An apparently unusual aspect to Hitchcock’s work method was his entrusting the viewing of dailies to editor George Tomasini and script supervisor Marshall Schlom. “He never went to look at this film,” Schlom asserted. “After dailies, George and I had to come back and tell him what we thought was right or wrong. He knew what he had.” Tomasini, having worked on The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, was one of the handful of collaborators in whose taste and instincts Hitchcock placed implicit confidence. That track record notwithstanding, Tomasini was only paid $11,000 to edit Psycho.
 

From "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho” by Stephen Rebello

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"I really enjoy editing the most... It’s the part I have the most control over, it’s the part I can deal with easiest. I can sit in my editing room and figure it out. I can solve problems that can’t get solved any other way. It always comes down to that in the end. It’s the part I rely on the most to save things, for better or worse. Everybody has their ace in the hole—mine’s editing."
 

From “The Making of Star Wars” by J.W. Rizler.

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One of the highlights from Criterion’s deluxe treatment of Blow Out is an hour long conversation between Brian De Palma and Noah Baumbach, filmed in October of 2010. Noah Baumbach isn’t the first filmmaker that springs to mind when thinking of appropriate De Palma pairings, but it’s fast apparent that he’s a genuine fan [he’s since curated a De Palma Suspense season at New York’s BAMCinématek.]

It’s always enjoyable listening to De Palma rail against conventions, clichés and trends, and this was no exception:

"When you start a movie with a helicopter shot of New York, is this an idea? Oh, we’re in Manhattan. Or these boring drive-ups, where the whole opening of the movie is a car driving up to a building. This is not an idea. Especially in the beginning of a movie where an audience is ready for anything. To waste that time with some boring geography shot mystifies me.

I’m always trying to figure out where the camera is in relation to the material. I’m always saying — and have been saying for years — that the position of the camera is just as important as what you’re photographing. A dirty word to me is coverage. Two shot. Over the shoulder. Stuff you see all the time that just drives me crazy because this, to me, is not directing. You have to think about where the camera is in relationship to the material."
 

The first time I saw De Palma interviewed was in 1998 when he sat down with Mark Cousins for the BBC’s Scene by Scene movie series. There he openly complained about modern movies, their lack of craft, the absence of cinema. He grumbled about the publicity machine and the lure of celebrity. He even stated that he’d never have agreed to the interview unless he was promoting a film [in this case it was Snake Eyes.] While the latter may be true for most directors and actors who are appearing on the television circuit, it’s rare for them to actually admit it. I managed to source an online version of the interview and re-watch it. Essential viewing, if only to watch De Palma squirm at Cousins’ verbose over-analysis and inappropriate moments of honesty. At one point, Cousins actually states, “[There’s] a sort of maverick quality in some of your work. Not all of it. I think you’ve made some terrible films. I hope it’s okay to say that.”

De Palma makes numerous memorable appearances throughout J.W. Rinzler's excellent book, "The Making of Star Wars". His reaction after George Lucas screened an early cut of the movie:

“What’s all this Force shit?! Where’s all the blood when they shoot people?”
 

Perhaps the definitive source for tales of De Palma is Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy, a no-holds-barred look at the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities. One of the most memorable moments in the book is when 2nd Unit Director Eric Schwab requests to shoot an establishing shot from the script — “The sky is a labyrinth of planes taking off and landing.” De Palma stated that the day he included the clichéd shot of an airplane landing in one of his movies was the day that he retired. A $100 bet was placed and Schwab began a 6 month process of attempting to film the perfect airplane landing with preparation that involved pinpointing the exact moment that the sun would align with the Empire State Building as Concorde landed on a runway.

Finally, a Blow Out related tale of brat pack rivalry as told by Quentin Tarantino:

The following test screening results from Criterion's website suggest that audiences weren’t quite ready for David Cronenberg’s betamax odyssey in 1983:

One of the featured film essays on that same page - Medium Cruel Reflections on Videodrome by Tim Lucas - mentions an interesting visual component that was present in the script but didn’t make it into the final film: video twitches. After using the Accumicon helmet, Max was to shake “video dandruff” from his head. People and objects were to twitch video throughout the story, to be achieved by dropping the resolution down to 525-lines with an electric neon-like effect:

[Michael] Lennick and his associate Lee Wilson prepared a reel of assorted video twitches and glitches for Cronenberg — “Everything from a basic white-noise glitch to complex little flashes with flecks of subliminal material in them,” Lennick says — which he did like. “It wasn’t the quality of their effects, per se,” Cronenberg explains, “but I didn’t have to see the actual twitches in context to know that they would have disrupted the film’s pacing. They didn’t gel with the surrounding footage — that’s the main reason they were cut. Michael was very disappointed, but it wouldn’t be true to portray this as him and me being destroyed by budget restrictions. I’ve not regretted their loss either.
 

Their omission no doubt makes the film feel a lot less dated when viewed today. But it’s a shame that this test reel didn’t survive in some form, just to view what might have been.

One special feature present on the Criterion Blu-ray that’s a must watch is Fear On Film, a 26 minute round table discussion between Cronenberg, John Carpenter and John Landis that’s hosted by future filmmaker Mick Garris. This was in 1982 when all three were at the top of their game. Youtube has the piece in 2 parts.

Long live the new flesh.

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I recently stumbled upon a wonderful post-production podcast called Going Postal. Until this, my go-to editing podcast was The Terence and Philip Show by Terence Curren and Philip Hodgetts. Alas, the schedule on that show is somewhat erratic, evening out to approximately one a month, and it always leaves me wanting more. Going Postal fills that gap. It’s been running since May of this year with each episode covering a variety of topics from technology and software news, to interviews with film and television editors, to reviews of current movie releases.

Episode 5 of Going Postal ("Meet or Supermeet?") covers EditFest London 2013 and includes a few cutting room stories from Taxi Driver courtesy of Academy Award winning editor Tom Rolf.

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On the "You talking to me?" scene:

"I had no idea it would take off and become a signature scene in this movie. Because when I saw the dailies, I said, “What do I do with this?” There is no reverse. There was no coverage. Essentially what you saw was almost every frame available to put together. So I had no option. And so when I put it together and showed it to Marty the first time, he went “Yeah, it works.” And I said, “What’s he talking about? It doesn’t work.” I felt no confidence in that scene."
 

He went on to speak about the repeat action from the same sequence:

"There’s a repeat. When he turns around. And then we go back and we do it again. That was Marty. That was not me. I said, “It’s going to look like a mistake, Marty.” Which, to me, it did look like a mistake. But it’s now part and parcel of the entire thing. That was strictly his contribution and it was a big one, obviously."
 

That repeat action was a huge deal for me when I first saw Taxi Driver. It was one of the first times I can remember becoming consciously aware of - and excited by - the power of film editing. It did look like a mistake. But not a mistake by the filmmakers. It looked like Travis Bickle’s mistake. In that moment, it felt like the character had taken control of the film itself.

There’s a nice write-up on EditFest’s conversation between Tom Rolf and Anne Coates here. And Premiumbeat offers a concise overview of the event with a few additional Tom Rolf quotes:

The most important talent to develop in the cutting room is diplomacy. Never hold anyone’s idea up to ridicule. Try anything and be ready to fight for what you think is right.
 

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I remember reading this David Foster Wallace article about the filming of Lost Highway [1997] prior to the film's release. His amusing definition of "Lynchian" has always stuck with me:

"AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively - i.e., we know it when we see it.
 
Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that badly cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody's got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not. A hideously bloody street fight over an insult would be a Lynchian street fight if and only if the insultee punctuates every kick and blow with an injunction not to say fucking anything if you can't say something fucking nice."