The editor

William Friedkin

that I didn't have the first part. I never bothered to shoot the detail that was protecting the President of the United States. I sort of took that for granted in my own mind and then realized in the cutting room that we didn't have it, so we went out and shot it as a kind of aftermath, but a prologue to the film. I also remember saying to Jack Hues and Nick Feldman, who are the group Wang Chung,

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William Friedkin

when the cut is going to come and often where it's going to be. You often know what the next shot is because the editor and the director have established a cutting pattern that becomes boring and predictable. And I perceived a long time ago that a director whose work I really admired, the Italian neorealist, I guess you'd call him, Michelangelo Antonioni, his films used to

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William Friedkin

a scene and then move on. Now, it's impossible not to repeat a shot occasionally, often not by design, often because something didn't work. You get in the cutting room and you find, well, I've got to repeat a shot. But in the films of like Antonioni and in films that I've made, there might be 60 or 70 shots without a repeat.

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Tim Lucas

Hello, I'm Tim Lucas, film critic and editor of Video Watchdog magazine. In December 1981 and March 1982, it was my privilege to be the only journalist allowed to visit the set of Videodrome, whose production I covered for Cinefantastique magazine. My research ultimately took the form of a book on the making of David Cronenberg's film, which initiated Centipede Press's studies in the horror film series in 2008. I'm here to share my insights about the film, as well as some memories of the time I spent on set.

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Tim Lucas

But let's take a moment to admire the production design of Carol Spier, who is working here like DP Mark Irwin and editor Ron Sanders on her third Cronenberg picture. The glass blocks suggest television screens and the open slats of the Venetian blinds emitting blue light evoke the resolution lines that were present on all analog TV picture tubes. You may note in this scene that Max's preferred format is Betamax, which video insiders of the day considered a far superior format to VHS.

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Tim Lucas

To abbreviate the shot to a length the MPAA considered acceptable, Cronenberg and editor Ron Sanders inserted a dissolve that allowed the shot to get to the point prematurely.

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We had filmed a scene in the jacuzzi of the record plant, and we came back. We didn't use the jacuzzi, but we used this office because it had a lot of gold records. Tony Hendra went back to the lampoon, and he's written a number of books, and then briefly was the editor of Spy magazine. I had a one-man show at Lincoln Center for which he took out an ad in the New York Times that said he was the creator of Spinal Tap. It was an oversight. It was strictly an oversight. No, it wasn't a one-man show. It was a Ronald Reagan operetta. A one-man lawsuit.

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Robert Leighton was the editor who's obviously gone on to do a lot of pictures. The final version, the film veered back and forth before it got to this point. And following this scene, there was another scene that took place just between David and Nigel after the smoke had cleared. And it's the two of them kind of like talking about old times and talking about what's the problem in here and everything. It was just, it was too much. But I think out of that...

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We wanted to avoid that Bob Hope movie thing where Reynolds... These aren't outtakes. These are all interviews, as you notice. It was a thing in the 70s that was happening in the mid-70s with Burt Reynolds movies where it was just him and Dom DeLuise making each other laugh. We tried to avoid that. Yeah, the end of Hardly Working had that, too. Kent Beyda, the assistant film editor, is a big film editor now as well. Kent Beyda. Cary Gleiberman, the Gleib. That's right. That's the man you shot in Roma 79. Don Newman and Erwin Mucas, as you called him.

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Paul Davis

who conceived and created a lot of the sounds that you hear in this film. And then Jerry Humphries, who was a legendary sound recording editor. They took an elephant trump and played it backwards and added reverb. That sound that you hear right there is pigs from a distance. But the main howl was an elephant.

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Paul Davis

A little trivia for you. The young lady in the background with the two kids, that's George Folsey's wife and kids. And George Folsey was the producer on the movie. Who John met as an editor. He met him when he was making Schlock. He was introduced to him by a publicist called Sol Kahn, who worked on Kelly's Heroes. And John came back to the U.S.,

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Paul Davis

who went on to become the editor of UK Penthouse magazine. And has a very successful actor in her own family, her son, Tyger Drew-Honey, from Outnumbered. The genius of this sequence is the fact that

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I'm Frank Morriss. I'm the editor. Lucky enough to be the editor of this movie. It's a very interesting picture because though a lot of people... ...thought it was science fiction... ...we always looked at it as science fact. And so the message here is mostly true. And many of the things that are not quite true... ...were not quite true at the time... ...such things that we'll run into as "whisper mode" and so on. And yet, a lot of these innovative things... ...weren't actually happening at the time. Reiss. Maloney. The Los Angeles helicopter squad... ...is one of the best in the country... ...and it's the only way that they're able to cover this huge area of Los Angeles. They're up in the air almost 20 hours a day. Where we're shooting right here is a brand-new facility... ...that they had not moved into, and they let us use it.

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And actually, when we did mix the sound... ...I was working on another film called WarGames at the time... ...and had to be shooting on that film. So I would come by late at night to the mixing stage... ...and Frank was working there. Frank had his own opinions about this music. Do you remember? - Oh, yeah. It wasn't something that I think you were crazy about. It was not your favourite-- Well, Frank has been a music editor for a lot of his life... ...before he became a film editor. So he has very strong... ...powerful opinions on music. Well, I think Arthur did a terrific job on this... ...but we lost a lot of it due to the fact that it didn't quite work... ...with the action, or whatever and... Or it just didn't fit the character of the movie. Two or three cues is all it was. - Yeah.

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Let's see what's on HBO tonight. Now, this movie is filmed in widescreen. Sometimes that's called Cinemascope, or anamorphic. And 35 mm film is not wide enough to contain this frame. It wouldn't fit. So Panavision and some other people... ...invented lenses that actually take this image that you're looking at... ...and squeeze it to the width of a 35 mm frame... ...which is almost half as wide as what you're looking at. If you hold up a piece of anamorphic film to the light and look at it... ...all of these guys would be tall... ...and skinny and mushed together. The whole image would suddenly get all squinched. When you project the image, then you have to have a similar lens... ...that unsqueezes the image. But this was an effort to make big, widescreen movies that-- Not necessarily in Cinerama or techniques like that... ...but that you could make on ordinary film, and have an experience that was... ...different from what you're seeing on television. It had a different aspect ratio, real wide screen. And the challenges of shooting it are quite interesting... ...because those lenses require a lot more light... ...and give you a lot less depth of focus. So you're always kind of struggling with it. It's a very special kind of look that I actually prefer. And it gives you some real challenges in composition and so on. But you don't see too many pictures shot in anamorphic nowadays. They have another process called Super 35... ...that isn't quite so difficult to shoot. I think, Frank, we did Bird on a Wire in Super 35. Right. Well, from the standpoint of coverage in this movie... ...it was an editor's tour de force almost. It was covered so well. You mean, in terms of you having the footage that you needed. Yeah. We had very, very, very few problems. Well, thank goodness we had enough time to shoot this movie... ...so that we could get the coverage that we needed... ...because it was so tricky to tell this story along the way.

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Jim Piddock

You may feel that, to your taste, the mood has already been sufficiently set, but, of course, it is a matter of taste, and the editor of the picture apparently thought that we could use a little more mood-setting, and, well, he's the professional, so let us defer. Let's appreciate his art. Every cut, I think, well judged, a frame earlier or later, here or there, and quite a different mood, but this is the mood, so let's revel in his art.

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Jim Piddock

Nope, no, we've got some warm light, which I think for a nighttime scene is rather the better choice. Oh, and we're back to cold again, back to cold light. So mixing again, mixing and matching. Oh, yes, I'm not sure I like that jump in, but that's the editor's art, isn't it? And we are not he. No, nor he.

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Jim Piddock

This doorway here is not actually at the same location as the bar with the cash register. Through the magic of the editor's art, we think the two are in the same place, one just by the other. But in fact, this door was in an econo lodge right across town, but it has a nice dusty rug in front of it that the filmmakers simply fell in love with. So they shot that bit at the econo lodge, and then through the magic of editing, they implied that the doorway was part of our bar, and they got that lovely dust effect. And who would know?

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You should have somebody write it down, you know. We found out about halfway into this picture that that was somebody's job. Because somebody can't tell you. I think three was good. You know what they do? They put like a circle around the number. Amazing. And then you go back. You know, because we found out in the cutting room that the ones with the circles were pretty good. I heard Coppola did that on Ghostbusters. It worked great. And he did a good job. Was that the second one? Two and a half went much faster after we knew what those damn circles were. I know. There's something I ought to tell you. No. No need to tell me anything. What's in the past...

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Remember they tried to build some baseball launcher thing? The ex-German rocket scientists we had in the effects department. That thing never worked. Probably just threw them up in the air. Is that the one we labeled the pigeon shooter? The pigeon shooter, yeah. That scared some people. They thought we were actually going to shoot pigeons with it. Those were the days, huh? Oh, you remember this? We rehearsed this. Well, do you remember we came in with all the dailies for this and the editor said, what's a rundown? Oh, yeah. It's like, uh-oh.

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I like that editor. Yeah. I know this is hard to believe, but apparently the umpires have got Crescione in a rundown. Who's Crescione? Is that another one of your high school people? No, I think that was... I don't know who that was. Your name's all friends? One of the wardrobe people's friends. Or was it the accountant or somebody? Yeah, Tony Crescione. No, this is...

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Peter Greenaway

and the other extreme, which is to do with what Picasso would say, painting what you imagine rather than what you see. I would have found, as I suspect many other people would be, this is a rather insular, elitist academic persuasion, but I found it of sufficient interest to wish to somehow want to debate it in the wider circle, and since I had no intention of continuing to be a documentary filmmaker, film editor,

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Peter Greenaway

and I'm determined to confront that eventuality well protected. And who will accuse you? As a filmmaker and as a film editor, in the years before this film was manufactured, I had developed for myself, I suppose, a personal style which often consisted of massive over-editing. So often the shots were extremely short and the whole scenic appearance of the manufacturer of the film would be very quick and frenetic. But I was learning to

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And the other person that should be mentioned here is Rick Shaine, the editor, who did a magnificent job cutting this film. Has there been any background in the text about Freddy Krueger at this point? Uh, no. No. What do you mean, in the text? I mean, who he was and...

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to harass us, not to be in touch with it. What was their response after they saw the first cut that you did? The first cut, the editor's cut, when I first arrived, they showed it to me and Bob turned around and looked at me and says, well, do you think we have a film here at all? I'll never forget that. That's a nice vote of confidence. And then he told me that he wanted a complete cut in two weeks. I think we ultimately did it in five weeks.

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and funnier looking Rodriguez brother. The one with the hairnet. Right. Fox Harris, who is the first character that we see in the film. Is no longer with us. Is no longer with us. But I met Fox Harris when I and Nancy Richardson, the editor, were guards or caretakers at the actor's studio in Los Angeles.

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And Dennis Dolan, who was the editor, said, I really think you've got to pay off the death of Archie because otherwise there's something missing here. And it was really Dennis that came up with the idea that we would do this whole new ending to this scene where they open the trunk the whole way and Archie gets it. Yeah, well, at this point you were searching for this ending and you kind of didn't know what you were shooting, so it was all starting to get magic. You can almost see the stars. Oh, shut up.

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In fact, even the editing I had no control over. I wasn't allowed near the editing rooms. And I didn't know what I got until I got it. Right, that's very surprising. Why was that? Why were you not invited to the edit? Why were you not part of the edit? Well, the editor said, you know, you don't need to be here, George. On Rawhead, I insisted on being in the editing room.

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But yeah, so there was lots of things I had no control over. I presume the editor himself would not have been the person making the decision that you should be there. No, he was. I think it was him. Oh, was it? It wasn't the producers, I don't think. He said, I just want to get on with it, George, and deliver to you when it's finished. Right. I mean, did you have notes at the end?

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Eleanor Bergstein

That absolutely happened, the crashing of the head. That was totally accidental, and we left it in. Now this, we had a wonderful editor, Peter Frank, but we were in such a short schedule, but we also had Girish Bhargava doing digital editing of our dance things, and it was Girish Bhargava who did this montage and did the finale. Girish Bhargava had worked with Emile on other dance things and did a brilliant, wonderful job on it, and I'll show you in a minute.

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Eleanor Bergstein

did this fabulous job for us and we changed it because he was a video editor and Peter was editing on film we had to change it back into film and it was a mathematical conversion and Emile and I kept saying it's wrong and people kept saying to us no no the numbers work it's right and we knew in our hearts that it was wrong and finally we got to this scene where Patrick jumped down and jumped up again without his feet hitting the floor

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Gary Goddard

Ann Coates, editor of many films, Lawrence of Arabia among them. Richard Edlund had recently left the Lucas organization. We were able to bring him on to handle the effects. Bill Stout came on board as a production designer and did a fantastic job.

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Gary Goddard

You didn't have to do that. It isn't even in the box. She had a great quality about her, and she did a great job. Shooting this whole movie, by the way, it was great. This whole company, Courtney and Chelsea and Ann Coates, the editor, it was more like a family, and it was almost like a wonderful kind of magical summer that we spent together making this movie. I think we all had a great time. It was a lot of work, and it was a lot of long nights. Half this movie was night shoots, which we'll get into later.

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This montage, remember, was one of the first things Seth Flaum, who became an editor that I worked with for the rest of my movies, cut. Bud Smith was the lead editor, a famous editor, who did The Exorcist and a lot of big movies with Billy Friedkin, was the lead editor on this movie, and, you know, just an absolute genius, as far as I'm concerned. Seth was an apprentice or an assistant, and he and I would squirrel away working on things like this montage, and I thought he did such a good job, that I ended up doing the next five, six movies with him after this.

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Montages are funny, 'cause when you get them cut together, lots of times, they save your butt. They look like they're designed, but... At least, Seth, my editor, in this case, saved my butt, because it wasn't designed as well as it looks.

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go out into the street. Come along, come along. Over here. The editor put on this nice car squeal.

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Bill Paxton

I think editorially it's a fun moment. I like the build. I didn't do any editing directly on this film. Because it's film-based editing, with rapid cutting, I thought it had really good energy. You see that cutting now with the Avid cos you don't have to make each splice manually. This is the Alamo told with six people. So the sentry guns are the equivalent of the first couple of attacks. I think it's great foreboding. It's just coming at them like a wave. If these guns don't stop them, they're screwed. I think it works pretty well, but the studio talked me into taking it out. So I'm happy to see it restored in this extended version. Ray Lovejoy was our editor and it was a tremendous responsibility. And this is before you had all of the Avid and Lightworks and any kind of digital editing. There was so much film and we had a pretty short postproduction schedule and he did just a tremendous job. I hired Ray for one simple reason - cos he had worked with Stanley Kubrick. It took him a while to really get what I was trying to do with this movie. A lot of his early cuts I didn't really care for. It's not that there was ever any tension between us. I just didn't feel I was getting what I wanted. Ray was getting really frustrated. I remember toward the end he cut the alien queen battle, the power loader queen battle at the end of the film. He was really nervous, cos he hadn't given me the action cutting that I wanted and I'd had to mess with it a lot and there was another editor who was cutting some stuff, and I was liking his action cutting better than Ray's. Ray is just a dear guy and a really good editor, but he was struggling with it. SO, finally, he just grabbed all the film, locked himself in his room, said "Don't bother me." Not mean or anything, but "I just gotta do this." And he went in and he cut the entire last eight minutes of the picture. He showed it to me very nervously. He cut in a day or two. He showed it to me very nervously and I watched the whole thing and I said "It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Don't change anything." And that was that. He felt like it was such a huge victory because he had actually got it. He had mastered the style for the film. Sigourney, she's very liberal politically and despised the idea of any kind of guns or anything, and tried to talk me out of them having weapons. I said "They're marines. They'd have weapons." She said "Do I have to carry a weapon?" I said "Yes." She said "Why?" I said "Because it's not Sigourney Weaver in the film. It's Ripley. And Ripley wants to survive." So I took her out shooting a Thompson machine gun, out behind the studio, and she fired off a 50-round magazine from the hip. And then she looked up at me with this sly grin and said "That's really fun." Another liberal bites the dust. There were a few things she asked if she could do when we had our first meeting. She wanted to die in the film, she wanted to not use guns and she wanted to make love to the alien. And between the third and fourth film she got to do all of those things. But fortunately for this film, I said no to all of them, even though I was petrified. I thought she'd bolt from the project, but she didn't. She had a lot of good ideas. But she did have certain specific things she thought should be done in the Aven mythos. When she got to a position of power on the later films, she made that happen. This scene coming up with Ripley and Newt, which is the attack of the facehuggers, was a really tough scene to orchestrate, prepare for, as far as we think we're now back 16 or 17 years. So we don't have any kind of digital animation and there's not gonna be any stop-motion animation, and these facehuggers have gotta come to life, so we created I think a half dozen different facehuggers that would do different things to create the performance coming up, including our hero, which had completely articulated hands, multiple cables that had to be controlled by six puppeteers for one facehugger. We had one that would run across the floor. We called him our pull toy. We had stunt facehuggers that we could throw to hit the wall. We had actually two different heroes. There's the one that crawls up over the counter coming at Newt. And then a completely articulated one with tongue and fingers that Ripley would fight off with all of the cables down her arms through the whole sequence. And there's so much that happens in that. You think of the facehugger that's coming after them, and multiple to create that one scene.

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Outside? Yeah. Come on. I'm not suggesting the worst will happen. You know, this is a kind of bureau chief, a kind of editor who really existed in the time. There used to be a lot of them were Irishmen with big hearts and who had this feeling of family for the people who worked for them.

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John McTiernan

While I was temp-tracking the movie, we used some Aaron Copland. I guess I have since learned the name of the pieces, Fanfare for the Common Man. It just, it just got introduced there. And Alan Silvestri later on parodied it beautifully. And we... It's playing in the background here. In the cutting room we call it Fanfare for the Common Mercenary.

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suspicious that the movie would be over. Yeah, I got a big argument with the editor, Mr. Frank J. Urioste, who's a great editor, and I just said, look, you gotta go longer. You gotta go 15 seconds and pull the track out. Like, there should be no sound. And he looked at me in horror, like, you can't do that. So they didn't, the chickens. In fact, we chickened out a little bit. We compromised, and I think we should have added five seconds, yes. And taken the track out. Yes.

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And you had two editors on the film, right? That's why I don't remember Post. They did an interview with me. They asked me on Post. It's funny. I barely remember Post. It's because we were still shooting blob bits, second and third unit. While you were back here, right? Yeah, while I was editing. It was crazy. Because you worked with Terry again from Nightmare 3, right? And then you had another addition. If you don't mind my asking, was the use of an additional editor just for expedience? Yes.

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