ingests a crocodile, the dead beast going through the snake’s digestive system inch by inch, the head being completely transformed by the digestive juices before the neck arrives.

  The head of Minsky’s is the opening sequence of the Amish girl arriving in New York. I worked and reworked this scene, trying to incorporate some of the stock footage. The process is tedious, rarely offering much return on a day’s labor, but it yielded my first inkling of how I might transform the film. As I intercut the scenes, I realized that the orthodox Amish farmers looked similar to some of the extras in the original shooting, men with beards and big hats who were supposed to be Orthodox Jews, It seemed a perfect binding element to bolster the important opening minutes. As Britt Ekland arrives in New York, the flash cuts of the Amish would highlight the emotional impact of her entering this alien but strangely similar world.

  I ordered more Amish scenes and began cutting again, like a baker adding more yeast to his recipe. After several days, I looked at the remade opening and saw a somewhat enlivened but still disappointing version. I had taken a wrong turn, and, as is frequently the case with editing experiments, many hours of effort were lost.

  But I learned something from this mistake. I now knew that the basic approach I had chosen of intercutting stock footage was sound. After several more weeks of editing—with the Amish farmers this time completely eliminated in favor of scenes of old New York—I hit upon my opening formula: the introductory sequence became a vast array of intercutting that establishes the Lower East Side of 1925, introduces the Amish girl, brings Minsky’s theater into focus, and works in the title and credits.

  The movie begins with words on a title card that are spoken simultaneously by a vaudeville-style announcer (Rudy Vallee). He speaks for just a few seconds, declaring that the film is based on true incidents, that “in 1925 there was this real religious girl and by accident she invented the striptease.” Suddenly we are thrown into the midst of a parade from black and white stock footage, the first element of a 1925 montage composed of twenty-nine shots in eighty-six seconds: a female band playing in bathing suits, a couple in a marathon dance contest, a boy and girl hugging in a tenement-lined street, a woman dancing beside a dancing horse, a man scaling the side of a building, a flagpole sitter, pushcarts and peddlers in an overcrowded street which suddenly turns to full color, and so on. I repeated the color trick three times toward the end of the montage to prepare the audience for the color cut of Britt Ekland riding happily on an old elevated city train.

  I now bring Ekland into the Lower East Side, and the montage effect continues. At regular intervals I show her progress. She’s getting educated by the new sights, and the audience is having an equivalent experience through the use of the stock footage and snippets of footage shot by Friedkin on the re-created set. The Friedkin cuts each go for a few frames in black and white before turning to color, sometimes with the aid of a cue, like the flash of a smile or the sudden flight of pigeons. Gradually the black and white footage yields more and more to the color.

  Bert Lahr, an aging vaudevillian (Lahr died during the filming of Minsky’s), is the second character I introduce. We first see his feet walking along the crowded street. He’s wearing shiny “spats,” which is also the name of the character he plays. He takes a grape from a fruit vendor’s basket. A wagon and driver, more pushcarts. Ekland among the crowd, a shaved-ice seller, 1925 traffic, Ekland catching her first glimpse of Minsky’s, the sign announcing the show with Wisdom’s and Robards’ pictures on it, a quick shot of Robards in his hotel lobby (my editorial signal that this is a character to watch for), Ekland calling out to Lahr—and the first dramatic action begins.

  In a few lines of dialogue it becomes clear why Ekland has come to New York and what she is running from: I make a quick cut to her bearded, raging father, then back to Ekland’s face wincing with guilt. A sympathetic Lahr invites her inside the theater. I cut to the action on stage, the audience. The music begins, applause, and Pablo Ferro’s specially designed flashing titles come on, superimposed over a slightly blurred view of the audience: a bud yorkin-norman lear production. As the focus shifts back and forth from the audience to the burlesque routine on stage, and as the energy level and excitement rise, I pop the names of the stars on and off the screen, the background taking on a matte finish each time. Eventually I run through all the credits in this way. For several seconds of vaudeville action there are no titles at all. Suddenly I switch to a nighttime sequence of old-time policemen running from the station house to their cars in flickering black and white and color. The vaudeville music continues, mixed with the sound of sirens and engines, but for an instant the picture disappears, replaced by a single flashing black word on a white background: “the” The flickering montage resumes, reuniting with its sound track: the prowl cars streaming out of their compound in a single file. As the sound track races on another flashing black word on an all-white background: “night” A policeman on a motorcycle. “they” The cop cars and cycles zooming through town, “raided” The police vehicles flickering through the darkness, “minsky’s.”

  The cops leave their cars and move toward the burlesque palace.

  I bring us inside again, in the middle of a Robards and Wisdom routine. Robards: “Hey, Chick, did you take a bath today?” Wisdom: “Why, is there one missing?” Laughter. A judge and a female witness in a courtroom. Judge: “When you were sitting there in the car, and you felt that man’s hand on your knee, and then again on the top of your stocking, why, why didn’t you scream for help?” Witness: “How did I know he was after my money?” Laughter.

  The two-line bits fire off in rapid succession, the effect created by the splicing together of a number of scenes filmed at different times for different parts of the film. Wisdom walks into the aisle of the theater. Audience on both sides, one man asleep. Wisdom: “That was one of me father’s jokes.” Robards: “What are you, one of your mother’s?”

  Judge: “Say, weren’t you up before me two weeks ago?” A woman witness: “I don’t know, Y
our Honor. What time do you get up?” Laughter. Her response and the laughter are heard as the penultimate titles are superimposed: produced by norman lear. The audience, another bit, more laughter: directed by william friedkin. The vaudeville music starts as Robards and Wisdom make a wildly cheered exit. The camera pans along the laughing audience to end the first reel.

  I created the pastiche inch by inch, recut it twenty or thirty times, and worked on it for over a month. In nine minutes there were close to three hundred splices. A single piece of vaudevillian music that I had laid down over the montage sequences became the film’s major musical theme. The treacly opening had been infused with enough bustling expectation and playful nostalgia to pass for modern entertainment. Lear found it thrilling.

  Norman Lear is a medium-sized man whose single distinguishing feature is a bald head with a thick fringe of gray hair. He’s a master at getting what he wants from people, knowing all the subtleties of feeling that make subordinates inclined to give extra and remain loyal. He’s positive, encouraging, and friendly, and lacks the gruff characteristics typical of producers. His only transparent manipulative device—one that would eventually cause a blow-up between us—is to offer profuse praise and then ask if the thing praised can’t be made “even better.” On the whole, he is difficult if not impossible to dislike.

  Lear had no intention of returning to Hollywood until Minsky’s was cut. He set up office in New York and began developing pilot TV scripts, one of which would later become “All in the Family.” Days went by without any discussion between us, but he was always accessible if I needed him, ready to drop whatever he was doing in order to see if his New Look was emerging. His office, actually an extension of my cutting room on West Fifty-fourth Street, consisted of some rented furniture and a secretary. He probably never guessed he would be there for almost a year.