Woody, meanwhile, was adjusting his own thinking, and during the last five screenings, he had me try out a different title each night in my rough-cut speech. The first night it was “Anhedonia,” and a hundred faces looked at me blankly. The second night it was “Anxiety,” which roused a few chuckles from devoted Allen fans. Then “Anhedonia” again. Then “Annie and Alvy.” And finally “Annie Hall,” which, thanks to a final burst of good sense, held. It’s now hard to suppose it could ever have been called anything else.
The cutting of every film presents different and unexpected challenges. You never know what problems you’re going to face or what skills you’ll need to summon. Annie Hall received intensive editorial attention, but it was not “saved” in the cutting room. Despite Woody’s self-deprecating quips (“You know what we had to go through to get it,” he said to me when I congratulated him on the Academy Awards), the quality was all there in the first cut. Anyone reading the unabridged shooting script would be overwhelmed by the authors’ comic genius. The special job in editing this picture was to find the plot amid all the brilliant skits.
Annie Hall did not entail a lot of cutting from one angle to another, a lot of emergency opticals, or any fancy editorial footwork of the sort that is so often praised or called “dazzling” by people with a limited knowledge of film editing’s true scope or purpose. In the entire picture there were only 382 cuts—compared to 1401 in The Night They Raided Minsky’s, a very different sort of comedy (of equal length), a film that was in such trouble that it had to be not so much edited as remade. The job with Annie Hall was, as Eisenstein said, to allow the filmed material to guide you. Somewhere in that two-hour-and-twenty-minute first assembly was a story that worked, and when the commotion and anxiety from viewing the first cut settled, Woody and I set out to find it. Out of the vast ariiount of material that Woody thought was going to comprise his first personal commentary film, we found a love story about two very different, perhaps incompatible, people; and once he allowed his original intentions to fade and we let the film lead us in this new direction, it proved to be a love story that was a touching fable of our times.
Shooting Thyrber’s THE GREATEST MAN IN THE WORLD with cinematographer Tony Mitchell.
(Photo: Ken Howard)
20 ■ Swan Song
In 1971 Glenn Turner, an eccentric self-made millionaire, the head of an evangelic movement called Dare to Be Great, and the founder of a controversial pyramid business scheme that soon tied him up in fraudulent-practices litigation all over the country, decided he wanted a public image, as he was about to launch a political career. Through a chain of people in public relations and film, I was recommended to him as the man who could make his biographical movie.
Turner’s opulent corporate headquarters were located in Orlando, Florida, but he spent a lot of his time giving inspirational speeches at Dare to Be Great meetings, in prisons, to fraternal organizations, and anywhere that people wanted to hear him. I first met him in San Francisco, where he’d gone to spur on a group of students who were cleaning up a damaging oil spill, and he promptly gave me the pitch he had delivered to millions of his followers: “I hear you’re the greatest film editor in the world. I want you to know that you can do whatever you want to do. You’re going to make a great documentary.”
The man had been an ugly boy with a harelip and a speech impediment, defects he still had, which was remarkable considering the depth and breadth and intensity of his following. He had climbed to prominence by telling millions to dare to be great, and now he was telling me, a former stammerer who had hidden himself in the cutting room, that I could make a film. He was a secular offshoot of the Southern Baptist preacher tradition, a middle-American phenomenon that was alien to me and that aroused my suspicion. But he was also an outsider, with a great sense of himself and what he could achieve. I admired his defiance of the authorities that impugned him, and I was moved by his determination to uplift the emotionally downtrodden. As I sat and listened to him in his room at the Fairmont Hotel, I was charmed by his earnestness and sincerity, and struck by my reaction: he was manipulating me with his dare-to-be-great formula, and I was inspired.
We agreed that I would make a documentary by following him, observing him, and interviewing him at various times and locations of my choosing over the course of the next three months. He would finance the whole thing and give me complete editorial control.
Making the film was the most gratifying professional experience of my life. The portrait was sympathetic, and yet the undertones of desperation, of mass-movement hysteria, were evident. A sentimental man with much to give, implied the film. A world saver. And, yes, a demogogue of sorts who, through the mobilization of pain, could become dangerous. “You really captured me,” said Turner when I screened it for him.
The picture was dramatic and fascinating to watch even for people in New York City, where Turner had received practically no press attention and was almost unknown. The network executives who saw it were moved to superlatives, but were unwilling to purchase it. Turner was prepared to buy an hour of prime time and air the picture at his own expense, allowing the stations to make an additional profit by selling advertising as well. But the networks’ editorial policies, which often entail a Pablum objectivity in which almost every subject gets put up and put down in equal measure, precluded the purchase of independent material or, in this case, even the airing of such material as an advertisement. Privately I was told that they believed a prime-time presentation of this picture would make Turner a political powerhouse overnight, and they did not want that responsibility. Just after the networks demurred, a large syndication company, which provides programs to nonnetwork stations all over the country, announced its intention to purchase the picture. Terms were agreed upon and the contract was being drawn up when the company withdrew from the deal for what I was convinced were political reasons. Ultimately the picture was shown locally in the South and Southwest on a number of independent stations.
Without Turner around to incite me, I drifted into a period during which all my old hesitations about leaving the cutting room—not wanting to promote myself, fear of failure, financial insecurity— restrained me. It was during this time that I conceived this book, partly in the hope that it would give me the momentum I needed to move on.
In 1977 another opportunity arose, this time to edit and co-direct an equally unusual film. It was the brainchild of Carl Gurevich, a single-minded, sensual gourmand who wanted to do a documentary on the sexual fantasies of ordinary people. I could tell from Carl’s evangelical commitment to the sexual revolution that this project might be as meaningful in its way as the Turner film. In any case, it was not going to be pornography—the objective was an R rating.
Acting Out did not live up to Carl’s quixotic intention of showing dream-come-true orgasms on the screen. Many of our volunteers had cross-sexual fantasies, degradation fantasies, perversion wishes of one kind or another. Those with hearty heterosexual appetites often found that put on the spot in the settings they requested and with the porno actor or actress of their choice, they were unable to rise to the auspicious occasion. But at certain moments in this film something poignant about the sharing of private dreams seemed to emerge instead. In any case, I found great pleasure in being able to shape the interviews and enacted fantasies into a documentary statement.
In 1978 Robert Geller, the TV producer for whom I had done some emergency editorial repair work in the past, invited me to direct “The Greatest Man in the World” by James Thurber as a part of the PBS “American Short Story” series. In the meantime I took the aggressive (for me) step of circulating a proposal for a documentary concept of my own. Woody Allen and I shook hands after Interiors to end a six-picture cutting-room relationship, and, via a path I only now can trace, I found myself emerging from the shadows and moving into the brightened area at the edge of the director’s spotlight.
At this point, a few observations. My first concerns the recurring quest
ion of how much editing is too much editing. Take the scene in Annie Hall in which Allen and Keaton wait on line at a movie theater arguing about their faltering sex life while a man behind them pontificates on Fellini, Bergman, and McLuhan. This scene remained on the screen for nearly three minutes without a single cut, and yet is properly edited, a fact that is easily overlooked in this era of heavy editing.
Since the sixties there has been a trend toward frenetic, clever, or flashy editing regardless of the tone or style of the film. Richard Lester’s reliance on editorial tricks in his famous Beatle pictures, while helping to shake filmmaking out of its stodginess, has been, for this reason, largely a corrupting influence. Picked up and promoted by television and advertising, flamboyant editing has had a faddish appeal, with the result that less care has been given to scripting, filming, and directing the actors.
Regardless of its extent or style, editing should not impress or call attention to itself. As an audience, we no more want to see the wheels and gears and levers responsible for the effect the film is having on us that we want to see the pencil marks on an author’s first draft or the invisible wires in a magic show. But as much as I dislike conspicuous or excessive editing, I would never set a limit on the amount of editing that is legitimate. Some pictures require a lot of fast cutting, others extensive editorial revision. Editing is a tool that should be used as needed, and filmmakers who distrust it because it interferes with the photographic purity are handicapping themselves with excessive ideology. On the whole, the editors for whom I have the most respect do not cut according to formulas or habits of mind, but face each new assignment with trepidation, because they know routine solutions do not exist.
Observation Two: Because editors are among the few film collaborators who must struggle with almost all the major issues—plot, continuity, performance, special effects—they are natural candidates for directors. With so many years spent making films work, when I direct a film, my intuition abounds with insights the moment I think of a scene or a transition or a characterization. I hear the music. I imagine the cuts. I see the performances I want, even the character type. And I believe this would be true for many editors. Yet compared to the other breeding grounds, relatively few directors have come from the ranks of career editors. Why the film industry has made such poor use of this obvious talent pool has to do with the nature of the editors, with the nature of the film business, and with the nature of power.
For all their quiet acknowledgment of recent years, editors are part of an oppressed class in filmmaking. Although, in addition to their formal duties, they serve the director as cheerleader, coach, therapist, idea man, and relief pitcher, they are the lowest-paid and least recognized of the top members of the movie team. And because they are also expected to play the role of savior if a picture is not working, they are often the first to be indicted for its failure.
To be a successful film editor one has to carefully weed out all the personal qualities—self-assertion, authority, exuberance over one’s own ideas—that are expected in directors. The profession selects in favor of caution, timidity, self-abnegation, tact, “a diplomacy,” says British editor James Clark, “which would normally put us straight into parliament.” In its extreme, the role of editor is like the old-fashioned role of wives of great men, women whose contributions to history are acknowledged only in the form of folklore. To defy this role is a dangerous thing, for one gets branded with whisper labels like “aggressive woman” or “uppity nigger.” Aram Avakian (The Miracle Worker, Jazz on a Summer’s Day), the editor (and director) whose cutting I most admire and have at times been awed by, resisted playing by these rules, and his editorial career has been damaged as a result. All told, an array of mutually influenced internal and external forces make it as unlikely for an editor to become a director as it does for a woman to head a major corporation.
Observation Three: Having spent so many years in the back rooms, I would naturally like to see filmmaking emerge from its hero myths and be recognized as a collective enterprise. I believe in collaboration, in the excitement of team effort, and in every man’s right to credit for his work. As a director, I’m too mindful of the odds and the challenges to want to surround myself with slaves or yesmen who will push me and my blunders into permanent embrace. But as much as I feel directors will benefit from a broadening and diffusing of the spotlight, it is difficult to imagine them voluntarily accepting a cut in their power.
To hold power in filmmaking is to have the option to say, “That’s where I dollied in for a close-up,” or “I’m in the midst of cutting my new picture” when the work being described actually belongs to someone else. It wasn’t long ago that the producer held such prerogatives. He optioned the book, hired the scriptwriters, gave the script to one of his in-house directors, told him which of the contracted stars to use, put a loyal “personal” editor on the project, and saw the result as his own creation. Thus, Gone With the Wind is associated with producer David O. Selznick, not with director Victor Fleming, even though Fleming won an Academy Award for his efforts.
During the casting for “The Greatest Man in the World,” I was struck by the availability of top character actors—people who for years have had a starlike luster for me—to play minor roles at relatively low rates of pay. Such is the unfortunate state of the acting business. It is also another aspect of a director’s power, for everyone around him is hungry for work, and in many cases he makes the choices. It is only a short step, once this power goes to your head, to assuming that because you chose the actor, his brilliant performance accrues to you; because you chose the cinematographer, his inventive camerawork accrues to you; because you chose the set designer, the imaginative sets accrue to you. You may even believe, as many directors do, that because you can demand revisions in the script and even contribute a few lines of dialogue yourself, you are legitimately credited as co-author.
Of course, anyone who’s made a career in filmmaking, unless he’s been hopelessly brainwashed by the director mystique, knows how things really stand—how petrified a director is of failure, how keenly he hunts down each member of his team, and how grateful he is (whether he acknowledges it or not) for any original ideas or sparks of inspiration his teammates may contribute. Director Stanley Kramer has argued that if editors have ideas, they should be directors, not editors. But when I make a picture, I want an editor with ideas, as badly as a baseball manager wants a thinking runner on the bases. Most directors, regardless of their pose, know that filmmaking is more like baseball than tennis and that they cannot work alone. They plead with producers for extra dollars to hire the actor or composer they fear they cannot do without just as strongly as a manager urges a club owner to purchase a star center fielder or pitcher.
Yes, the director is still the key man on the team. But as Casey Stengel said after winning his ninth American League pennant in ten years, “I couldn’t have done it without the boys.”
Thank You
We want to thank the people who helped us during the writing and researching of this book. For spending time with us at a tape recorder remembering obscure details from the past we are indebted to Dede Allen, Woody Allen, Monroe Arnold, Aram Avakian, Marshall Brickman, Joe Coffey, Herb Gardner, Sidney Glazier, Jack Gross-berg, Alexander Hammid, William Hornbeck, Irving Jacoby, Ely Landau, Daniel Mandell, Helen Gwynne Morgan, Larry Peerce, Helen van Dongen, and Willard Van Dyke. Without them the book would have been impoverished. We also owe thanks to Susan E. Morse, Richard Meran Barsam, Randy Wershba, Charles Silver, Alister Sanderson, and especially Win Sharpies, Jr., who dug up valuable information we were unable to get ourselves; to David Williams, Davida Rosenblum, Gene Thornton, and Jack Richardson for reading and commenting on the manuscript and for their encouragement; to Nancy Allen for her dynamite typing; to Harvey Klinger for introducing us to each other and to our publisher, and to Henry Kellerman, Lloyd Gilden, Franklin Heller, Hayes Jacobs, Carey Me Williams, Bob Gould, and Phyllis Kertman for reasons they will know.
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Index
Academy Awards
Ackerman, Stanley
Acting Out
actors, and editing
After Many Years
Agriculture, U.S. Department of
Aiello, Danny
“Alexander Nevsky” (cantata), 270
“All in the Family,”
Allen, Dede
Allen, Woody
Altman, Robert
American Broadcasting Company
American Cinema Editors (ACE), 70
American Graffiti
“American Short Story,”
American Society of Cinematographers
Amish
Anderson Tapes, The
Andrews, Harry
Angel Street
“Anhedonia,”
animation
“Annie and Alvy
Annie Hall
anonymity, of editor
“Anxiety,”
Apartment, The
Apocalypse Now
Aran Islands
Army Signal Corps, V.S.
Arnold, Edward
Arnold, Monroe
“Around the World,”
Arzner, Dorothy
Ash Wednesday
Asher, William
Aubrey, james
Aurthur, Robert Alan
When The Shooting Stops Page 33
