by Tom Vitale
It took a little bit of time for me to understand what Tony was saying. I was incredibly relieved to be off the hook, but was he suggesting he thought of me as a juvenile misanthrope and was impressed I’d pulled off something so sophisticated as instructing the fixer to hire a street performer? I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what Tony was saying. This was fantastic news! Given our unique relationship, it was clearly advantageous to come off as a bit stupider than I really was. Unless of course this was a ploy to lure me into a state of false security…
“Did a clown really rape you?” I asked when I regained my composure.
“Looks like there’s traffic on the George Washington,” Tony said, swerving off the highway without signaling. “I’ll show you a shortcut to the bridge, we go right past where I grew up.”
Chapter Six
KILL YOUR DARLINGS
“SOMEDAY THIS WAR IS GONNA END,” JESSE SAID, REPEATING ONE OF Tony’s favorite quotes. I smiled tightly. As hard as it was to believe, Parts Unknown was winding down. Two months after Tony’s death, it was the end of the line—whether I was ready for it or not. In addition to the “Crew Special,” I was wrapping up the Indonesia edit. Footage from the uncompleted episode in France wasn’t going to be used, which made our Indonesia shoot the last episode Tony filmed that would make it to air. This was going to be our last chance to make Tony proud.
I was glad Jesse was editing Indonesia; we had quite a history. We’d both started on the show at the same time way back on A Cook’s Tour when I was a tape logger. We’d worked together regularly since my first episodes of No Reservations in 2005, and Jesse had edited Romania, infusing it with his trademark sense of humor, all but securing my role as director. Now here we were in the surreal position of cutting a posthumous episode of Parts Unknown. It was humbling, after all I’d learned from Tony over the years, and I was still having trouble figuring out how to end the show.
Tony’s absence loomed large; it was his creative vision that drove much of the editing process. Even more than my time in the field, I felt like I’d really got to know Tony through our edit collaborations and battles over the years. It was the part of the process where he really shined, and arguably where I learned the most from him during our time together.
“BE INCREASINGLY SURREAL,” TONY SAID. “Make this show as hallucinogenic as possible. I want images from Haitian art, crosses, skulls, dicks, babies, limbs intercut with the dreamlike surreality of the actual environment.”
By 2010 the show was starting to repeat locations, and Tony had wanted to stretch his legs, tell some different stories. He’d insisted, then finally demanded, we go to Haiti, and ultimately the Travel Channel had begrudgingly approved the trip. We arrived several months after the massive 7.0 earthquake that had left a quarter million people dead. This would be the first time the show had purposefully ventured to a truly “high-risk environment.” I don’t think any of us quite realized what we’d signed up for until landing in Port-au-Prince. The city was gone. In its place was a patchwork of grief, mass graves, countless makeshift refugee camps, collapsed and twisted concrete stitched together by a network of partially blocked roads. Thousands were still missing, survivors were dealing with a cholera outbreak, and foreign aid and attention were flagging. Driving at night, the only light came from an occasional passing car or burning oil drum, indication of an improvised roadblock. Our head of security, Damien, never had his hand far from a gun secreted in the glove box.
The shoot had been emotionally intense, but two months later back in New York, the edit was coming together well—really well—until the network did what seemed like their best to ruin it: “Lose Tony eating second helping. Doesn’t make him look good in a food shortage” and “Is there any tourism still available?” More worrisome, there were demands for more clarity in the voice-over, more linear explanation, a neat sum-up at the end and generally less artistry in the storytelling. Eric, the editor, and I were horrified, fearing the network might succeed in gutting our show. But Tony stepped in and pushed back, fiercely defending the cut.
“This episode is Emmy material. This is not Frontline. We want impressionistic… we are showing—not telling. This is not polemic. There is no happy conclusion or any conclusion to be reached that won’t be out of date by airtime.”
Tony ultimately prevailed, and he was right: the show won Zach and Todd a well-deserved Emmy for cinematography. It also set a precedent that raising the bar sometimes required traveling to more challenging locations. It also required knowing how and when to push back against the powers that be.
If I wasn’t in the field shooting an episode or sleeping for a week straight when I got back home, you could probably find me working with the editors. I was always intimately involved in my edits; I had to be. The way I looked at it, if the show got left on the edit room floor, it didn’t matter how hard we worked in the field. Edits may not have been as glamorous as the shoots, but they were just as high stakes and far more satisfying. In a strange way, through the edit I’d actually realize I had been there and sort of vicariously enjoy the trip in a way I hadn’t been able to while filming. Television production—especially with Tony—was an “ends justifies the means” operation. It might have been the most horrible, painful, humiliating, awful shoot, but if it was a spectacular edit—a great end product—almost everything bad that happened in the field was forgotten.
Successfully guiding a show through the edit required long days screening raw footage, pulling sound bites, doing additional research, and creative collaboration with the editor. The real storytelling happened in the edit room. I always strived to add bells and whistles, make something that was beautiful, emotional, honest, or even just special to me personally. The ultimate goal was, of course, making a good show, and Tony was the ultimate judge of success.
The edit was the part of the creative process Tony enjoyed the most. Tony was as ingenious as he was demanding, and his feedback could be scorching.
“Rule one? Show, don’t tell! It’s intro to storytelling, for fuck’s sake!” Tony said. “This cut has too much blah blah like a fucking museum tour when it should be a dynamic, breathtaking visual demonstration. Why are we not showing Zach’s gaze? I know we have the footage!”
Tony was a big believer in the power of point of view. Finding people with a good point of view for Tony to interact with on camera allowed us to look at a place through someone else’s eyes. It granted Tony and the show an insider’s access and was part of the magic recipe. Usually, Tony’s sidekick of choice was a chef returning to his ancestral homeland for the first time, or traveling Eastern Europe with Zamir. But this time we were visiting southern Spain with Zach, our director of photography. In a strange breaking-the-fourth-wall twist, Zach was both behind and in front of the camera with Tony, and apparently Jesse and I were ruining it in the edit.
“What is this show about?” Tony continued. “Whose point of view are we telling it from? Answer: We are telling the story from Zach—a cinematographer’s point of view. What would Zach see? Make it beautiful, the way a cinematographer would see the world. Let the images do the talking. Make the ending ‘about something,’ a reminder, visually, of who is looking. Unfuck this edit and make it as excellent as it can be and should be.”
Tony set a high bar. He asked a lot of everyone who worked on the show, and specifically the editors. They were an amazingly talented bunch held to a standard that would probably be considered unattainable or even abusive on other shows. Editors might have had the hardest job on the team, as a huge share of the pressure to constantly reinvent and elevate the show fell on their shoulders.
My professional experience was pretty much limited to making shows with Tony, but I had a dim understanding that our post-production workflow was a little unusual. We had nine weeks to edit each episode, which was apparently a lot compared to the industry standard of four and a half weeks. And nine weeks was based on everything going according to plan. Nothing ever went according to plan.
Edits would continue on at roughly $10,000 a week until Tony was satisfied the episode was right, budget be damned. Looking back, I knew I was lucky, but I don’t think I realized just how spoiled I was to work on a show where quality not only came first, but it was also pretty much the only concern.
But nothing good comes easy, and navigating the potential editorial pitfalls was a long and bumpy road. Despite Tony’s unique voice and style permeating every frame, he most often couldn’t offer much in the way of specific direction until he saw the all-important first cut (our initial attempt to make sense of the sixty to eighty hours of raw footage). Tony’s opinion of an episode would never recover from a bad first impression, so the more polished, the better. The editor would basically have to cut a refined first pass of the entire episode, even though it was almost inevitably going to be redone.
If Tony didn’t like how an edit was going, he’d refuse to write the voice-over script. I should really say rewrite the script, as it was up to the editors or me to write the initial scratch narration. Tony’s voice-over made up the literal backbone of the shows, and his rewrites essentially served as the seal of approval. But even if Tony liked a cut, he often didn’t write to what had been edited or even the scratch voice-over script he’d been given. Tony wrote what he wanted to write. This meant reverse engineering the cut to fit what Tony provided was all but inevitable.
It was an admittedly inefficient backward workflow, but it was what Tony needed and therefore just the way things were done. It was also demoralizing for editorial department morale.
Tony, who wasn’t the type to take prisoners, often seemed to have little if any sympathy for the editor’s perspective. Part of the issue certainly stemmed from Tony being naturally suspicious of “pale, pasty-face types that actually choose to sit alone locked in a dark room in front of an editing board all day watching other people do things.”
Since I moved through the production as well as the post-production worlds, I felt like I understood both sides, and I’d learned it was best to wear kid gloves when offering my edit feedback. Even more important was softening how Tony felt whenever possible. If he didn’t like the way a cut was going, if he found himself unimpressed with the artistry in the storytelling? Well, let’s just say Tony’s feedback was an art form in and of itself. My inbox contains countless three a.m. emails that go something like this:
The end of the show is turgid and saccharine and schmaltzy to a fault. it’s painfully, sophomorically WAY WAY WAY over the top. Currently the show is a pointlessly arty mish mosh of mixed metaphors. Don’t bludgeon the obvious references/homage into the ground for fuck’s sake. Please! It’s bathos-soaked and delivered at the end of a meat mallet. So some SERIOUS surgery on Act Six. It utterly blows. As is its conventional season two, and the MUSIC is abominable—or inappropriate throughout. It sounds like an 80s Tom Cruise film. PLEASE. Un-fuck this show.
Sent from my iPad
But for all his bluster, Tony was kind of a softie at heart and didn’t relish confrontation. Unfortunately for everyone, one of these emails inadvertently made it to McIndio, the editor of the show with which Tony was displeased. Faced with the realization that his feedback had pushed McIndio to the verge of a mental breakdown, Tony invited him along on the Thailand shoot by way of apologizing.
“Jeez, these freaking editors,” Tony said. “We need to get them out in the sunshine, thicken their skin, and it’ll also be good for creativity.”
Unfortunately, the “Editor Outreach Program” didn’t go quite as expected. Already well out of his comfort zone by the time he touched down in Bangkok, on the van ride to the hotel, McIndio spasmodically swatted at imaginary mosquitos while simultaneously tabulating and cross-referencing numbers and letters on license plates, convinced he was seeing patterns. Unfortunately, the situation pretty much deteriorated from there. “It was like a haunting,” Tony said. “By the end of the shoot, he was walking around in concentric circles arguing with himself about prime numbers. Fuck me. Some people are better off left in their cage.”
Tony terminated the outreach program as well as most direct contact with the editorial staff, leaving that task to people like me. However, as much as Tony couldn’t sympathize with the editor mindset, he also understood they held the keys to the many “strange and terrible tools” of filmmaking. Tony was fascinated by and dependent on whatever idiosyncratic brain chemistry made editors expert at communicating through cuts, sound design, and music rather than words, and as such, he had a great deal of respect for what they could do.
And it was impressive. The ability to shape the vast amount of raw footage into a cohesive narrative as well as put up with Tony without going “McIndio” required near superhuman abilities. Take for example Hunter, who joined the ranks shortly before the move to CNN. Hunter’s first cuts somehow looked like finished shows, always cinematic, and he had a magic ability to present complicated and difficult subject matter both clearly and without being heavyhanded. He was low-key, low maintenance, and strangely normal for an editor. Hunter was also an absolute genius.
Knowing how much Tony hated sum-ups, Hunter had the idea to end our Laos episode with no talking or voice-over. It should be pointed out just how radical an idea this was. Network television observes near religious adherence to a belief that the audience needs a constant and reassuring voice reminding them of what they saw, what they were seeing currently, as well as what was coming up next. This holds especially true for the end of the show, where there was typically a relentless push for Tony to deliver some sort of satisfying platitude.
But Hunter pulled it off. No talking, no voice-over for five and a half minutes, just natural sound and music over footage of Tony at a local festival. Colorful paper lantern dragons along with countless floating candles are set adrift, transforming the entire Mekong River into an ethereal blaze of light as the soundtrack builds to a crescendo. It was beautiful and a record time without speaking, a true high-water mark.
“My god, he’s some kind of wunderkind,” Tony said. “Nobody’s that perfect. He must murder hookers in his basement to vent his rage, it’s the only logical explanation. Make sure Hunter doesn’t get busted. He’s too valuable to go to prison.”
A NATURAL-BORN EXAGGERATOR WITH A superb taste for the absurd, Tony was the ultimate storyteller. Tony’s way of looking at the world, his ability to transform the bland everyday into a fantastic reinterpretation of reality, only seemed to add more meaning and truth to the original event.
“Both versions of the scene will begin with the same shots of the train approaching the station. Keep my version straightforward, about food—with a passing reference to the hungry kids,” Tony said, talking a mile a minute, pausing only to light a cigarette. “We want to leave almost no hint of how badly things spun out of control in my version, skim over the ugliness and culpability and shame and spare the viewer the awkwardness we felt.”
Trying to focus over the sound of gunshots in the background, I struggled to keep up, scribbling down Tony’s edit direction in my notebook. We were standing in a modest backyard in the Hezbollah-controlled Dahieh suburb of Beirut, waiting for the cameras to finish setting up a family meal scene. As was often the case, while shooting one show, I’d be overseeing another through the post-production process. And, as was also common, the edit—in this case Madagascar—had hit a speed bump.
“I’m sorry, I’m still just having trouble understanding the justification for multiple versions of the food riot,” I said.
Tony rolled his eyes and sighed. “So, to clarify, the idea is at the end of the show, I ask Darren how he would tell what happened on the train. We then cut back to the train for Darren’s version, which this time includes the starving children stripping me of my food. Much bleaker. Much less flattering. Unsparing. Dark. Brutal. Frightening even. Darren’s version shows the reality on the ground in all its buzzkill awfulness.”
The Darren Tony was referring to was Darren Aronofsky, director of such films as Requiem f
or a Dream, Pi, Black Swan, and The Wrestler, among others. He’d accompanied us to Madagascar, the island nation off the southeast tip of Africa that most people associate with animated lemurs. However, environmental apocalypse, crushing poverty, and human suffering were more representative of what I saw. That speed bump in the edit revolved around what we’d assumed would be a routine food stop while on a scenic train ride to the coast.
A couple hours into the trip, our train stopped at an isolated jungle station. Cameras rolled as Tony and Darren disembarked in search of food, and much to everyone’s surprise the situation quickly began to spiral out of control. What started with a large crowd of local village children shouting and fighting over scraps of food, spare change, and even plastic recyclables soon devolved into a state of anarchy. The children slammed their fists against the train in what appeared to be acts of violent begging. The few tourists on board tossed empty bottles out of the window in fear. There was the sound of crying among the screaming. The samosas we’d arranged for Darren and Tony to eat were ripped from their hands by the mob of hungry kids, and we had to retreat to the train. The desperation and poverty had been heartbreaking, the whole thing a dramatic and deeply unsettling reality check.
“Darren’s version ends with the two of us sitting in stunned silence on the train afterward,” Tony said. “The contrast between our versions should be shocking.”
“Yeah… but I’m worried the multiple perspective pulls us out of the moment,” I said. “Doesn’t it kind of needlessly distract from the very serious issues we bring up in the show and instead call attention to us?”