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 Sam O'Steen,Bobbie O'Steen | 249 pages | 25 Jan 2002 | Michael Wiese Productions | 9780941188371 | English | Seattle, United States Cutters' Way: The Mysterious Art of Film Editing - Bright Lights Film Journal 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.