View fullsize

Jack Nitzsche's soundtrack for Paul Schrader's Hardcore [1979] has never been officially released, but Twilight Time's recent Blu-ray re-issue features an isolated score audio track, a cue from which is featured above.

Mirroring the film's structure, the score opens with religious themed organ music and slowly transforms into seedy pulsating synths as George C Scott travels in search of his daughter. These two opposite textures occasionally blend together, an example of which can be heard at the tail end of the uploaded cue.

I recommend browsing Twilight Time's website to take a look at their Blu-ray catalogue. It's nice to see some love given to forgotten titles such as Arthur Penn's The Chase [1966], Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train [1985] and Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning [1988], all of which also include isolated score tracks.

View fullsize

The Innocents is Jack Clayton's 1961 film adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. It features a screenplay co-written by Truman Capote, an incredible performance by Deborah Kerr (Black Narcissus), photography by Freddie Francis (The Elephant Man), and - surprisingly - moments that remain genuinely shocking, even 50+ years after its release. It's one of those forgotten films that frequently appear on top horror lists by critics and filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro. It's also a film that's particularly notable for the editing by Academy Award winner Jim Clark.

Jim Clark’s work on The Innocents features a number of standout moments. The film opens on 45 seconds of black, with just the sound of a creepy children's song - “O Willow Waly” - used to establish an unsettling tone. The main titles feature ambiguous imagery shot at night accompanied by the audio of birds chirping in the day. And the scares are edited in an unconventional pattern throughout: rather than first seeing a ghost, then cutting to an actor’s reaction, here the formula is reversed so that first we see the reaction, then we see the scare.

But perhaps the most memorable aspect of the editing is the use of extremely long dissolves and superimpositions. These are scattered throughout the film, beginning with a long dreamlike dissolve that takes us out of the main titles and into the opening scene, and culminating midway through the picture in a stylized sequence that displays this technique to stunning effect:

The editing combined with Freddie Francis’s photography and some wonderfully creepy sound design produces a haunting otherworldly collage. Fragments of images linger at the tail ends of dissolves, producing ambiguous ghost-like shapes and textures. And this was done at a time when executing such an effect was no easy task. Here's Jim Clark from Criterion's special feature The Making of The Innocents:

"When it came to the montage of long dissolves and super impositions, that was the first time that I had experience of that kind of scene. And therefore I had to invent a way of doing it.

I had the elements that Jack had shot and the only way I could work it out and supply the optical house with some form of template was by cutting it with blank film. I used spacing - what we called spacing - which was blank film. There was no image on it. What I would do was get the piece of film that had the image on it. That was the piece I wanted to use. And I would write the edge numbers on a piece of blank film with the slate number so that what we ended up with were four rolls of film which had no images on them but had numbers written on them. And indications of how long those shots should remain on the screen. So that you would find that you have a superimposition followed by a dissolve. Sometimes you had four images running simultaneously. Other times you had two.

The laboratory and the optical house were quite bemused by this. They’d never been faced with anything like this before. Although, of course, montages had been around for years. In Hollywood, particularly."
 

And here's Clark from his autobiography, Dream Repairman: Adventures in Film Editing:

"I was also able to indulge in some rather cunning dissolves, somewhat influenced by George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun. These would not be simple mixes of equal length. A 4-foot mix is the norm, but these would last 15 or 20 feet, the images gradually merging. I referred to them as lopsided mixes since the overlaps were nonstandard and often there would be a third image in there too, so these mixes were like mini montages. I didn’t always get them right the first time, and the optical house had its problems, but the results were very pleasing to Jack and myself."
 

In order to translate the above into modern non-linear editing terms, I had to look up the ratio of 1 foot of film in relation to frame count:

• 16mm :

40 frames per foot
36 feet per minute at sound speed (24fps)

• 35mm : (4-perf)

16 frames per foot
90 feet per minute at sound speed (24fps)

Therefore:

• 4 Foot Dissolve: 64 Frames / 2.7 Seconds
• 15 Foot Dissolve: 160 Frames / 10 Seconds
• 20 Foot Dissolve: 320 Frames / 13.3 Seconds

As an editor, I've always been wary of using dissolves. "If you can't cut it, dissolve it," as the saying goes. With the exception of fading to or from black its been years since I've applied one. But Jim Clark's work on The Innocents makes me want to experiment with superimpositions and 13 second dissolves at the first available opportunity.

Purchase The Innocents.

View fullsize

Unfortunately, these Shining themed Vinyl Idolz are not available to purchase - they're mock-ups taken from the Evil Corp twitter feed. If real, I'd have secured the Kubrick figure in a heartbeat.

One glimmer of hope that they might emerge in the future is that Jack Torrence and The Shining's ghostly twins have already appeared in Funko's Horror themed Mystery Mini series. And Alex from A Clockwork Orange is currently available as a Vinyl Idol, a Funko Pop [including a masked limited edition version] and as a Funko Miniature.

View fullsize

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands reviewing footage in their home garage in Hollywood. I wish I could accurately pin down the date of this picture to identify what film they're working on, but the internet provides conflicting information.

“I tell the director before I start, “If you want me to be innovative, give me the chance to make mistakes and maybe we can do something interesting.”… You can play safe and leave it all in, and you sit with the director and say, “Let’s trim here, let’s trim there,” but why not give the director a challenge? That’s what’s nice about film editing: there are a lot of little discoveries you make along the trip, and you put them in. If I find an interesting wrinkle, something different that might work, I say, “If I do it the way the director wants, he’ll never see this interesting little wrinkle.” I’m not doing my job unless I’m giving him options. That’s the key to this business.”
 

Michael Kahn Interview from Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing by Vincent LoBrutto

View fullsize

William Friedkin recounts a tale of how he handled studio notes on Sorcerer. This must have been an uncomfortable lunch for the editorial team:

"[Barry] Diller asked if he and [Sid] Sheinberg could see me the next day to pass along a few notes from their team. Since The French Connection experience I wasn’t keen on notes from executives. So I said okay, but I’d want to bring my editors and the writer so they could hear the notes firsthand. Diller and Sheinberg weren’t used to meeting with “below-the-title” guys, but they reluctantly agreed, thinking it was in the spirit of cooperation. It was a sham.

I told Wally [Walon Green, Screenwriter] and Bud [Smith, Editor] and the assistant editors, Jere Huggins and Ned Humphreys, to come unshaven, button their shirts incorrectly, leaving them outside their trousers, wear scruffy, mismatched shoes and socks, and generally look like homeless guys. I told them to wear sullen expressions, project indifference, not smile or nod or do anything that showed understanding, let alone agreement with whatever the executives said—just stare blankly at them while they talked. And don’t react to anything I might say or do, I added. Sheinberg and Diller were successful, high-powered executives, but I felt they had little to offer on how to improve a film I worked on for over a year. I thought that an audience’s response was worth a thousand times more than any executive’s, and that all these guys wanted to do was leave their mark on the film, like a dog pissing on a tree.

The meeting took place over lunch at the posh private dining room at Universal. Sheinberg and Diller were in suits and ties, and my guys were dressed as I had instructed them. Two waiters. Drink orders. Everyone ordered iced tea or bottled water or Diet Coke except me. I asked for a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, no glass. Shocked glances all around, especially from the waiters, who thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. When drinks arrived, I opened the vodka bottle and started glugging. Though not a drinker, I can handle booze and have only been drunk twice in my life. Diller and Sheinberg had a handful of meaningless notes, to which we gave neither visual nor verbal response. Lunch was ordered, but when it arrived, I just kept drinking from the bottle. After about fifteen minutes I fell to the floor facedown. No one reacted, so I just lay there until gradually there was silence. Then Diller turned to Wally and the editors and asked, “Does this happen often?”

“Every day,” Wally deadpanned.

I leave it to you to evaluate this incident. Some of you may find it appalling, others stupid, still others insulting and self-destructive. It was certainly all of that, but at the time, that was my nature. I was still the class clown, and it was also a dumb-ass way of coping with criticism. I wouldn’t want to be treated that way myself."
 

From William Friedkin's “The Friedkin Connection”