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Gregg Featherman - Editor
What is editing?
Few people outside "the business" really know what goes on in the cutting room, and there's a good reason for that. More often than not, the editing of a film is designed to be invisible, so as not to allow the mechanics of how a given moment is constructed to intrude upon the story at hand. This built-in invisibility has helped to make the editorial process a mystery to most.
So what is editing? Contrary to the way editorial is portrayed in the HBO Project Greenlight show, editing is a huge component of what makes a finished film. It is the last opportunity to rewrite the movie and many films are altered greatly in the cutting room. Scenes are cut to play differently than the way they were written, certain beats are exaggerated or minimized, whole story lines are dropped or enhanced, performances are tuned, and the emotional texture of the film is refined. Essentially, editing is a form of writing whose language is pictures, words, music and sound. All of these elements are mixed and sculpted for the explicit purpose of telling the director's story.
How I got into editing
I started editing when I was a kid. Got my first movie camera at age nine, and my first film splicer, an 8mm model, the following year. I've always loved putting one piece of film after the next.
Getting into the business was relatively easy. It was the mid-seventies when I graduated from Hampshire College. Computers were just being introduced into electronic cutting rooms. This was long before personal computers were a glint in IBM's eye. As a 20-year-old kid, the idea of sitting in a room that looked like the bridge on "Star Trek," cutting a concert film in the dead of night, appealed to me. So I got a job at one of the new post-production houses, and in a few months I was editing concerts for HBO.
I tended to alternate between music-related jobs and serious documentaries. Really enjoyed myself. I got to work with artists that I greatly admired - Andy Warhol, Mary Lucier and Robert Wilson among them.
Sometime in the mid-nineties I remembered that I wanted to cut films. This was a tricky aspiration since I had never cut a dramatic scene and had not followed the traditional path of the film cutter. Luckily, a very talented director recommended me to Tom Fontana, then the writer/producer of "Homicide" (now he writes/produces "OZ"). Fontana gave me break. He hired me to cut a pilot. The next year he hired me to work on "Homicide." I can't overstate how fortunate I was to be working with a guy like Fontana. Besides his obvious skills as a writer and producer, he is a great teacher.
Because "Homicide" was well received within the business (long before I got there), it wasn't that big a leap to branch out and cut features. The first film I cut was "Robinson Crusoe," starring Pierce Brosnon. It was a Miramax film and Jon Gordon was the production exec. That was six years ago. Since then, most of the films I've cut have been for either Miramax or Dimension Films.
Cutting "Stolen Summer"
Cutting "Stolen Summer" was by far the most pleasurable film experience I've ever had. It was also the most challenging. Let's start with the pleasure.
The atmosphere around a film, the overall tenor, is set by the director. And Pete Jones is a pleasure to work with. He's fast, he's smart, he knows what he wants and he knows how to listen. He is not the guy I see every week on HBO.
The other pleasure that should not be overlooked is the environment of support that surrounded this film. In post-production at least, everyone worked well together. There was no real friction between the director, the producers, the studio and the actors. It was all about the film. We all supported Pete. Every day was constructive. Harmony may not make for good TV, but it sure makes the long days shorter.
The rest of the pleasure was in the footage. The script was great to begin with and the adult performances were stellar without exception. I also enjoyed watching the kids get better as shooting progressed.
Which brings us to the challenges.
Most of these were expected, but it's the ones you don't expect that get you. I expected that cutting the kids would be tricky and it was. Adi and Mike have a lot of screen time and some very heavy dialogue - no easy task for even the most experienced actors. So there were issues of nuance and attention and pace. But the biggest problem in working with the kids was their tendency to look into the camera. You can't beat that.
Even though I knew we had a tight, eight week post schedule, it didn't compute until I started cutting. How do you cut a film, top to bottom, with screenings and previews, in so little time? As fast as you can.
Viewers of Project Greenlight have also seen the seeds of other unanticipated issues - the sound problems when shooting under the El, the combination of rain and lack of rain at the baseball field, the shakey-cam episode in the bedroom. Did these big moments from the show cause problems in post? The short answer is yes, these were all small thorns in my side, but none of them were insurmountable.
The End
Our toughest mission in the "Stolen Summer" cutting room was shaping the end of the film and the persistent problem of how to use the infamous baseball scene. Despite the difficult shooting conditions familiar to fans of the Project Greenlight show, the scene, when assembled, played well. Not only did the scene play as it was written, but it played in several other permutations along the way. The issue in the cutting room was not one of "cutability" or even malleability; it was one of story.
The scene was causing some unintended responses, it was discordant. "So cut it out" you say. But that's not so easy. Baseball was connected, story-wise, to the film's closing scenes.
So what did we do?
I can't tell you. The film isn't released yet.
To find out, you'll just have to go see "Stolen Summer" when it hits theatres on March 22nd. Bring a friend. Bring your kids. We'll talk later.
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