But Eisenstein’s theorizing was never a substitute for artistic passion, and although it propelled him along, it did not entirely dominate his work. Once he got into the cutting room, he allowed the film to lead him into areas he hadn’t expected to go. “The filmed material at the moment of editing can sometimes be wiser than the author or editor,” he said. And he acknowledged of Potemkin, “I realized the emotive scenes, as the Holy Scriptures say, ‘without seeing my creation’; that is, I realized them thanks to the feelings which the events inspired within me.”
When I first saw Potemkin, I had been in the editing room for about a year and I could well understand the terror the film struck in the hearts of editors, bourgeois and revolutionist alike. Although its naval scenes had become the model for zillions of World War II battleship encounters, the film as a whole had never been equaled. Awing as War and Peace or Moby Dick might be to an aspiring writer or the Himalayas to a first-time mountain climber, Potemkin stands on such a peak that it has become the subject of self-effacing jokes among film editors; they have lived in its shadow for so long, they no longer dare to harbor thoughts of topping it.
Editors Harold Masser, Harold May, George Barto and Bill Hornbeck in the Mack Sennett cutting room, 1922.
(Courtesy Marc Wanamaker, Bison Archives)
5 ■ The Birth of a Profession
Technicians with Dreams
EDITOR. Technician who assembles final print of film from various scenes and tracks available; works closely under director’s control except in routine pictures.
—LESLIE HALLIWELL, The Filmgoer’s Companion
“The studio I became connected with,” recalls Bill Hornbeck, A one of the top editors of all time, “was the Mack Sennett Keystone. They bought property from my father in 1912 and built the studio there, and one little corner we kept as a home. So I grew up right there with the movies next door to us and would climb over the fence and watch them. And they didn’t mind; I was a youngster hanging around, and I didn’t cause them any trouble. That’s how I got interested. Well, I kept asking for a job, any kind of job, and they said, well, when you get long pants, we’ll give you a job.
“When I got out of school I wanted to do something to get in, and it didn’t matter what I did. My grandfather was the gateman at the studio and he kept watching for a job, and when one came up, first thing he called me. I was fifteen years old then and working in my mother’s restaurant. It was noontime, and I was washing dishes, and my mother was busy as the devil. I quit the job right in the middle of lunch—she never forgave me for that!
“Well, I got on my bike and out I went to the studio and got a job winding film in the lab. They called it a ‘film wrapper.’ I did that for just a short time. Of course the business was expanding very rapidly with these comedies. We did a film a day, six one-reelers a week, and one two-reeler. We had thirty companies shooting, thirty different directors, camera crews and all. Of course the camera crew was only a cameraman—he didn’t have an assistant, he didn’t have a focus, he was the works. He loaded his film in the morning, he carried his camera, he put the slate out in front, he unloaded the camera at night, got the negative to the lab, and the next morning he broke the film down, separating out the usable takes—he was an entity of his own.
“Anyway this wrapping thing didn’t last very long. I became a printer, printing the daily rushes; stayed in there about a year. Then I went into the dry room where we rotated film on drums until it was dry. Now all this took place in one large building. At first I was interested in the miniature department, the tiny trains and all that, but I soon got fascinated with the editorial end of it, and I would hang out there whenever I had any spare time. The editors had to do their own splicing, so they would get me to do the splicing for free—saying I was going to learn to be an editor. It got so that I would work nights on these reels of film, and I thought, well, I’ll be an editor, it won’t be long now, and so I have to splice all these reels.
“Well, from drying I went into projection. Being a projectionist fascinated me because now I could watch the films and see what was happening as they went through the editorial stages. Then the war broke out. I was too young to go by six months, but most of the editors were drafted, and they started to use kids. That’s really how I got into it so rapidly.”
In the early boom years of the industry that Hornbeck describes people were pouring into film from every imaginable occupation— Sennett himself had been a boilermaker—and so it was not astounding that a kid of seventeen would be promoted to film editor, war or no. Filmmaking, the first great collaborative art form, started out, in the United States at least, as democratic as a gold rush.
The pace of the industry heightened the director’s need for collaborators. It began with cameramen—Billy Bitzer and Edouard Tissé, the ingenious craftsmen who developed long-standing associations with Griffith and Eisenstein, are two important early examples.
But as the industry grew, so did the number of collaborators upon whom directors were forced to depend. By the twenties scriptwriters and scenarists were making significant inroads on the picture. In some studios scenarists would produce a “continuity,” or shooting script, which worked out the picture shot for shot in advance, and while this practice lasted, the director slipped to the second slot in the studio totem. Largely overlooked in the hubbub of growth and excitement and the lengthening list of credit lines was the emergence of the film editor from a mere splicer to a significant contributor to the film’s final form.
Kevin Brownlow, a British producer-director and the author of The Parade’s Gone By, a fine and affectionate account of the silent era, is one of the few film historians to take note of the birth of the editing profession. Among the early editors he interviewed is Clarence Brown, who began his career in Fort Lee, New Jersey, as an assistant to the popular director Maurice Tourneur and quickly graduated to directing his own films with such stars as Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo (whose career he launched). “I think I was Tourneur’s first editor,” says Clarence Brown. “In those early days—nineteen-fifteen—the only two people who knew anything about the film were the director and the cameraman, so they had to edit it between them. I used to watch this process with interest. I once saw Tourneur with twenty pieces of film in his mouth. I got it into my head that I could do it. Within a month I was editing his pictures and writing his titles, relieving him of that end of the business entirely.”
In a letter to Brownlow, Dorothy Arzner, who came to cutting from typing scripts and would later be famous as one of the first women directors, recounts her equally informal introduction to the craft, which at this time (1919) was settling down to a recognized specialization: “One cutter, Nan Heron, was particularly helpful. She was cutting a Donald Crisp picture, Too Much Johnson; I watched her work on one reel and she let me do the second, while she watched and guided every cut. On Sunday I went into the studio and assembled the next reel. On Monday I told her about it and she looked at it and approved. I finished the picture under her guidance. She then recommended me to keep script and cut the next Donald Crisp picture.”
From the very beginning cutting was a profession whose characteristics changed markedly from set to set and studio to studio. Margaret Booth, who began a half-century cutting career in the early twenties, has credited Clarence Brown with becoming the sort of director who would let an editor do his job without interference: “I cut a number of his pictures and never saw him in the cutting room.” Indeed, throughout much of the industry a common procedure was developing whereby the editor would cut a portion of the film on his own, screen it for the director, and then make modifications according to the director’s critique.
Still, a number of directors jealously guarded the editorial prerogative, sometimes with admirable results. Continuing in the Griffith tradition, filmmakers like Chaplin, Abel Gance, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton were frequently the true editors of their films. Judging from Keaton’s account of the relationship, his edito
r performed the role that would today be ascribed to the assistant editor:
“J. Sherman Kell was my cutter,” he told Brownlow. “Father Sherman, we called him. He looked like a priest. He broke the film down and put it in the racks. I’d say, ‘Give me that long shot of the ballroom.’ He’d get that out. ‘Give me the close-up now of the butler announcing the arrival of his lordship.’ As I cut them, he’s there splicing them together. Running them onto a reel as fast as I hand them to him.”
In the major studios, however, the responsibilities of the man with the scissors were growing. Together with the title writer, he worked out the final arrangement of most films, and when a film didn’t work, the two men might revise its entire concept by rearranging some of the scenes, or change intended meanings by altering the actors’ words on the cards. At Keystone, where Bill Hornbeck in 1921 emerged as the supervising editor, the director had virtually no control over his work once it went to edit. As Hornbeck says: “He was too busy getting the next picture ready. In those really early days an editor would be on each picture. He would work with the director if he was able, and get it down to a pretty darn good cut. About Wednesday of every week, I would take over and do the final cut—getting it down to the fine points with Sennett. But we had to ship a picture every Saturday night regardless of what happened. So down toward the wire, the editor ruled the film—and we didn’t get paid the next week if that film didn’t go out.
“A lot of times we were forced to make big changes, alter the meanings and so forth. I remember one in particular. Eddie Cline made a picture, and it was overdramatic, overdone—it turned out to be just a lot of baloney—so we wouldn’t ship it. Now Pathé was releasing our pictures, and at the end, to fulfill our contract with them, we had to get rid of this one. So we decided to make it a farce. We called it The Gosh-Darned Mortgage, put the craziest titles in, and just kidded the whole thing from beginning to end. We thought, well, we’ll never get another contract with Path£ after this bunch of crap. But, by golly, when it got to New York, they loved it!”
The cutting room in the twenties was still a primitive arena. Editors cut by hand and tested the rhythm of an edited sequence by pulling it through their fingers as they viewed it. Many were so committed to this archaic process that they were reluctant to use the animated viewers, or Moviolas, when they were introduced halfway through the decade. Only the talkies and the requirements of synchronization would finish off this manual art for good.
One of the silent-era stars, Bebe Daniels, who began acting as a child in 1908 and enjoyed a great success both in comedies and musicals, became friends with Dorothy Arzner while at Paramount in the mid-twenties. Her impressions of Arzner cutting helped capture for Brownlow the flavor of the period:
One day Dorothy Arzner came to me and said, “Bebe, you could have heightened this scene a great deal.” She started to explain, but I didn’t get it. “Come up to the cutting room some night and I’ll show you what I mean.” So I went up with her, and I became fascinated. It taught me more about writing for motion pictures than anything in the world could have taught me.
Dorothy used to hold the film up to the light and cut in the hand. I remember my first lesson; she held the film up and said, “Well, now, look—this is dead from here to here—we’re going to put this close-up in here—so we’ll go to here. We don’t need this—wait a minute, we can come in here. . . .”
Gradually I began to understand, and learned to cut film myself. We used to mark the frame with a wax pencil, scrape the emulsion off with a razor blade, apply the glue, then put the other piece of film on top and press it down hard. Then we’d check our sprocket holes, and examine the cut under the magnifying glass. Dorothy used to cut as we went on those comedies, and it was very helpful to see the cut rushes in the morning. We could keep the pace right. We might have slowed down as we went along, but seeing the cut rushes kept us to the right speed.
Every night I’d trudge up there and work with Dorothy until seven or eight, then I’d go home with my nails full of glue.
Says Arzner of the same period, “I was a very fast cutter. I cut something like thirty-two pictures in one year at Realart, a subsidiary of Paramount. . . . I also supervised the negative cutting and trained the girls who cut negative and spliced film by hand. I set up the film filing system and supervised the art work on the titles. I worked most of the day and night and loved it.”
Whether done by the editor himself or a splicer assistant, negative cutting was the most tedious aspect of the work. It simply meant making a duplicate of the final cut out of all the negative film that had been piling up since the first days of shooting. It was a crucial process, for it was from this negative cut that all subsequent prints would be made. But finding the negative to match each little shot from the finished positive was more complicated than one might imagine. There were no guide, or “key,” numbers on the film, as there are today, and it was not always easy to tell the difference between various takes of the same scene. “In the old days we cut negative by eye,” recalls Margaret Booth, who cut her first picture in 1924, her last in 1976 (Murder by Death), and in between served as editor-in-chief at MGM for thirty years. “We had to match the action. Sometimes there’d be a tiny pinpoint on the negative and then you knew you were right. But it was very tedious work. Close-ups of Lillian Gish in Orphans of the Storm would go on for miles, and they’d be very similar so we’d all help one another.”
Industry expansion meanwhile presented the editor with new and unexpected challenges. Many pictures had to be cut differently, it turned out, depending on where they were released—such was the variation not only in what people were willing to tolerate but also in what they were capable of understanding. The quick development of motion-picture shorthand, which could propel actors from one scene to another with no transition, was still beyond the comprehension of many new moviegoers, particularly in areas where the cinema was still a novelty. Editors had to make versions suited to their perceptual abilities as well as to their tastes.
With the advent of the double feature, the editor was presented with yet another unforeseen task. In order to include a second film that was somewhat shorter than the top-billed feature, last year’s releases had to be cut down by fifteen or twenty minutes to make them a suitable second-run length.
The editor’s special services to the industry did not end there. By the late twenties studio executives would occasionally find themselves falling back on him when a struggle with a director over the length, point of view, or artistic approach of a particular film had reached an impasse. In a number of celebrated cases, movies were seized from hapless directors and given to the editor for remaking. This sometimes caused a great outcry, as when Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, initially forty-two reels long, was cut to ten reels by a studio editor. These battles over the final cut were just the beginning of a struggle between directors and producers that goes on in many forms to this day—the yanking of A New Leaf out of the hands of director Elaine May and into the cutting room of Frederic Steinkamp being a recent example, complete with courtroom embellishments. These heavily charged and bitter circumstances would represent some of the few occasions when an editor would have to bear almost total responsibility for assembling a picture. Even then, he would remain unknown.
As editing became more refined and complex, and as its mechanics grew more difficult to master, many directors turned shy of the cutting room, some never venturing in at all. By the early twenties the industry already had name editors who commanded higher salaries and were called in to cut top features. These men and women operated on a free-lance basis, as do almost all top editors today. In the studios, meanwhile, senior editors sometimes had better relations with the producer than the director did, and they used that advantage to get what they needed in the way of additional takes or to see that their point of view over a disputed cut prevailed. In a few cases the relationship between the producer and his favorite editor became institutionalized and lasted for
decades. As recently as 1968 director Sidney Lumet complained to a group of young filmmakers, “When I complete a film for Metro, I have to get blood on the floor to protect it from a lady by the name of Margaret Booth, who I’m sure none of you have ever heard of. She was Irving Thalberg’s cutter, and to this day she checks every movie made for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and can stop you at any point, call off your mix, and re-edit herself. She owns your negative.”
Another studio powerhouse was Daniel Mandell, who was lured into editing in 1920 after suffering a war injury that terminated his career as an acrobat. Mandell, who eventually spent twenty-four years as an editor for Sam Goldwyn and won three Academy Awards—for The Pride of the Yankees (Sam Wood, 1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946), and The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)—as well as two Academy Nominations, was accustomed to having his way on and off the set—particularly after the director had been given his chance in the first, or “director’s,” cut: “With some directors I’d listen very respectfully to whatever suggestions they had and, if I thought they merited attention, I’d follow them. Otherwise, I’d ignore them and take the initiative.”
“Did you ever get stuck in a situation,” we asked him, “in which you didn’t have enough film to work with?” “No, no,” he said, “because if I thought I needed something else, I’d go out on the set and tell the director to shoot it. There was one director, Henry Hathaway—I did a thing with him called The Real Glory—and every time I’d go on the set and ask him to shoot something, I’d get a big argument. But the next day I’d see it in the rushes. I didn’t hesitate to make these requests because I always had a good reason. If Goldwyn called me to task, I would say, well the hell, I need it, and besides, you don’t want to take the chance of going back into retakes, do you?” Mandell, of course, knew that there’s nothing a producer hates more than the expense of calling back a group of scattered actors for retakes.
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