When The Shooting Stops

by Ralph Rosenblum

  One of Mandell’s favorite battles flared up in 1942 during the making of The Pride of the Yankees, the story of baseball star Lou Gehrig. Director Sam Wood based a portion of the film on the famous good-bye celebration for the critically afflicted Gehrig at Yankee Stadium, a highly emotional event in which Gehrig and teammate Babe Ruth hugged and cried—a scene that had been viewed by millions on newsreel. “The director, he tried to embellish it more than it was,” says Mandell. “I mean we had the newsreels. I ran every newsreel I could get hold of and studied them, and I threw out all the junk that he’d put in—which made him very angry, but I didn’t care. I thought, how the hell can you make a scene like that more dramatic? So I followed the newsreels, that’s all I did. He wanted to change it back, but I went to Goldwyn, and I won.”

  When Wood left MGM to begin work on his next picture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, the editor of his last film was still haunting him. Mandell had found that Wood had left him too little material to create an important opening sequence. “I took the stuff to Goldwyn and I showed him what he did, and I said, how the hell am I going to make a montage of him learning to be a great ball player out of this?” When Wood was apprised of Mandell’s complaint, he protested that Gary Cooper, who played Gehrig in the film, was right-handed while Gehrig himself had been left-handed—obviously Wood was limited in the shots he could make of Cooper playing ball. But Mandell had an editor’s solution. “It’s easy. All you have to do is put the letters on his shirt backward, have him hit right-handed, run to third base instead of first, do everything in reverse, and we’ll flop the film over. . . . Oh, we ended up with all kinds of cuts in that one,” Mandell chuckles. “A ball player running and sliding into a base, cut to Cooper getting up. There’s so many things. Too much to talk about.”

  Mandell’s privileged position depended, of course, on his relationship with Sam Goldwyn, one of the kingpins of the industry. That their dependence was mutual is amusingly illustrated by a memorable practical joke. The incident occurred during the making of The Best Years of Our Lives, which swept a handful of Academy Awards in 1946.

  “Freddie March has just returned from the war,” says Mandell, recounting the film, “and he’s coming back for his job. The manager of the bank was saying, ‘You know, things don’t look very good in the business picture.’ Now, I thought it would be so funny to make him say, ‘Things don’t look very good in the picture business/ So I switched the words and ran it for Goldwyn to see what his reaction would be and if he would catch it. He caught it all right, and he said, ‘What the hell are we in—the banking business or the picture business!’ I said, ‘Well, that was the only flaw, and otherwise the take was very good. I can fix that very easily.’ So he says, ‘Are you sure?’ And I says, ‘Absolutely positive!’”

  Mandell’s position was of course a rare one. Most editors, whether attached to a studio or free-lance, whether given a great deal of responsibility or very little, were expected to play a meek role. And whether they had limited imagination and talent and simply did what they were told or were true behind-the-scenes geniuses who added spark and fluidity to everything they touched, all editors were seen as technicians. Even such giants as Mandell, Hornbeck, and Booth failed to achieve recognition anywhere near commensurate with their contributions.

  In many respects filmmaking was following the ancient dictum of all collaborative enterprises—that the generals are remembered but not the lieutenants. Still, as the industry developed in the twenties and thirties, the eclipse of the film editor went beyond the time-honored celebration of chiefs. Even cinema aficionados, proud of their appreciation for a cameraman’s “soft warm photography,” a composer’s “stirring score,” or even a writer’s “brilliant” screenplay, fell silent on the subject of editing.

  What accounted for the editor’s profound obscurity? A major factor was the way his job tended to overlap the director’s. While in some studios it might have been the producer or star he had to please, over the years, especially on important films, the extent of his contribution came to rest chiefly on how much the director respected and encouraged it. It thus developed that outside these two men, almost no one had any idea exactly what that contribution was.

  Besides, the very nature of the process tended to obscure talent. Not only was it impossible to assign credit for a masterful editing job, most viewers, aficionados included, had no way of spotting it. The purpose of editing was to cover its traces.

  It was a peculiar, ill-defined profession. Many an ingenious editor, convinced of his own vision, would find that much of his career consisted of a subtle, unspoken struggle in which he persisted in taking more editorial liberties than he was offered. If he could make his moves gently, without causing offense, perhaps even hinting that his innovations had been the director’s unspoken wish all along, his reputation might survive, and he would be hired to cut another film. Other editors learned to play the mechanic’s role, sometimes to the extent of a maddening refusal to take any initiative at all.

  Under these vastly vacillating circumstances, who could blame a director for thinking—the question probably crossed at least some of their minds—that giving the editor his due might arouse speculations that would unfairly undermine the director’s own prestige? It was one thing to acknowledge the contribution of a set director, a costume designer, or even a cameraman—painful as such acknowledgments might be—but to acknowledge the editor cut too close to the heart of the director’s own importance.

  Inevitably, the shorthand that grew up around the cutting room mirrored the ambiguous nature of the work. “Fill in the holes!” became the great command that editors were left with. An order that had the ring of “Patch up my grammar when you type the letter,” it hardly conceded the magnitude of what was being asked. Even today one can overhear one director asking another, “Who are you using?” when inquiring the name of his current editor. The language reveals the preference to see the cutter as a technical adjunct.

  So it was an odd coupling, this relationship between the director and the editor, and because of all the ambiguities that went along with it, and the natural reluctance on everyone’s part to rock the boat, even if it was set on a course that was somewhat exploitative and damaging to the editor’s dignity, a silent consensus emerged to keep the editor’s contribution under the heading of mechanical adjustments. All this was of course belied by the great care that directors, when they had the option, were beginning to exercise when they chose their cutters. The editor’s past credits as well as his temperament would be carefully weighed. Because, as editor-turned-director Robert Wise would later note, the collaboration with the editor is the director’s longest marriage in film.

  As film histories began appearing in the thirties, the importance of editing to the making of the motion picture was gradually acknowledged. In The Rise of the American Film (1939), Lewis Jacobs wrote that the Russian emphasis on editing “was nearer the essence of film art” than “the German emphasis on camera eye and mobility,” which he saw as a “subordinate tool to the cutting process.” Nevertheless, not one film editor is mentioned in Jacobs’ book, and the same is true for every major work on film to this day. Reference books like Leslie Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion (1974) may include hundreds of write-ups on producers, musicians, screenwriters, cameramen, directors, stars, long-forgotten grade-B thrillers, and minor character actors, but not one editor. In nine hundred pages, Halliwell’s only comment on editors and editing is the quoted definition that begins this chapter.

  Barred from status jobs, a great number of capable and talented women moved into editing in the twenties from jobs as negative cutters, script keepers, and typists. Trained from childhood to think of themselves as assistants rather than originators, they found in editing a safe outlet for their genius—and directors found in them the ideal combination of aptitude and submission. Even today, though the percentage of female editors is smaller than it once was, they are far more numerous than women directors. Indeed
, Verna Fields (American Graffiti, The Sugarland Express, Jaws) and Dede Allen (Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico) are the only two editors whose names have ever been known to the general public.

  The personality of the men who were drawn to editing as a lifetime career (rather than as a stepping stone to directing) was naturally one of modest ambition and little urge for personal credit. Whereas cameramen organized the American Society of Cinematographers in 1918, the American Cinema Editors (ACE) was not organized until 1950. “They were a quiet group,” remembers Bill Hornbeck, himself a man of great modesty, “and they didn’t worry about recognition. They probably didn’t have sense enough yet to know how important they were.”

  Self-effacement seemed built right into the job description. When Oscars for film editors were first awarded in the thirties, a dozen or so top editors—apparently determined to keep the awards from going to anyone’s head—casually decided on the winner at an annual luncheon. “We didn’t give it as much thought as they do today,” says Hornbeck, who usually sat on the committee. “I remember one fellow was in the hospital, and we thought it would be kind of nice to give him an award. He won the Academy Award that year.”

  Like most editors, Hornbeck is loath to gripe about the shadowy status of editors during filmmaking’s first century. A legend in the business for his stunning work on Shane, A Place in the Sun (Academy Award), and Giant, Hornbeck remains unperturbed about his anonymity with the general public.

  Q. “How do you feel about the fact that, considering the amount of original work the editor actually does on a film, he gets so little credit?”

  Hornbeck: “Oh, I don’t know. It’s true that they get very little credit for the amount of time and effort and value they give a movie. That’s always been the way.”

  Q. “You never felt any resentment about that?”

  Hornbeck: “Oh no, I never felt that I was the only cog. The same thing happens with a lot of others in the business.”

  And so, for a bunch of interlocking reasons, the first generations of film editors have been forgotten. Of course, they bear an accountability for their fate—many of them chose the profession precisely because it allowed them to use their vision and imagination without putting their self-worth on the line. To wield the power of creation without bearing ultimate authority or responsibility was a perfect formula for a cautious personality.

  The early editors never protested or organized or promoted themselves. They might get together and bitch about certain directors—so-and-so doesn’t know what he wants, so-and-so never shoots enough, so-and-so shoots too much—but something very basic within them reinforced the most pronounced vassalage in moviemaking. “I never thought I was the only cog” explains Bill Hornbeck, one of the genuine pioneers of film, whose work in England during the thirties has been credited with a significant increase in the quality of British film production, who edited Frank Capra’s famous Why We Fight series of World War II, and who then went on to cut some of the best postwar pictures. “How did you hear about me?” asks three-time Oscar-winner Daniel Mandell, a man who could make a dead courtroom scene like that in Witness for the Prosecution come kinetically alive and who retired in 1966 after performing similar feats for sixty-eight other movie features.

  Most assuredly, here was a profession that would demand every ounce of your craftsmanship and inner resources yet spare you the limelight’s scrutiny. For certain people this was a satisfactory compromise; for others, as I would discover from personal experience, it was a painful one.

  Ralph and Jack Rosenblum, circa 1931.

  6 ■ From the Shadows of Bensonhurst

  Portrait of the Editor as a Young Man

  One of the fondest memories of my youth is seeing two pictures on a Saturday afternoon at the Marboro Theatre in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, coming out about five o’clock, and getting a frankfurter with mustard and sauerkraut. I still get the taste every Saturday between five and six.

  I became an avid moviegoer just as the talkies were coming in. The spectacular 1926 version of Ben-Hur, with a chariot-race cutting sequence that still rivals the best, was reissued with sound effects in 1931, and for a long time that was my favorite picture. Even at six I could identify with chilling excitement with a story about a slave who was finally set free. Another of my favorites was an obscure science-fiction fantasy with Richard Dix called Trans Atlantic Tunnel. It was the story of a zealot who, fired by his own single-minded determination, built a tunnel from New York to London. The prospect of someone forging ahead on such an outlandish project in the face of near universal opposition was exalting.

  In general, the films with a social statement of some kind—I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Blockade (1938), Grapes of Wrath (1940)—made the greatest impression on me. Had either the Marboro or Benson theaters given me the option to view some of the great documentaries that were being made at this time, I probably would never have seen another Snow White or Wizard of Oz. Entertainment films, no matter how good, were just wishful thinking to me, and the people who made them could never stand on a par with those who dealt in hard facts.

  An early tendency toward isolation, even more than my love of the movies, has always been linked in my mind with my becoming a film editor. An unhappy, silent boy, prideful, and easily hurt, a fat boy with a weird sense of humor and an unchildlike awareness of the absurdity of things, I usually sat in the back of the class, and had few friends. Most important, I had a speech impediment that made me extraordinarily self-conscious.

  Because I stammered, every day had its secret agonies. At school, the roll call was like a fuse that burned in my direction. I got stuck on h’s. The struggle to say “Here” left me shaken for the rest of the morning. Other situations I could get around by carefully choosing the opening letter of the first word of my sentence. But I never volunteered in class and said as little as I could in all circumstances.

  Every Friday morning the entire population of P.S. 186 would gather in the giant, windowless auditorium with its row upon row of connected metal folding chairs, and after we said the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer and listened to announcements, one of the sixth-grade classes would entertain us. One by one the students came onstage to recite or sing or play an instrument. The performances were hardly stirring, but I observed everyone with fixed attention. I never smiled or grimaced or enjoyed or judged them—all I could think about from the moment they came onstage was the day when I would have to take their place.

  When my class’s turn arrived, I was assigned to recite John Masefield’s poem “I Must Go Down to the Sea Again.” To hide the awful ordeal of preparation from my family, I spent the time before dinner practicing the poem in the closet of the bedroom I shared with my brother Jack. It is unnerving to look back and realize how important small, enclosed, secluded spaces have been to me from the time I was a child.

  The morning I recited my two stanzas of Masefield’s poem still echoes as the most dreadful experience of my life. Waiting in the wings to go on was like packing all the roll calls in the world into a single nightmare. I would rather have gone out there naked than reveal my defect to all those people. I had no idea who went ahead of me or what he said. When it was my turn, I went out drenched, as if to slaughter.

  The whole thing must have taken two minutes. I felt very alone and nearly blind with anxiety. I had to speak loudly because we had no microphone. Just the same, my voice seemed to get lost in the cavernous room, where it mingled with the sounds of restless students turning and shifting and coughing. I froze once or twice, and during those moments I became so hot and so red I was sure they noticed and wondered what was wrong with me. “Hey, what’s taking him so long?” “Come on, Ralph!” “Cat got your tongue, big boy?” “Spit it out, fella!” But no such humiliation occurred. As I walked back into the wings, the tone of the place remained unchanged—as if they not only hadn’t noticed my stammer, but hadn’t noticed me at all. The perfunctory clapping gave
no hint of rejection or pity. Another kid had come and gone and stumbled through his stupid recitation. For the rest of the day, and for several days afterward, I forgot entirely about my stammer, and felt debased instead for having done such a halfhearted job. These conflicting anxieties, a fear of exposure and a drive to excel, have badgered me all my life.

  Most of my childhood coincided with the Depression, and in mine and many other families personal unhappiness was often sealed behind a wall of financial woes. It was an era when Hollywood became the national diversion, a double feature cost twenty-five cents, and if it didn’t make you forget one form or another of depression, it at least packed a lot of ephemeral pleasure into three mindless hours.

  I realize in retrospect that children are great fans of fast editing. The films that were breaking new ground in editing at this time were gangster pictures like Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarf ace (1932), and we kids loved them as much for their malevolent content as the pace with which it poured over us. The advent of sound had initially put a severe cramp in editing style—noisy cameras could not move in for close-ups, and the requirements of synchronization made the old editorial liberties impossible—with the result that for a year or two some very stilted and static films were produced. But once the industry engineers surmounted these obstacles, fast, tight cutting came back with a vengeance, often—as Arthur Knight recounts in his book The Liveliest Art—accompanied by equally punchy dialogue: