Patton Oswalt always made the joke that people really love female directors considering how many editors who put together what the men behind the camera shot into something watchable, choosing the best angles and pacing from what they’re given, are women. Beyond that specification, editors in general make or break movies all the time. Without editing, there’d be reels of unconnected tissue, stories without form, characters standing around and lacking context, but nips and tucks can turn a turkey into a classic.
The 1975 Spielberg spectacular that cemented his career and launched the blockbuster craze in Hollywood is a film that needs no introduction. Everybody knows the story of three intrepid heroes—the cop, the scholar, and the veteran—that set out to hunt down the giant great white shark terrorizing Amity Island and noshing on its residents during the July 4th holiday. Some film nerds even know of “Bruce” (Spielberg’s working name for the shark puppet, inspired by a lawyer he knew) and how often it broke down.
These breakdowns led to Spielberg using the puppet less than he would have, but he was further encouraged by the film’s editor, Verna Fields, who won an Oscar for her work on the film, by the way, to cut it down even more in the edit. She’d point out to Spielberg the places where it began to look fake on-screen and cut a couple of seconds before to maintain the illusion. She knew that the film only worked if people didn’t find out the big, janky shark puppet wasn’t big and janky and a puppet. With the film achieving classic status all these years later, it looked like her expertise paid off.
Wes Craven, noted master of horror, seems like the type of guy nobody in their right mind would want to mess with regarding a new slasher film. Seeing images coming out of the movie, the producers hated the Ghostface mask, thinking it was dull, flat, and cheap-looking and leaving Wes Craven, who knew how good it looked in motion in something of a slump. They hated Ghostface so much, in fact, they wanted to scrap the design of the character and start over.
Enter the editor, Patrick Lussier (who edited the next two Screams, as well) who worked at a breakneck pace to put a rough cut of the opening sequence in which fake out lead Drew Barrymore gets menaced by the now iconic killer before the execs’ eyes, leading them to see how good everything looked assembled. It’s amazing to think that without the nimbleness of an editor, Ghostface might not have been Ghostface and as for Scream itself, well, it certainly wouldn’t be on its fifth installment and counting.
Barry Sonnenfeld, who started out as the cinematographer for the Coen brothers before going onto directing, has given the world many popular and/or notorious films from the Addams Family duology to the Men in Black series, to Wild Wild West. It was when he was working on the first Men in Black that he decided to cut down on a very complicated subplot in the editing room, changing things himself to streamline the narrative and help shoot this Spielberg-produced property based on an obscure Marvel comic into the stratosphere.
It turned out that original plotline between the two aliens Edgar attacks at lunch was that they were formerly warring factions now trying a tentative peace treaty and Edgar wasn’t going to have any of that. Instead, by cutting out the dialogue, inserting jibber-jabber, and then subtitling it, Sonnenfeld took this screwy scene and made it into two aliens of the same species meeting, getting attacked, and set up the menace of the big bad bug. For Men in Black, the director made the right call, cutting here, splicing there, changing a few things around in post, and launching a franchise that aimed for the stars.
This romcom genre classic wasn’t always the quirky, irreverent film audiences came to know and love (and execs in pitch meetings came to hold up as a gold standard of what a rom-com could be).
Originally the film was a rambling mess, 50 minutes longer than the film audiences sat down to see in 1977, and included a goofball murder mystery that Annie and Alvy floated around. It was through the judicious edit that it became about their on again/off again love affair that audiences came to know and love.
Star Wars is the prime example of editing being the thing that transformed a lovable loser into a stone-cold all-time classic. George Lucas’s creativity aside, when he first edited together the adventures of farmboy Luke, rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold Han, and Princess Leia, created a mess that left all his big Hollywood buddies, including Brian De Palma, scratching their heads. Enter the woman, stage right: Marcia Lucas, George’s then-wife. The woman who had recut American Graffiti and saved that film from the dustbin of history was bringing her sense once more to his newest spectacle.
While working on Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, and offering welcomed advice to Spielberg and John Milius, George was off trying to get the green light on his B-picture space adventure. When he finally got it he came back with a jumble of film that didn’t work in his original cuts. There were scenes moments she got him to keep: Leia kissing Luke for luck before they swing across the chasm in the death Star and the mouse droid running away from Han and Chewie, and took other bits, like the Death Star trench run in which Lucas had Luke make two passes and cut it down to one, tightening it into a nerve-wracking bit of action filmmaking that still resonates to this day.
The film went on to insane success, of course, but hindsight is always 20/20. What isn’t hindsight is how valuable Marcia was to the film’s legacy. And in fact, when it came to the 50th Academy Awards, the film was nominated on multiple fronts for which George would’ve taken home a statue: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay. But as a winner for editing, Marcia was the only Lucas to get the gold.
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