When The Shooting Stops Read online

  Above all, this emerging Minsky’s was highly contemporary. One might even conclude it had a New Look. The obvious fact that had eluded us from the beginning suddenly struck me now: The avant-garde quality Richard Lester had achieved in films like Help! could only be accomplished through editing. From the moment the Search for the New Look began, Minsky’s was destined to be a cutting-room picture.

  Despite the pressure that had been constantly pumped into the Minsky’s cutting room during that year, Lear and I managed to survive without a real fight. We did have several disagreements, though, one of which was a serious battle that I still regret having lost.

  At the end of the film, after Minsky’s theater has been raided and we know that it will be closed down for good, we see Bert Lahr on the empty stage fondling the relics of burlesque. When Friedkin and I produced the first cut, I had already begun putting music on the tracks, and for this concluding segment I chose a Chico Hamilton piece called “Thoughts.” On it Hamilton uses a jazz bass alongside a haunting voice like that of a Jewish cantor. It is tingling music, and played over the forlorn Lahr alone in the empty theater, intercut with very short black and white snatches of the audience laughing—but without the sound of laughter—it had a powerful, dirgelike effect. One of the last things Friedkin had said to Lear before leaving was, “Whatever you do, don’t cut that piece of music.” The serious note at the end seemed to crystallize the whole film around an awareness that the burlesque era was truly dead, and that for all its frothiness, perhaps something of value, some innocence, had been lost. It almost ennobled the movie, like a touching truth at the end of a day of mindless frolicking.

  But the chilling sequence frightened Lear. He insisted on inserting the brassy David Rose music that is always played alongside a striptease, and the movie was diminished as a result.

  A second disagreement was minor and structural, though it did concern an innovation for which the film would be noted by reviewers.

  From the first days of editing one of my concerns had been the creation of a smooth blending of the black and white stock footage with the color film. I hoped that one way to make the transitions would be to use some of Friedkin’s original color footage in black and white, and I had a black and white work print of the movie on hand for that purpose. One day early in the film I was engrossed in some intricate cutting from stock footage to a sequence from the color film. After cutting it once, I decided to extend the original Friedkin material by reinstating a few frames that I’d trimmed from its beginning. I asked my assistant for the trim. As he rummaged nervously through the film barrel, I became more and more impatient, and finally exploded, “For Christ’s sake, forget the trim and give it to me in black and white!” I intended to use the few black and white frames as a temporary filler, but what I saw changed my mind. We now had black and white stock footage, cutting to these few black and white frames from Minsky’s—which because of the accuracy of the re-created set looks just like another piece of stock footage—and this same scene suddenly turning to color a few frames later. It seemed as if the stock footage itself had burst into Technicolor. The impact was magical.

  Using this method I was able to integrate the stock material in a way that added sparkle to the film and avoided obvious, jolting transitions. I became self-conscious about the number of times we used this trick, but Lear was captivated by it, insisted on employing it more times than I thought was necessary, and it became our visual motif. When the film was finally released in December 1968—to generally positive reviews—some of the critics noted that the combined use of color and black and white film was a particularly interesting innovation. In the year-end issue of New York magazine Judith Crist wrote, “Director William Friedkin proves his sense of cinema again by remarkable intersplicing of newsreels and striking use of black and white fade-ins to color.”

  Crist, of course, had no way of knowing that Friedkin may not have even seen the film she reviewed. Indeed, I’d heard that he would be barred from the screenings because of his talk-show blunder and would ultimately have to pay to get in. But as ever when a new movie is released, any mention of the underlying rancors, ordeals, and moments of desperation was strictly taboo. The industry’s unspoken attitude is that the production process has been nothing but cooperation, studded with regular bursts of creative inspiration; that the confident smiles on the vice presidents’ faces were up there from the start; and that the picture that appears on the screen is exactly what we set out originally to achieve. No one ever talks about the agony of viewing the first cut—even though it is always felt. And as long as films are made, no outsider, neither friend nor colleague, will ever be invited to see that first cut flicker torturously across the studio’s private screen.

  Key transitional frames from THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN.

  (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

  3 ■ From a Recording Medium to an Art Form

  The Invention of Editing

  Every advance in filmmaking has been designed to make something more real—an event, an emotion, an idea. When moving pictures were still a novelty, an early inventor like Louis Lumière could show a two-minute film of an oncoming locomotive, choke his viewers with terror and delight, and certainly convince at least those front-row spectators who ran panic-stricken for the exits that they were getting their one franc’s worth. But novelties wear off quickly, and the devices that once caused onlookers to grip each other’s knees soon left them sitting impassively.

  In the beginning it was enough to project any convincing representation of motion on the screen. But more inventive minds dreamed up greater delights. Of the primitive creators, a professional magician named Georges Méliès was the most popular and most ingenious. He saw in film the potential not only to record his magic shows for wider viewing but also to embellish them with special effects that heretofore were beyond his reach. Because he could stop the camera in the middle of a scene and make some opportune alterations, or crank the camera back to produce a double exposure, he could make a character vanish in a flash, turn him into an animal or a monster, or, with some additional effort, burst him into a thousand pieces.

  In Méliès’ little pictures the plot was often used merely as a frame for the wondrous special effects. A typical example from his hundreds of shorts is The Devil in a Convent, in which he transforms a devil and an imp into a priest and a choirboy and has them enter a convent. Once inside, the demons change back into their true forms, causing no little consternation among the fleeing nuns. In the end Saint George appears, wrestles with the devil, and liberates the convent from his grasp. In longer tales, such as Cinderella, A Trip to the Moon, and The Impossible Voyage, Méliès used double-exposure dissolves in order to ease the transition from scene to scene. Charming, erotic, imaginative, and poetic, his films made use of such techniques as stop-motion, fast and slow motion, reverse shootings, and animation to put a dynamic and delightful magic theater on the screen.

  But despite Méliès’ mastery of stage techniques and of certain camera techniques that put him way ahead of his envious contemporaries, he barely touched the mechanics of moviemaking as we’ve come to know them.

  The first man to toy with the power inherent in film was an Edison Company mechanic and projectionist named Edwin S. Porter. What Porter did is so commonplace today that it takes some imagination to recognize how significant it was in his time. When we think back on the films we’ve enjoyed, we recall our favorite scenes as if they were all of a single piece. That a scene may have been shot on several different days, that it may be composed of scores of little shots lasting only a few seconds apiece, that a close-up of the hero may have been an afterthought of the director’s (and shot long after the heroine—to whom he’s supposedly speaking—has returned to her dressing room) hardly concerns us. When I was editing The Night They Raided Minsky’s, I never considered any sequence of film to be an entity unto itself. Of all the burlesque routines that were acted out and filmed in their entirety, not one mad
e it into the movie uncut. Each routine was shot from several angles, allowing me to intercut from one perspective to another. But, more than that, I used the stage material for dashes of spirit and atmosphere, and, instead of showing any routine from beginning to end, I sprinkled it throughout the picture in bits and pieces. Audiences today are so accustomed to seeing film juggled about like this and so capable of maintaining their perspective despite close-ups and flashbacks and sudden shifts in position that they would find it hard to appreciate what a mass of kaleidoscopic confusion a modern film would seem to a turn-of-the-century viewer.

  The pioneer filmmakers, like the pioneers in any medium, were severely limited in the use of their tools, and of their limitations none was greater than the way in which they were imprisoned by the events that went on before their cameras. They had no idea that a scene could be composed of bits and pieces. They shot their scenes as if recording a play, and if anything węnt wrong, they threw away their exposed film and began shooting from the top again. Actors who were shot dead at the opening of a scene would have to lie motionless until the scene was complete—and if there were many retakes, they could spend an entire afternoon biting the dust.

  Until 1902, the year that Porter made The Life of An American Fireman, what the filmmaker saw is what the audience saw. It was a continuous, unbroken piece of action, shot from a single camera angle, the perspective the all-encompassing, straight-on, eye-level view inherited from the theater. In fact, not only were the individual scenes unbroken, but few moviemakers dared even to break a picture down into scenes. American motion pictures at this time were at most two- or three-minute uncut recordings of humorous or historic happenings. If, as in Méliès’ films, a picture was composed of more than one scene (a rarity), no attempt was made to link the last action of one scene with the first action of the next. Each transition was a total break—and this is what Porter changed.

  Porter never considered himself an inventive genius. His only goal was to put stories on film, as Méliès was doing. But Porter had a resourceful mechanic’s mind, and he turned at once to a search for ready-made components that would make his task easier. He chose to tell the story of a fire rescue, and to kick his project off, he used already available stock footage of urban fire companies in action. To this he added some staged action of his own and then pieced the various parts together as if they were a single event. What did it matter that the elements were originally unrelated? That the mother and child were screaming in a smoke-filled room long after the Newark Fire Department had gone on parade before the movie cameras? Once they’d been pieced together, no one would know the difference.

  Of course in piecing film together like this the assumption was that the audience would make certain leaps of association—for when Porter dissolved from a hand pulling a fire alarm to hundreds of firemen bursting into action, or from the fire engines rushing through town to the mother and child succumbing to the smoke, it was the first time that a film story had been created through the suggestive techniques of editing. As it turned out, Porter’s new technique made his drama more real than anything that had appeared on the screen before—so real that audiences exhibited unprecedented anxiety over the fate of the victims and unbridled rejoicing over their rescue. Porter had unlocked the power of editing.

  Once the concept of relating two separate pieces of film had been established, anything was possible. You could shoot a man out of a cannon, cut to the same man crashing amid bits of plaster onto someone’s dinner table, and the audience would naturally assume that the second motion was a continuation of the first—that the man had not simply been dropped onto the table together with a bag of plaster from a scaffolding a foot or two above, but had crashed through the ceiling as a result of his cannon ride. You could show a battleship being blown to smithereens and then cut to a uniformed man struggling desperately to stay afloat in turbulent debris-strewn waters—and rest assured that the audience would conclude that this was a surviving sailor from the destroyed ship and not some actor desperately trying to look as if he were drowning in the shallow waters off Hollywood and Vine. Editing would not only enable filmmakers to bring dramatic and comic action to life; it could make ideas more tangible, too. In Porter’s later film The Kleptomaniac, he would cut from a poor shoplifter getting a tough sentence to a rich one getting off lightly, and his viewers were angered by the contrast; while in The Ex-Convict he would cut from the former prisoner’s humble hearth to the opulent home of the manufacturer who refuses him work. The choice of the cut invited comparison, outrage, and sympathy for the unlucky ex-con.

  With the advent of editing, the range of emotions that the camera could stir became endless. No longer dependent on novelties or tricks or confined to recording events, film was suddenly a rapidly expanding medium; it could go as far as the inventiveness of the director could take it. The process of realizing all this potential in editing would take a mere two decades. In that time filmmakers would learn to blend the art of the theater with that of the novel and even the poem. By the mid-twenties masterpieces of artistry and sophistication would emerge that even today stand at the summit of motion-picture achievement. But in the meantime there was groping.

  After The Life of an American Fireman, Porter’s next important picture was his famous eight-minute adventure, The Great Train Robbery. He made two advances here. Instead of using dissolves—in which one scene gradually disappears as the next emerges—Porter cut directly from one action to the next, using no visual crutches to ease the transition. This alone was an important innovation, unburdening the young medium of a tedious and unnecessary convention. The other contribution of this film was the use of “parallel” action. When Porter cut from the scene of the holdup back to the location where the telegraph operator had been tied up by the bandits, audiences understood that they were being moved back in time in order to see the development of the story at another place. These small advances greatly enhanced the drama, and Porter’s little film was found so exciting that when nickelodeons were introduced a year later, The Great Train Robbery was the major attraction for many months, inspiring imitations for years.

  Although film technique was marching forward, neither Porter nor the majority of his contemporaries seemed aware of it. Not only did they fail to capitalize on Porter’s editing discoveries, but even Porter slipped back into more primitive uncut productions. He seemed oblivious to his own achievements. For several years important clues were left unexamined. At the end of The Great Train Robbery, for example, Porter attached a piece of film unrelated to the rest of the story. It shows a close-up of a bandit firing his pistol point-blank at the audience. It never occurred to Porter to integrate this close-up into the story itself. It did not seem possible at the time. Although he had used editing to link the action of one scene to another and to suggest meanings and associations, in 1903 each scene was still composed of one continuous piece of film. To change the camera angle, to move in for a close-up, to cut to simultaneous action and then back again—all that would have to wait for the first true genius of the cinema, D. W. Griffith.

  When Griffith initially proposed using a close-up to heighten dramatic tension, his producers warned him that the public would never buy half an actor. But Griffith was an ambitious, determined talent, with a strong sense of drama and a commitment to having artistic impact. With the door to the cutting room opened by Porter, Griffith would not be timid about barging in.

  He first broke a scene in 1908 in For Love of Gold, cutting in the middle of the action to a full shot of one of the actors. No scene had ever been divided into more than one shot, and this simple innovation would soon cause a minor revolution. It would relieve the director of having to reshoot an entire scene if any part were imperfect—now he could simply resume action from another angle. It meant that actors whose usefulness had ended early in a scene could leave the set. It meant that the tedium of a long scene could be broken and the tempo heightened by fresh cuts and new angles. But Griffith’s initial
intention was less encompassing. He merely wanted to sidestep the cumbersome “dream balloon,” a filmed insert that filmmakers were using to illustrate a character’s fantasy or thoughts. By cutting up close to a single character Griffith could allow him to act out his thoughts. As in the past, the audience understood exactly what was happening—that despite the cut they were still watching the same scene, only from a zoomed-in perspective—and the dream balloon was banished from the screen for good.

  Within the year Griffith took his advance further. While editing After Many Years, he cut right up to the face of his leading lady, a transition that shocked his producers. He then cut to the object of her thoughts, her husband stranded on a desert island, and finally back to the woman’s face. In one sweeping gesture he had made the first use of a close-up since Porter’s throwaway shot at the end of The Great Train Robbery, had cut away from a scene without finishing it, and had found a perfect cinematic way of representing a character’s thoughts. One can imagine the reaction of the dismayed executives at Biograph. A woman in a room, suddenly a woman’s face filling the whole screen, suddenly a man on a desert island—what the hell’s come loose here! A genius gone beserk! But once again audiences were able to follow the director’s logic, and the executives were greatly relieved.