At the recently held Trailer Park Festival in Chicago (SHOOT, 9/8), a competition designed to showcase the cutting prowess of up-and-coming assistant editors, participants heard excerpts from a letter containing words of encouragement from Oscar-winning editor Hughes Winborne (Crash). Trailer Park honorees received a copy of the letter, which reads, in part, as follows:
I, for one, am eternally thankful to the assistants who have worked with me. I have relied on them not only for technical assistance, but also, and more importantly, for their creative input. There is nothing more fun in the editing room than sitting around with my assistants analyzing a scene, a shot or a performance–trying to solve a problem, trying to make the movie we are cutting better. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been saved or inspired by one of their ideas.
In this letter I will give you guys an overview of my career, the ups and downs…I hope it may be in some small way instructive…..I got my first assisting job on a film called Girl from India. It was a horrible movie and I was never fully paid. First lesson: get paid. 90 hours a week, horrible and hilarious footage. But I didn’t care. I was working on a real movie. …. Well, it was shot on 35mm anyway.
My next film was a horror film, The Mutilator. What is really interesting about this job is how I got it and where it led. I heard about The Mutilator from my father of all places. He told me there was a local attorney, Buddy Cooper, who was going to make a horror film in Atlantic Beach, NC. I called Buddy and asked if I found an editor for him, could I be the assistant? ” Sure,” he said. So I found him an editor and had my second feature. Two months into the job, I arrived for work one morning and Buddy was sitting having a conversation with the editor. When he saw me, he asked if I would mind going to have a cup of coffee and come back in 30 minutes. When I returned, Buddy was sitting by himself. He had fired the editor and asked if I would finish the film. I was stunned….I had my first feature editing job.
The first three weeks were terrifying. I was OK when I was working, but at night I would go home, drink a couple of beers and get into the tub and shake. I went on to not only cut the picture, but the sound as well. How long would it have taken me to cut my first feature without this lucky break? I have no idea. But I can say this–after I got a taste of being the editor, I wanted to stay an editor. Besides….I was a lousy assistant.
After The Mutilator, I got work cutting industrials at AT&T. Now this wasn’t working in features, but someone was actually paying me good money to be an editor….After a couple of years at AT&T, I found my way to early reality TV and then to CBS’s 48 Hours…when it was still very much a verite show. Skimpy scripts, tons of footage, pieces created almost entirely in the editing room. Many pieces I cut were straight montage from beginning to end. Six to eight minutes with almost as many edits as in 60 minutes of most features I’ve worked on. But best of all, 48 Hours was generous enough to allow me to leave from time to time to cut low budget features for little or no money and then return to a steady salary at CBS. For that I will be forever grateful.
I worked at CBS off and on for five years until I was hired to cut Sling Blade. Sling Blade brought me to L.A….In L.A., the entertainment industry is everywhere. More editing jobs but also many more people competing for them. For the next few years, I worked in low to medium budget films, getting into Sundance a few times and always hoping to get my films into theaters. This is a particularly difficult task in these days of blockbusters and studios opening films in over 3,000 theaters. I have had my share of films go straight to DVD. But I enjoyed working on independent films. The directors were almost always first timers, but they brought great passion and conviction to what they considered to be their shot. Then in 2000, after a film called Stark Raving Mad, the bottom dropped out completely. I could not find a job.
It was excruciating. By far the lowest point of my career….I started entertaining the idea of a career change. Then almost a year to the day of finishing my last film, I called 48 Hours and asked if they needed help during Christmas. They did….I worked in N.Y. for three months. When I returned to L.A., my agent had an interview for me on a movie called Employee of the Month. Never in my career have I prepared for an interview more thoroughly….I marked the script with post-its on almost every page. When I walked into the meeting, I made sure to put the script in a place where the director and producer could see all of the post its sticking out from the sides of the script. During the interview, I worked into the conversation every joke from the script I could remember…. I was hired on the spot. I loved working on that film.
When we were almost finished cutting, the producer told me she had another project starting soon. “Would I be interested?” she asked. “Of course,” I said. The name of the film was Crash. Right place, right time.
If there is something I have learned that I can pass on, it is that almost anything is possible if you stick with it. This is a very competitive business and often it is difficult to thrive. You need a lot of luck, but you also have to hang around long enough to get lucky. I did not have any grand plan for my career. I just knew from the first minute I had the opportunity to edit that I had found work I could enjoy for a long time. I have enjoyed editing Rockettes and I have enjoyed editing Don Cheadle. Whoever I had in front of me, I tried to do the best I could. Sometimes it has been frustrating and sometimes it has been sublime. But it has always been fun. I am a very lucky guy and I hope everyone of you will be as fortunate as I have been.
