Forty-Five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies Free

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FREE CUT TO THE CHASE: FORTY-FIVE YEARS OF EDITING AMERICAS FAVOURITE MOVIES PDF

The lowest-priced brand-new, unused, unopened, undamaged item in its original packaging where packaging is applicable. Packaging should be the same as what is found in a retail store, unless the item is handmade or was packaged by the manufacturer in non-retail packaging, such as an unprinted box or plastic bag. See details for additional description. What does this price mean? This is the price excluding postage and handling fees a seller has provided at which the same item, or one that is nearly identical to it, is being offered for sale or has been offered for sale in the recent past. The price may be the seller's own price elsewhere or another seller's price. The "off" amount and percentage simply signifies the calculated difference between the seller-provided price for the item elsewhere and the seller's price on eBay. Skip to main content. About this product. Last one! Stock photo. Brand new: Lowest price The lowest-priced brand-new, unused, unopened, undamaged Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies in its original packaging where packaging is applicable. See all 7 brand new listings. Buy It Now. Add to cart. In this behind the scenes look at Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies art of editing, O'Steen talks candidly about working and playing with Hollywood's biggest directors and stars. It is a perfect combination of juicy, never-before-told gossip and meaningful tips on the art of film editing - by one of Hollywood's legendary behind-the-scenes characters. Sam O'Steen who lived on both coasts, edited dozens of awarded-winning films, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? Successful screenwriter and editor who lives in New York. Show more Show less. Any condition Any condition. Last one Free postage. See all 8 - All listings for this product. No ratings or reviews yet. Be the first to write a review. Peterson Paperback 4. Van der Kolk Paperback, 4. Save on Non-Fiction Books Trending price is based on prices over last 90 days. You may also like. This item doesn't belong on this page. Best Film Editing Sequences

The answer is fairly obvious, right? Francis Ford Coppola, the writer and director. An astute observer might also point Cut to the Chase: Forty- five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies that they all feature Robert Duvall at some point or another. Okay, but what if I add three more to the original three? Ripley Cold Mountain Big-budget films by directors of Italian descent, you might think, or stories of crime and war. A good guess, but no. Need a hint? Any clearer? Few people bother to follow the careers of film editors, so arcane and unexciting does their artistry seem. Some people might not see that as a coincidence. Of the scores of technicians who labor on any given movie production, from the lowliest intern to the executive producer, the editor is probably the most underappreciated. Only grips and gaffers are less well known to the general public. There is an old saw in Hollywood that a film is written three times: first, when the screenwriter puts it to paper; second, when the film is shot; and, finally, when it is edited. Since the cutting room is the last stop on this circuitous journey, the editor, in effect, has the last word on the completed film. She can save the picture or ruin it, alter it completely or leave it fairly well alone; in any case, her fingerprints will be all over it. And yet, as far as most people are concerned, the editor might as well be invisible. Tally up a list of all the film editors you can think of, as many names as you can remember off the top of your head. Now directors. See my point? In part, this is simply the nature of the art: good editing is seamless, allowing the viewer to slip into the world of the film unawares, as if into a dream. We stop and take note of the editing only when it is clumsy or jarring. They Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies to be retiring creatures, fond of cool, dark places, preferring quiet anonymity to the glare of the spotlight. He won the Academy Award that year. Ralph Rosenblum, in his book on film editing, described the typical editor thus:. When movies were still cut on film, editors plowed through literally miles of footage to extract a two-hour finished product. The average feature-length film generates anywhere from twenty to forty hours of raw footage. But in the editing room, astronomical numbers are simply part of the game. One of the most terrifying facets of editing, as in chess, is the mind- numbing infinity of possibilities before you at any given moment. Hours, even days, can be wasted simply because you decide to switch out a single shot in a two-minute-long scene. It turns out, in fact, that this madness can be quantified, in a rather curious-looking mathematical formula:. To decipher this quaint little equation, you must know that C is the minimum number of ways a particular scene can be edited; e is the transcendental constant 2. The factorial of 7, for instance, is 1x2x3x4x5x6x7, or 5, This means that a scene of a mere twenty-five shots, which is not very many, hardly unusual for a feature film, can be edited in approximately 39,,,, different ways. If those numbers were miles, that would be about twenty-five laps around the observable universe. Since some action scenes have as many as shots, that means the number of possibilities available to the editor would be a number so vast it could blacken an entire page with zeros. The first filmmakers faced no such problems. In the dawn of cinema, movies reached the screen uncut. A simple shot of a train entering a station or a group of laborers pouring out of a factory was thrilling enough to pack theaters. Enter Edwin S. Porter, one of the pioneers who helped transform film from a mere recording medium into a dramatic art form. Entire scenes would be shot in one take, without close-ups. Among other difficulties, this meant that if a single thing went wrong in a lengthy scene, the entire scene would have to be reshot. In The Life of an American Firemanhe cuts from a hand pulling a fire alarm to the firemen in the station springing into action. The curiosity for viewers today is that Porter chose to portray the dramatic crescendo twice, first from the point of view of a woman as she is rescued Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies a burning building and then, starting from scratch, from the point of view of the firemen coming to save her. Yet he had a cunning talent for juxtaposition. How is it that we accept such a violent transition — whether it be from a wide shot to a close-up, from Paris to the Sahara desert, or from the seventeenth century to the present — as a cut? Then suddenly, at the beginning of the twentieth century, human beings were confronted with something else — edited film. Murch speculates that it was dreams. The first person to truly discover this cinematic language was D. Griffith, who was to early cinema what Jane Austen was to the English novel. He saw what Porter failed to see in The Life of an American Fireman : that you could crosscut between different points of view in a scene to create suspense. Perhaps his most signal technique, for which he is still remembered today, is the accelerated pace of cutting that he used during moments of heightened tension, as in The Lonely VillaThe Lonedale Operatorand The Birth of a Nationrapidly cutting between heroes and villains during chases and rescues. In this manner, he showed that, with some clever editing, he could subjugate time to his demands, either drawing it out for suspense or speeding it up for sudden denouement. Likewise, he dispensed with the custom, so reminiscent of the stage, of beginning a scene when a character enters a room, cutting instead at the moment of the important action, thereby accelerating the pace of the story. Not only did this last technique prove that simple Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies could simulate consciousness, it established a dividing line between screen acting and stage acting that still exists to this day. In a tight close-up, a good actor need only think a thought to express it, rather than histrionically projecting to the back rows of the theater. Early film cutting was a sometimes excruciating Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies. Editors viewed their movies in negative, making it difficult to tell one take from the next. Lacking any numbers on the film to guide them, they were forced to pore over millions of frames by hand, using minute alterations in the image to find their bearings. The essential tools of the trade consisted of a rewind bench, a magnifying glass, and an ordinary pair of scissors. The only way you could see the film in motion was to screen it, so editors took to pulling the film through their fingers to simulate movement. If they wanted three seconds of footage, they held the film to the tip of their nose and pulled it out to the length of their arm. If they wanted to view it in progress, they hauled it into the projection room and screened it, then carried it back to the editing table to get chopped up some more. All this changed with the invention of the Moviola in A chunky, frog-green machine with foot pedals to run the film and a four-inch spy hole to view it, the Moviola was the brainchild of Iwan Serrurier, a Dutch-born electrical engineer who designed the contraption on a whim, as a diversion from his job at the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in Pasadena. Then inSerrurier ran across an editor at Douglas Fairbanks Studios who suggested he adapt it as an editing table for the movie industry. It arrived just in time, too. With the coming of sound, there was no way an editor, no matter how sharp-eyed, could sync sound to silent lips. To accomplish this aural feat, the Moviola was simply fitted with an additional sprocket for the soundtrack Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies run on, making possible the explosion of talkies that burst from Hollywood, beginning in After that, the device changed little. It was hefty, ugly, noisy more than one editor compared the clanking it made to a sewing machine and, because of its tilted viewer, required the user to sit hunched over all day at a forty-five-degree angle. Yet it remained the mainstay of the film industry for the next seventy years, an unequivocal, if curious, testament to its durability, almost as if the Model T had persisted as the car-of-choice until the new millennium. See if you can guess what it is:. A well-to-do nebbishy Manhattanite kvetches about his neuroses in a series of loosely related vignettes. We are given a science fiction episode, titled The Invasion of the Elementa tour of the garden of Eden and the nine circles of Hell; fantasies involving Nazis and zombies; a scene where our hero plays basketball with Nietzsche, Kafka, and Kierkegaard; and flashbacks to some of his past romances. Sound familiar? Born in Brooklyn inRosenblum grew up only a few short miles from where Allen would be raised a decade later. A shy, unprepossessing boy, Rosenblum suffered from a debilitating stammer as a child that left him with few friends and often confined him to his own room. Perhaps for this reason, he was instinctively drawn, after high school, into a job for the Office of War Information OWIthe department in charge of churning out documentary films during World War ll. Beginning as a lowly messenger boy, Rosenblum finagled his way into the cutting room where he eventually apprenticed under filmmaker Robert Flaherty, assisting in cutting together his last picture, Louisiana Story After the war, with the demobilization of the OWI, Rosenblum found his first assignments as a full-fledged editor in the newly budding television industry. He quickly became known as one of the most efficient and dependable editors in the business, forming his own company to edit such programs as The Guy Lombardo ShowThe Patty Duke Showand commercials for Texaco, Buick, and Phillip Morris. His background in documentary filmmaking served him well. My apprenticeship with documentary filmmakers enabled me to face a picture. This was how he first met Woody Allen. Allen had just finished shooting his first film, the zany comedy Take the Money and Run There was one problem: no one thought it was funny, including Allen, who was in the process of watching his yet-to-be-established career already going down the drain. I knew they were talking about not releasing it. He immediately set to work reassembling the film. It was about me, my life, my thoughts, my ideas, my background. Rather than damaging the film, though, this ended up producing some of the funniest scenes in the movie. Since the movie began with Allen telling a joke to sum up his life, why not end the same way? That very day, as they drove to the studio, Allen began scribbling down ideas in the cab. A day later, the voice over was in the movie. I think every writer of comedy wants to send them out with something like that, to keep them laughing, extremely hysterical, for an hour and twenty-eight minutes, and then for the last 10 minutes turn it around and let them walk away with something they can chew on. This, it should be noted, is not the typical Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies between an editor and his director. Few directors today, at least ones who hold the prerogative of final cut as Allen did, have the nerve to make such extensive changes at the behest Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies a subordinate. It has not always been thus. Cut to the Chase: Forty-Five Years of Editing America's Favorite Movies by Sam O'Steen

This survey of the best examples of film editing stretches back to the earliest silent films. The very first films were called actualities - they were short, single-shot films Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies a stationary camera, viewing a scene a train pulling into a station, workers leaving a factory, etc. The art of film editing originally called "cutting" since it involved splicing together pieces of nitrate or celluloid first developed in the films of Parisian Georges Melies e. Porter e. Editing involved the manipulation of time and space to tell a story. The concept of montage aka collision editing or "putting together" -- rapidly juxtaposing various shots or sequencesoften conflicting images, in order to evoke a mood, emotional response, or derive new meaning, etc. The word montage has also taken on the added meaning of a compressed sequence of narrative material, condensed in time. As cinema progressed, classic scenes of masterful film editing appeared, such as the following:. Many of the most memorable film-editing sequences are highlighted in this multi-part tribute to one of the least understood of the cinema's technical arts. To learn more about the art of film editing, it's also essential to know some of the technical terminology, i. See this site's illustrated Film Terms Glossary. For further investigation, note the film titles below that were honored in as the 75 Best Edited Films of All-Time by the Motion Picture Editors Guild - many of which show up in Filmsite's own compilation arranged chronologically in this site's featured article. Raging Bull Thelma Schoonmaker 2. Citizen Kane Robert Wise 3. Greenberg, Walter Murch 4. All That Jazz Alan Heim 5. Bonnie And Clyde Dede Allen 6. The Godfather William H. Reynolds, Peter Zinner 7. Lawrence of Arabia Anne V. Coates 8. Jaws Verna Fields 9. The French Connection Gerald B. Greenberg The Conversation Richard Chew Psycho George Tomasini Memento Dody Dorn GoodFellas James Y. Kewi, Thelma Schoonmaker City of GodBraz. Pulp Fiction Sally Menke Dog Day Afternoon Dede Allen Raiders of the Lost Ark Michael Kahn The Wild Bunch Lou Lombardo Saving Private Ryan Michael Kahn The Matrix Zach Staenberg BreathlessFr. Fight Club James Haygood Requiem for a Dream Jay Rabinowitz Cabaret David Bretherton Chinatown Sam Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies Moulin Rouge! Seven SamuraiJp. Koichi Iwashita, Akira Kurosawa Casablanca Owen Marks Inception Lee Smith Rope William H. Zeigler Schindler's List Michael Kahn West Side Story Thomas Stanford. Leo Cattozzo The Shining Ray Lovejoy Days of Heaven Billy Weber Winters Vertigo George Tomasini Apollo 13 Daniel P. Hanley, Mike Hill Rear Window George Tomasini Vogel The Graduate Sam O'Steen 52b. Out of Sight Anne V. Coates High Noon Elmo Williams Black Hawk Down Pietro Scalia Harris Smith, Evan A. Lottman RashomonJp. Akira Kurosawa 61a. Sherlock Jr. Yokelson 61b. Speed John Wright Confidential Peter Honess The Sound of Music William H. Reynolds The Bourne Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies Christopher Rouse ZFr. Hugo Thelma Schoonmaker 69b. Midnight Cowboy Hugh A. Robertson 69c. Miller's Crossing Michael R. Miller Blade Runner Gillian L. Hutshing, Marsha Nakashima, Terry Rawlings Mulholland Dr. Rocky Scott Conrad, Richard Halsey North by Northwest George Tomasini. All rights reserved. Filmsite: written by Tim Dirks. Search for:. Facebook Twitter. Best Film Editing Sequences of All-Time: From the Silents to the Present Introduction Best Film Editing Sequences chronological order Introduction now Best Film Editing Sequences of All-Time: Film editing could be called 'film construction' and has been regarded by many as the 'invisible' art behind some of the greatest motion picture sequences of all time. Film editing is a skilled art - the selection and integration of a sequence of shots taken from thousands of feet of film to establish a structure, tempo, mood, or style. As cinema progressed, classic scenes of masterful film editing appeared, such as the following: the 'film-within-a-film' dream sequence of Sherlock Jr. West Side Story Thomas Stanford North by Northwest George Tomasini Best Film Editing Sequences chronological order Introduction now. Best Film Editing Sequences chronological order Introduction now. Best Film Editing Sequences of All-Time: Film editing could be called 'film construction' and has been regarded by many as the Cut to the Chase: Forty-five Years of Editing Americas Favourite Movies art behind some of the greatest motion picture sequences of all time.