When The Shooting Stops

by Ralph Rosenblum

  But it was impossible to stay angry at Herb for long. He was always funny and never stopped making me laugh. He’d pay me the most ingratiating attention. If he sensed I was getting testy, he put on a servile Southern accent and began calling me “Mr. Ralph,” with a ludicrous accompaniment of bowing and scraping. If that didn’t work, he’d do his Prussian imitations. Via the latter routines he’d spout what as far as I could tell was the sum total of his film knowledge—hysterical German-accented declarations such as, “Eisen-stein warned: ’Watch out, the movie shouldn’t go into the toilet!’ “

  Time meant nothing to Herb. I still remember a moment in a Mexican restaurant when he tried futilely to understand what was making me disconsolate. He joked that with all the big pictures being made United Artists had probably forgotten all about our little black and white production off by the river and that they’d continue to pay for the editing for years before the executives caught on. A lovable madman, I thought. A nutty incompetent that United Artists will one day have to cart away in a straitjacket in order to salvage their investment. Herb’s recollection of me: “Mr. Rosenblum here was a much older man at the time.”

  The conventions that had gradually accumulated and come to rule feature-film editing were not so much laws as guidelines and assumptions, many of which were first developed by Griffith, Eisen-stein, and Pudovkin and later codified for film students by Karel Reisz in his 1953 book, The Technique of Film Editing. They concerned such issues as the proper way of making a smooth cut, the right dramatic length for a piece of film, how the interplay of cuts creates the desired rhythm and tempo, and how the selection of the appropriate perspective and camera angle can generate a specific emotional tone—suspense, terror, grotesqueness, or humor—based on what the editor chooses to focus on and- what he leaves out of the viewer’s vision. These guidelines were sensible and appropriate and left considerable leeway for individual choice and invention, but their very existence was symbolic of ossification. The potential for editorial play in feature films was not nearly what it had been in the silent era when stories were told through clever juxtapositions or even in current documentary, which in some quarters was still freewheeling and uninhibited (Bert Stern’s and Aram Avakian’s 1960 film, Jazz on a Summer’s Day, being an exhilarating example). By and large, feature editing had become focused on the small issues.

  Making the film smooth was the major preoccupation, and certain elementary principles had become sacred. You had to be sure the background and lighting stayed the same when you cut from a long shot to a close-up. If there is a cat on the mantelpiece in the first shot, he should still be there in the second, along with all the predominant shadows and highlights. You had to know the exact moment to make the cut. You don’t wait until James Cagney’s hand has almost reached the revolver on the table to cut in for a close-up of the grasp. Rather, you change angles the moment after his eyes glance downward and he realizes that the gun’s within reach. The second choice is smoother and more dramatic.

  Smooth continuity is similarly enhanced by preserving a sense of direction. Since Griffith’s day characters, armies, battleships always moved in the same direction across the screen from long shot to middle shot to close shot. Griffith also used direction as an ongoing means of identification: In The Birth of a Nation Union soldiers always emanated from the right side of the screen and Rebels from the left. And, of course, directional flow was applied to completely unrelated pieces of action—a man falling from a twenty-two-story window giving way to a toy parachute falling into a boy’s hands—as a useful tool for making transitions.

  Other rules governed subtler questions. If a young lady being assaulted in her houseboat by Robert Mitchum suddenly grasps that her life as well as her chastity is endangered, the editor may want to cut to a close shot of her face to accent her panic. But the close-up must be complete; just a slight enlarging of her image would be jarring in its lack of resolution. On the other hand, if the woman shows no panic at all, and in response to Mitchum’s lustful aggression asks coolly, “What was the food like in San Quentin?” using a close-up would be ludicrous in this context, creating an unintended joke.

  At the beginning of new scenes, editors traditionally chose to stand back as far as possible to give a sense of place and situation. Thus we see an isolated houseboat hidden on the wooded shore of the Cape Fear River, cut inside to a long shot of Mitchum with his leading lady pinned to the kitchen sink, than a medium shot in which the actors fill the screen, and finally a close shot of Mitchum’s hand moving menacingly across her half-bare chest. An alternative approach, popularized on television in the fifties, was to begin the scene with the detail and only gradually move back to reveal the context of which the detail is a part. The opening of Louisiana Story, in which the first thing we see is a dew-covered lotus leaf, is a perfect example of this alternative. Recent instances of the more traditional style are Pretty Baby, Do a Flor and Her Two Husbands, and A Special Day, all three of which begin with aerial views of the locale where the stories take place.

  All of these editing conventions—to which Reisz was able to devote over 250 pages—served the essential task of enabling the editor to do justice to the script and the shot material. They were like a writer’s grammar, and as such are still crucial to the making of any film. In the sixties they would be not so much abandoned as diminished in importance as directors and editors saw opportunities to move cutting away from simple subservience to the script and use it as a major vehicle for molding the film. In the process they discovered that some of the old commandments were not as immutable as they had thought. The rules had only seemed sacred—because, after decades of seeing armies moving obediently from right to left, audiences had become conditioned to expect it. They could be deconditioned.

  The intended title sequence for A Thousand Clowns was a scene from “Chuckles the Chipmunk,” a ghastly television kid show. The camera moves back to reveal a TV in the apartment of the main characters— Murray, played by Jason Robards, a TV gag writer who quit the “Chuckles” show in order to lead the free (unemployed) life, and his all-but-adopted twelve-year-old nephew Nick, played by Barry Gordon, a less liberated individual who would like his uncle to get a job. Nick comments on how awful the show has become since Murray quit, and Murray, anguished by the false sounds of childish cheer, tries to bury his head under a pillow.

  After the titles role by, the scene switches to a junkyard, one of Murray’s favorite haunts, where Nick, who has cut school, tries to talk his uncle into looking for work. He explains that the child-welfare people have discovered his unwholesome living conditions and may try to relocate him in a foster home if Murray doesn’t improve their circumstances. We follow them around for a good part of the day, first in the junkyard, then the South Street Seaport area, Liberty Island, the Liberty Island Ferry, and finally the Battery Park waterfront. Herb and I fiddled with the editing of this very funny but cinematically staid material for quite some time before he was struck with an inspiration.

  Herb got hold of cameraman Joe Coffey (Arthur Ornitz had done all the original photography), went out early one weekday morning, and shot crowds going to work. Since Murray spoke with mortification about the horrible spectacle of regimented, workbound urban-ites, Herb thought, why not really show it, make it vivid? Certainly that would be less like a play. The results encouraged him. “This was just like movies now!” says Herb. “This is what Murray talked about—going to work, what it feels like, what it can look like with those long early morning shadows, with every New York face looking like they’re about to be executed, like there’s their stop and then there’s Auschwitz. And now we’re seeing it. So I came in with this pile of stuff, and I sat down with Ralph, and I said, This is going to be our new title scene.”

  The shots of people going to work were good. The bleary-eyed New Yorkers moved in unison, like troops in permanent retreat. Hundreds of thousands of semiawake people, following their well-worn paths to work, obeying the walk and don�
�t walk signs as if they were all powered by the same remote-control device. The signal changes and they rumble toward us across the intersection. Cut to an overhead shot as scores of feet step forward in obedient formation. Cut to the crowd filing across the screen, another group emerging from the subway, each angle amplifying the grim procession.

  Then Herb had another inspiration. He took one of those reels of taped march music and began playing it over the marching New Yorkers. “It was a breakthrough,” says Herb, “in Ralph’s relationship with me, in finding a style for the movie, in realizing we could make a film together. Because I took the march music and started running a couple of overhead shots of people going to work—and they started walking to the music. And I’ll always remember, Ralph turns to me with a happy smile on his face, and he says, ‘I think we got something here.’”

  From now on Herb began to listen to his music for a mood or a spirit that suggested where to go next, and then we’d begin to shape the movie in that direction. When the new going-to-work title scene was completed, Herb presented it to United Artists, and they were impressed enough to extend his budget for additional shooting.

  Bypassing the rest of the film’s first hour, Herb now set his sights on a moment in reel six. With cameraman Coffey he went out and shot additional footage of Robards and his leading lady, Barbara Harris— the social worker who falls in love with him—riding around the city on a bicycle-built-for-two. In the play, the screenplay, and the initial cut of the film, their first love scene consisted of mutual declarations of love followed by several minutes of tender, self-revealing dialogue. We eliminated all the talk and replaced it with a bicycle-riding montage.

  Herb Gardner: “I wanted to show they loved each other and that there was life to their connection. In the opening two lines of the scene she says, ‘I’ve thought about it and I probably love you.’ And he says, ‘That’s very romantic—I probably love you, too.’ It then proceeds to three pages of dialogue. It was a pretty decent scene that always worked well in the play. What we ended up with in the movie were those two lines and the most exuberant of the bicycle-riding shots.”

  It was the sort of transition that violated the conventions on continuity as they had been applied to feature films. But as Herb points out, it was emotionally correct and the audience could grasp its meaning.

  “You don’t have to say, ‘I’m going to ride a bicycle,’ or finish the scene, or anything. The next thing is they’re riding a bicycle and a full brass band is playing the ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’ The brass band and the two of them riding this bicycle-built-for-two is a celebration of they-love-each-other. What would have been a three-minute love scene inside was now a three-minute love scene done with a brass band and eventually Jason humming in his cracked, intimate, very rough, and deeply believable sound, humming and playing, ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.’”

  Antony Gibbs, one of the all-time top British editors {Tom Jones, The Knack3 A Bridge Too Far), once said that the greatest influence on the development of his editing skills was his relationship with director Tony Richardson. Because Richardson was a novice who knew almost nothing of editing technique, “He pushed me,” said Gibbs, “further away from convention than I would have dared go alone.” Watching Herb Gardner use music to lead him toward the feeling he wanted to create was having a similar effect on me. This was simply not the way feature films were made. Not only was the music traditionally added at the end of a film, it was never used to alter or adjust the message on the screen, but only to amplify it. Whole music libraries existed for just this purpose with thousands of one- and two-minute recordings for “tragic closings,” “romantic background,” “street scene,” “approaching monster,” “wild ride,” “conquering hero,” “longing,” “treachery,” “uplift finale,” and so forth, and original scores tended to serve the same limited and predictable purpose. Rather than using music as background or amplification, Herb was using it as counterpoint to the material on the screen, a new, independent, juxtaposed element that was every bit as important as words. For the first time in my feature-film experience music became a part of the editorial composition of the film. It was only one of many jolts I would receive in the coming months, jolts that would stimulate my own inventive resources and permanently influence my cutting-room technique. “When we used up all of our most dramatic bicycle shots, I said, ‘We should end this now.’ And Ralph said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Well, the rest of the shots don’t look like much.’ He said, ‘We’ll put them all together.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘We’ll put them on top of each other.’ So he took a bunch of ordinary shots, like they were colors, and put them all together. There are times when there are five images of Jason and Barbara riding bicycles, floating through each other and past each other. There was one deeply, deeply boring shot—I thought it would be romantic—of them riding by the fountain in Central Park. Ralph took stock footage of the Central Park South skyline, with the Essex House and all those buildings, and a fairly close shot of the two faces riding through on the bicycle, plus the fountain shot, and blended them together. And we added to it the soft voice of Jason roughly singing, and it looks as if they’re riding on top of the buildings of New York. It makes you remember for the whole next hour of the movie that these people care for each other, and that there’s a tenderness between them. It was as if you were seeing a soft romantic deck being shuffled properly together. It was a madhouse from then on. We were willing to try anything.”

  Director Fred Coe, Betty Todd (script supervisor), Jason Robards, and Ralph Rosenblum at the Moviola.

  13 ■ A Thousand Clowns

  Part II: A Style Arrived At by Repair

  It’s one thing to take some routine footage of high-school marching bands or some bizarre shots of European traffic cops and, just for the fun of it, cut them into bits, set the montage to some improbable music, and after several hours of spare time come up with a lively three-minute short for “Omnibus.” But to go through that process with a feature film, to maintain that rhythm and sparkle for 118 minutes, to perform that kind of transformation was a new proposition to me. Lumet’s pictures were edited with tremendous rhythm and pace—catch Fail Safe on TV some night, and you’ll see that it never stops; it pulls you along like a rapids. But Lumet and I never edited against the intentions of the script or the raw footage; Fail Safe was an action movie and we gave it superaction cutting. With A Thousand Clowns Gardner and I were attempting through the addition of some extra film, an idiosyncratic use of music, and the abandonment of the script to create a movie that simply wasn’t there before.

  True, the initial alterations in A Thousand Clowns were encouraging. But at least three months were gone now, and I had to face certain things. Our new inventions represented only a few minutes of razzmatazz in a film that was otherwise extremely stagebound. The contrast between the two styles was so apparent it suggested a black and white movie with one or two color sequences. To make this picture conform to the stylistic excitement of the title scene and the bicycle-riding montage, it would have to be handcrafted inch by inch. Nothing could be left alone any more; every scene would have to sing somehow, would have to come to color. It was a long time before I had any reason to believe that I wasn’t digging myself deeper and deeper into blunder and illusion.

  Herb Gardner: “I think Ralph and I went through every kind of emotion you can have—from love to absolute outright hate. Petulance, fondness, excitement, despair, boredom. Even paranoia. Ralph had every reason to believe that I was on a cutting jag. He figures I’m crazy. I figure he’s resisting me. We were involved in the most extraordinary, intimate circumstances, exposing to each other on a daily basis such joy followed by such disappointment. Ralph would become morose—and boy, can he do a morose for you. It’s Greek. You see a man, looks like a nice Jewish fellow, works as an editor—suddenly he’s got three pillars behind him and I’m in Medea. So I would change my voice, do a German accent, and Ralph would start to laugh.”


  Our first major obstacle was right there in the opening scene of the film, in which Nick follows Murray to his favorite haunts, trying to read to him from the want ads and to convince him that “for me as an actual child the way you live in our house and we live is a dangerous thing for my later life when I become an actual person.” It was all outdoor material, but it felt like a stage set. Something had to be done.

  Gardner: “Suddenly I thought, it doesn’t have to be a day. It could be all the days they’ve ever talked about this. Maybe it’s many days. Maybe Nick asks him a question on a pier and Murray answers him in front of the Statue of Liberty. Who knows what time it is? Time is whatever you feel it is.”

  We then proceeded to create what for that period was a very unusual scene for any kind of film—one that completely ignored the old rules of continuity. We cut together a single continuous piece of dialogue from the conversations that were recorded between Murray and Nick at the four original locations. We placed the dialogue over a visual montage that shows them at the junk dealer’s, walking with a parade, at Lincoln Center, on a dock seeing off a ship, at a fishing pier, back at the junkyard, on the Liberty Island Ferry, on Liberty Island, walking along Park Avenue (with Murray pulling a kite and Nick trying to read aloud from the help-wan ted columns), in Central Park, in front of a store window, at a parade again, and so forth. Without the slightest break in the dialogue, the locale keeps shifting. They’re in Central Park when Nick says, “You know, Murray, you don’t want 3. job is the whole thing.” A close-up of Murray: “Would you just concentrate on being a child. Because I find”—cut to Murray and Nick on the ferry boat—“your imitation of an adult hopelessly inadequate.”

  The raw material we had with which to construct this scene was not always cooperative. Frequently, in order to make it work, we had to choose pieces of film from the original scenes in which the character who was speaking was looking away from the camera, so that we could put the desired dialogue in without the interference of his original mouthings. Some of the conversation is played over silent footage of Murray and Nick that Herb shot with Joe Coffey on one of their outings. To work that material into the montage we had to select long shots or angles that didn’t reveal the speaker’s face. We were thus able to maintain the illusion that the actor is indeed saying the words on the sound track. Into this fraudulence we had to work enough synch-sound sentences coming from genuine moving lips to avoid abandoning all contact with reality. To this end, we several times slowed the flurry down and allowed the conversation to continue for several moments at one location.