Film Editors — Putting It Together (1918) 🇺🇸
Two women, meeting at a luncheon, were talking of recent photoplays they had seen. “The picture was pretty and all,” said one, “but the story seemed mixed up.”
by Helen Starr
Then she attempted to explain what was wrong with it. But its faults were intangible. Had an English house been flashed on the screen as an old Southern homestead, or a girl shown playing tennis in an evening dress, then she could have explained the faults. The public are location and wardrobe wise by this time but they are not yet “cutting wise.” The picture this woman couldn’t “get” was a jumble because it had been assembled by a “cutter” who used scissors and no headwork.
Film surgery is a developing art, as yet but little understood by the public. Ten years ago school boys did the cutting. It required no brains — only agile fingers for snipping purposes. You see, the scenes were — and still are — taken on long strips of negative. Perhaps, at the start of the picture, Nellie is shown leaving her town in Vermont in scenes designated 2, 3 and 5. At the end of the picture — say scenes 45 and 46 — a wiser and repentent Nellie comes back to Vermont. To save time, the director takes all the railroad station scenes the same morning and on the same roll of film. But before each scene is taken the assistant writes the scene number on a slate and the camera man grinds his crank as the slate is held up before the camera.
This system avoids mixups after the film is developed. And in the early days, when the school boy cutter came around to the studio, he sat down with his scissors and snipped off the film, pasting the strips in their proper sequence as regarded their scene numbers. The company then had a new photoplay, or rather a new “movie.”
One day a “smart guy” discovered that the picture would be more interesting if the scissors were used to cut part of each scene away, as for instance, some of the film which showed Nellie buying her railroad ticket, checking her trunk and other commonplace actions.
He slashed into a strip of dazzling ballroom stuff, showing the guests all in evening dress and inserted a strip of film showing poor Agnes sitting home alone in her tenement room wishing she were at the ball. Then he pasted more ballroom stuff after the poverty scene. When the piece of film was run off the picture was far more interesting than if yards and yards of ballroom action had been reeled off uninterruptedly. Strong contrast was thus afforded, for it was impossible to forget poor, sad Agnes while looking at the gay and selfish dancers at the ball.
But this wise cutter overdid the scissors stuff. He exhibited a great disregard for fact and logical sequence. The ballroom stuff having been doctored, it was evident that the dancers had all miraculously changed partners since first shown.
Cutters who followed said that the film must not be chopped up so that the story jumps from here to there and from one scene to another without a reason. It wasn’t enough to excite the audience by a lot of “cut backs” and inserts; it must be made logical. So the intelligent cutter who saw the light of reason and who possessed dramatic instinct came into the film manufacturing business — men like Mack Sennett, the comedy producer, who is regarded as a master cutter as well as producer. Frank Lawrence of Universal. Del Andrews of Triangle. Arthur Ripley of Fox. Jimmy Smith [James Smith] with D. W. Griffith, Billy Shea of the Fairbanks Company [Douglas Fairbanks Sr.], and clever women cutters like little Rose Smith (Jimmy’s wife), who cut Intolerance and is now with the Mary Pickford Company, and Anne Bauchens of Lasky, and a dozen or so others.
Before the modern cutter begins his work on a film he reads the scenario carefully. While the picture is being taken he — or she — often goes on location and watches the company at work. Rose Smith of the Pickford Company and Billy Shea, Doug Fairbanks’ cutter, see every scene “shot,” so that they are familiar with every bit of film before they start cutting.
The director “shoots” many hundred feet of extra material so that the cutter, or himself, if he makes the “selections,” can choose the best of the lot. The director takes every difficult acting scene two or three times and if the company is playing in a picturesque locality he shoots bits of the surrounding country which might fit well in the finished picture.
In the long run this shooting of extra stuff is good economy, particularly if many actors are employed for the day to take part in big scenes. For, if it were later found that the extra stuff was necessary, re-hiring of the “mob” would result at additional expense.
Again, a director may spend many hours trying to get a difficult scene only to have it thrown into the scrap basket. Another may supervise the building of an expensive set which appears for a brief moment in the finished picture. And directors only too often run away with themselves in shooting beautiful exteriors. There is no doubt that the artistic genius about filmdom centers in the directors and actors — that is what they are paid for — and yet they need the cutter’s hard sense as a balance. The cutter sees the story as a whole and is required to shave it down to a certain number of reels. Thus he can only use the scenes which go toward making a logical story that an audience can both enjoy and understand. The cutter also sees to it that the spoken and other titles are inserted in the right places.
A great deal of power lies in the hands of the cutter. He can make or break a play or a player. In a big plant the cutter may not even have a nodding acquaintance with the actors and yet he sees all their work as it runs through his hands in the film. Some unknown little extra girl who is given a small bit to play may do it exceptionally well. If so the cutter will keep her full scene in the finished picture. But if a player is a poor actor good eyesight is required to catch the fleeting glimpse of his work on the screen. The cutter does him a favor by omitting his worst attempts.
An ingenious cutter can save his company much money which would otherwise be spent in production. In a certain war picture an effect was gained whereby thousands of soldiers seemed engaged in battle. The production manager raised his voice in protest at the costly army of extras. “There were only seventy real soldiers in that scene,” explained the cutter. “We cut the picture so it seemed as if thousands took part — first a long shot of the seventy fighting amid battle smoke on one side, then closer shots of a dozen or two soldiers running in from the right, another dozen running in from the left, another long shot of the seventy soldiers but now wearing the uniforms of the enemy and fighting on the opposite side, then back to a shot of the hero and his forces and so on throughout the picture.” It was just a matter of reverse camera shots and joining them together so cleverly that any audience would be deceived.
Making over the director’s mistakes is part of the cutter’s duty. Perhaps an actor in a certain scene picked up a letter in his right hand before he crossed a room. Then maybe the lighting made it impossible to go on taking more scenes that day and the next scenes were not begun until the following morning. By that time neither actor or director could remember whether the letter was picked up in the right or left hand. The actor thinks he carried it in his left hand so does his next scene that way. He was wrong as the cutter finds out when the film runs through his hands. This has to be fixed up by cutting to some other scene after the actor picks up the letter the first time or else by discarding all the film which precedes that before the actor finally puts the letter on the table across the room. Nowadays in the big companies the director has an assistant, usually a stenographer, who keeps a record of all the details of every scene so that such mistakes are almost impossible.
The matter of progression is most important. If an actor is seen in a dining-room set and if he goes out a door at the left of the screen, it is obvious that when we next “pick him up” in the parlor he must be seen entering the parlor at the right of the screen. But sometimes the cutter finds that the director has made a mistake in this regard. If so he can turn the film negative over. This process is called “using a duplicate negative” and as in reversing a kodak film, it makes the actor face in the desired direction.
The cutter has much to do in the matter of suspense. If police and criminals and rescuers are chasing the hero the cutter can work the affair up to a high pitch of excitement by the manner in which he reverts to one and then another of the characters. In one picture the hero was caught in a trap in the woods. The climax was spoiled because a short flash of his rescuer appeared so early in the film that the outcome was obvious.
Frank Lawrence of Universal is one of the best film surgeons in the business. He “grew up” at the Vitagraph plant and for sixteen years cut and revamped film for that organization. His practiced eye seems to grasp a hundred flaws the first time the film is run off for him and he makes it over into a healthy young photoplay in the time a younger cutter would be figuring out his first half reel. Lawrence cut “The Fall of a Nation,” “The Battle Cry of Peace” and hundreds of other well known Vitagraph photoplays.
In the early Keystone days, it was generally understood that Mack Sennett “made” all his comedies in the cutting room. Free from all directing detail, his splendid dramatic sense could be entirely devoted to testing the “business” for its laugh-getting qualities.
Intolerance was cut by Jimmy Smith, his wife, Rose Smith, and D. W. Griffith, its producer. The cutting and assembling of this picture took many months, for it was no small feat to weave those four great stories into a photoplay which a normal mind could grasp. Mrs. Smith was recently loaned to Mr. Griffith by Mary Pickford to help him prepare for the screen his European war spectacle “Hearts of the World.”
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There is no doubt that the artistic genius about filmland centers in directors and actors — yet they need the cutter’s hard sense as a balance.
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Mary Pickford perusing her picture after it has gone through the hands of the ruthless “film surgeon.”
The cutter sees the story as a whole and pastes in scenes which make a picture an audience can both enjoy and understand. By interspersing flashes of individual soldiers in battle scenes (shown in two panels at right) personal phases of the conflict are established in the mind of the observer. Also, the cutter must make over a director’s mistakes. The three strip pictures on page opposite illustrate his watchfulness. The man shown at the desk held the letter in his right hand in close-up scene. The scenic strip was omitted because the cutter thought it unnecessary. In the bottom strip, the film originally showed the man entering from the left when he should have entered at the right in order to make logical the preceding scene, which showed him in the hall, about to enter the room at his right. Merely by turning the film over, the cutter corrected this error.
The cutting and assembling of Intolerance required many months. It was no small feat to weave the four stories together.
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The Biggest Picture Show in the World
For two days a Kansas City newspaper recently held open house at Convention Hall, entertaining free of charge almost the entire population of the city with a simultaneous quadruple showing of a feature picture. The four screens were arranged in a square, and the projection on each so synchronized that a line of marching soldiers in a news reel was unbroken, and seemed to be marching around the square.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, July 1918
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The editors featured in the above article are:
- Del Andrews (1894–1942)
- Anne Bauchens (1882–1967)
- Frank Lawrence (1883–1960)
- Arthur Ripley (1897–1961)
- Mack Sennett (1880–1960)
- William Shea (1893–1961)
- James Smith (1892–1975)
- Rose Smith (1897–1962)