Radiohead

After working a few years as an assistant film editor, I decided to try to make the jump to editor. The decision wasn’t so much an “if” as a “when”. I knew I didn’t want to be an assistant forever, or even for very much longer. Although I had increased my knowledge and ability in the cutting room, I found the actual work of an assistant editor extremely boring, if not downright demeaning. Keeping track of the millions of tiny pieces of plastic generated during the cutting of a film is a monumental (and monumentally tedious) task, and I got into editing because I like putting things together and trying to make them work – taking A and B and making and wholly different C out of it. Assisting an editor was just not cutting it (heh heh heh). Plus, there’s a precarious balance that needs to be maintained on the road to editorship. It really does make you a better editor if you spend some time assisting and immersing yourself in the arcana of opticals and negative-cutting and drop frames and delivery requirements, but if you spend too much time honing your skills as an assistant, you’ll be branded an assistant forever. The ladder to editor, although closely linked with the assistant ladder, is a separate structure, and when you are ready to try and make the jump, you have to start over again from near zero. So, not only are you in danger of becoming a permanent assistant if you stay in the job too long, but it’s also quite possible to become too comfortable with the money that a good assistant can make to be able to retighten the belt and take the hit that building your new career takes on your income. I’ve seen it happen to several people. Not wanting to fall into that trap, I jumped to the bottom rung of the editor’s ladder as soon as I could.

And that bottom was pretty far down, I daresay. I had a couple of false starts along the way. My first chance to edit something was when the editor I was assisting got another job before finishing the last one. That means I got to take over the reins on the absurd (and absurdly named) Tough and Deadly, which always reminds me of the local LA chain of stores Smart & Final. The director had been fired from the show the same week that the editor had to leave, so my first day of actually touching the flatbed KEM editing machine was under the eye of the new director, brought in to pump up the film and add some new scenes. I have rarely been so scared, and my nerves betrayed me as I tried to make a change to a sequence, spent twenty minutes pulling it all apart, and then put it all back together exactly the same way it was when I started. Trying to learn to keep the film in synch while I made changes to somebody else’s cut was murderously difficult, but I persevered and eventually got more comfortable with the tricks of cutting film on a flatbed.

The producers of that film loved me. They were especially glad to be rid of the previous editor because, in their opinion, all of the temporary music he put in the rough cut sucked, and they thought that he really didn’t have the right feel for the film. I never mentioned to them that he had come to me looking for music suggestions and I had been the one that convinced him to use the pieces he used. The film got finished, for better or worse, and the company promptly went out of business.

The editor also left on my next job – this time considerably earlier in the film, due to the oft-cited “creative differences” between her and the director, and so I got bumped up to editor on that film. That was a much better experience and the film, a documentary about Ayn Rand, was much more agreeable to work on. I may not have agreed with the subject’s philosophy, but I wasn’t embarrassed to be working on it. That lasted a couple of years, and it was during that film that I decided I wasn’t going to assist any more, and turned down a lucrative, long-term job as an assistant to prove it.

The problem was – and continues to be – that there is no clear line from project to project. Each time I get a job, I meet new people, but when the job ends, virtually everybody is out of work again. Each new job seems like a miracle, unrelated (largely) to anything that came before it. So, when Ayn wound down, I was back on the street.

Out of the blue, an acquaintance of mine (okay, it was Whitey) called up and asked if I knew how to use the Avid computer editing system. He was working on music for a straight-to-video project and the producers needed an editor for a couple of weeks. Of course I can use the Avid, I bravely lied, and showed up for work with only the barest rudimentary understanding of what the Avid even was. Fortunately, the producers were far more incompetent than I could ever hope to be, so I was able to pick up some of the basics without revealing how little I actually knew. So impressed were they, that when they got the chance to do a series for Showtime, they called me up to be not only the editor, but the entire post-production department. The pay was crap, but it would get me more experience and the credit would look good on my resume, even if the show didn’t, so I agreed.

When my friends found out that I was working on a late-night T&A series for Showtime, they were all predictably jealous. Oh man, you get paid for looking at tits all day long! But the truth was considerably uglier than that. True, I did, technically, get paid for what I was doing, but I got paid very little – barely over the unemployment rate – and I was working 60-70 hours a week – on top of my two hour a day commute. And though it’s true that I did get to see quite a lot of meat whistles, these were not your grade A sweater puppies. These were the poorly enhanced knobs of frighteningly stupid wannabe starlets who somehow thought that if they flashed their funbags on an incredibly bad, late-night cable show, they would be well on their way to becoming the next Julia Roberts or Meryl Streep. Funny how there’s no old bad late-night cable shows out there with Julia Roberts cavorting au natural, or Meryl Streep suddenly shedding her top to participate in a pie fight by the pool. But this small detail seemed to have escaped their attention. On the other hand, it did make me feel better about the abuse I was enduring. I may have been working long hours for little pay, but at least I got to keep my clothes on.

It was a scary time. G was newly pregnant with what would become Owen, and things were tight financially. And although this job helped, it didn’t help much, and I was gone so much of the day that there wasn’t much left of me when I got home. I worked on this job for a couple of months over the summer, cutting 13 half-hour episodes in about two months. Right in the middle of that job, I turned 33, and to mark the occasion, my friend Patrick gave me the hot new Radiohead CD, OK Computer.