By Sandy Cohen, Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Film editor Anne V. Coates didn’t know much about erotic bondage before working on “Fifty Shades of Grey,” but even at nearly 90 years old, she felt the film should be sexier.
“I fought strongly to get it more sexy,” Coates said in her enthusiastic lilt during a recent interview. “I had some great ideas. I wanted her wrapped up like a suitcase and hoisted up to the ceiling.”
That adventurous spirit and love of film led Coates to become a sought-after editor for more than 60 years. An Oscar winner for editing 1962’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” Coates will receive a second statuette Saturday — an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement — alongside actor Jackie Chan, casting director Lynn Stalmaster and documentarian Frederick Wiseman at the film academy’s eighth annual Governors Awards.
“I love the fact that (this award) brings light onto editors, because I don’t think they get enough recognition for what they do — probably because people don’t really understand what we do,” Coates said.
Film editing is the artistic and technical endeavor of cutting raw footage into cinematic story sequences. Coates said she initially wanted to be a film director, “but in the days when I was young, it was very difficult for women and there weren’t many jobs open to them.” Besides hairstyling and makeup, editing was one of the few options.
Coates first became dazzled by the world of film while a student at boarding school. Her class was reading “Wuthering Heights” (which she found “extremely boring”) when they went on a field trip to see the movie version.
“Well, apart for falling madly for Laurence Olivier, it just so excited me to see what you could do with pictures, with telling a story in pictures,” she said.
Coates worked steadily as an editor from 1952 until last year’s “Fifty Shades,” earning four other Oscar nominations along the way for “Becket,” ‘’The Elephant Man,” ‘’In the Line of Fire,” and “Out of Sight.”
Director David Lean would prove pivotal in her career. Not only did he hire her for his Oscar-winning “Lawrence of Arabia,” he encouraged her to share her ideas.
“He always said to me, ‘Have the confidence to say what you think. It doesn’t matter who the producer and director are; you come up with your opinions,’” she recalled. “You’ve got to be fairly tough to be an editor, I think.”
Thus the bid for a sexier “Fifty Shades.”
As opportunities for women in the film industry increased, Coates was offered directing jobs, but she turned them down. Editing offered a more forgiving schedule for a young mother, she said: “Also, my husband was a director, so you know, too many directors on top of each other.”
She has three children with her late husband, Douglas Hickox. Their two sons are directors and their daughter is a film editor.
Coates said the transition to digital, which she made with 1995’s “Congo,” didn’t change her style much because she rarely employs the newfangled tricks it offers.
She’s grateful, though, that she won’t have to learn how to edit the inevitable virtual-reality films.
“I won’t, really, because I’m semi-retiring myself right now,” the 90-year-old said. “But the new editors will have to involve themselves in that as well.”
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More