Anderson – One More Time Around
It’s all Whitey’s fault, really.
I had made the decision to stop being an assistant film editor and try for full-fledged editorship, but I wasn’t having much luck. The few contacts that I had made only knew me as an assistant. Twice I was bumped from assistant to editor halfway through a film, and was praised by the producers and promised more work and both times the companies dissolved before another project could be started. The belt was getting pretty tight and the bank balance mighty low and I was beginning to wonder if I was going to be doomed to a life of filing trims when Whitey called.
A former Hampster (as we Hampshire alums sometimes call ourselves), Whitey had been part of the great migration west that a bunch of us took at the beginning of the 1990s, landing in LA to make our mark on show biz. He was a musician and composer, struggling to make a living writing scores for films. He also played in the Lucky Stars, and shows up in the earliest incarnation of Lonesome Pie, as well as contributing a few flourishes and recording a couple of tracks for the Lonesome Pie album (the LP LP, you might say).
Whitey got his nickname because of his bleached complexion and light blond hair, and because it seemed sort of a fitting name for somebody in a retro Western Swing band like the Lucky Stars, although the warm reaction he got from skinheads in Orange County upon learning his name sort of dampened his enthusiasm for that particular nickname, and it has largely been retired.
At any rate, he called me up one day, asking if I knew the Avid editing system. I had taken a class, but to say that I knew it was quite a stretch. So, in the time-honored Hollywood tradition, I bravely lied. He had been doing some composing and arranging for a direct-to-video schlockmeister (even lower rent than the place I first worked when I got to town – as difficult as that was to believe). They had just acquired a soft-core racing flick starring ex-Penthouse Pet and Olivia model Julie Strain (who went on to marry the creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle – go figure) and needed somebody to come in and recut it a bit. I assured them I was the perfect guy for the job and, because they were so cheap, they were having trouble finding any experienced editors, so they agreed to let me come in for a weekend and see what I could do with it.
A nerve-wracking couple of days later (okay, how does this program work?), and I had a new cut, which I sent back to their office. It was a terrible film, and had one of the most amazing mistakes I ever ran across. The DP, or director of photography, had put a half-filter on the lens in order to shoot some wide desert exteriors. The filter was clear on the bottom and dark blue on the top and, if you lined up the shot correctly, it made the sky a stunning deep rich blue without affecting the landscape. All well and good, but he didn’t take the filter off after he shot those wide exteriors, so all the rest of that day’s footage was dark blue on top – dark blue heads on top of normal bodies. But, they had Julie Strain, and I guess her own brand of special effects (whoops, there goes my bra!) was meant to make up for any other deficiencies.
They loved my cut, and hired me to edit a couple of trailers for other newly acquired properties. Of course, all they gave me to cut the trailers was a VHS copy of the film, so I couldn’t pull out any dialogue or recut any scenes and I had to use the music that had been laid down in those scenes. It was a thankless nightmare, but I got through it and was their golden boy for a while. Primarily because I’d work for peanuts while figuring out the Avid. Those jobs lead to me cutting an entire Showtime series for them, with Whitey – er, Chris – doing the scores. It was a grueling, humiliating job, but when it was over, I knew the Avid a little better, and could use that knowledge to bluff my way into the next editing job and I never looked back.
An accomplished musician (and famous in certain circles for his one-handed accordion technique), Chris recorded a charming disc of instrumental music called Sepiatone, from which this track was taken. There’s a whimsical, chamber circus feel to the tracks – the whole album sounds like Roger Eno conducting the Penguin Café Orchestra at Cirque du Soleil’s tribute to Frederico Fellini. And that’s a good thing.
I must, however, take exception with his choice of arranging Erik Satie’s tired warhorse, Gymnopodie #1. The arrangement is perfectly serviceable, but, for god’s sake, can’t we leave this piece of music alone? Like Pachabel’s infernal canon (written, as Peter Schickle says, not by Johann Pachabel but by the Marquis de Sade), Vivaldi’s The Seasons and Beethovan’s Fifth, Satie’s Gymnopodie #1 has become shorthand for “classical music” and has been played and arranged so many times as to become almost completely inaudible. If you’re determined to mine this territory, why not choose one of the other Gymnopodies? Or, better yet, one of the glorious Gnossienne’s? But it’s a minor quibble, and certainly doesn’t taint the rest of the disc.
He recently resurrected his old name for another project, Whitey’s Carnival of Funk, which is as wild a ride as the title suggests. So, it’s thanks to him that I find myself sitting in an editing bay, cutting shows for HGTV. Thanks, Whitey. I’ll get you back for this someday.