Barbara Tulliver, ACE, earned a primetime Emmy nomination for Phil Spector, continuing a longstanding collaboration with director David Mamet. This is her second career nom in the Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Miniseries or a Movie category, the first coming two years ago (shared with Plummy Tucker) for her work on Too Big To Fail, directed by Curtis Hanson.
There are Emmy parallels between Too Big To Fail and Phil Spector that extend well beyond Tulliver. Both are HBO films and each garnered 11 Emmy nominations.
Yet while the widely acclaimed Too Big To Fail didn’t succeed in winning an Emmy. Phil Spector has the chance to break through in the following categories: Outstanding Miniseries or Movie; Editing; Outstanding Directing for A Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special (Mamet); Lead Actor (Al Pacino); Lead Actress (Helen Mirren); Writing (Mamet); Art Direction (production designer Patrizia Von Brandenstein, art director Fredda Slavin, set decorator Diane Lederman); Sound Mixing (production mixer Gary Alper, re-recording mixers Roy Waldspurger and Michael Barry, C.A.S.); Makeup (dept. head makeup artist Chris Bingham, key makeup artist Hildie Ginsberg, personal makeup artist John Caglione, Jr); Hairstyling (dept head hairstylist Stanley Steve Hall, personal hairstylists Cydney Cornell, Michael Kriston) and Costumes (costume designer Debra McGuire, assistant costume designer Lorraine Calvert).
For Phil Spector, Tulliver credited Mamet with writing “a wonderful script. The performers were terrific. I was fortunate to have a lot of great elements to work with. David wrote and directed a really interesting drama about our justice system, which sets it apart from the general straight biopic. HBO was gutsy to do something like that. This was a provocative film which created a lot of controversy when it came out.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge Phil Spector posed to Tulliver as an editor was, she assessed, the fact that it was “chock-full of dialogue which left less room to put in songs. There weren’t a lot of montages to allow for music to breathe. We wanted to remind the audience of some of the music that Spector contributed to during his career. We had to find the pieces of music that worked and then get the rights to that music, creating moments where the film and music could breathe without losing the momentum that David had written into the actual screenplay itself.”
Tulliver has enjoyed a collaborative relationship with Mamet spanning many years and varied projects, cutting for the director/writer such features as Dream House, Heist, Spartan, The Winslow Boy, Oleanna and Homicide, as well as shorts including Two Painters, Our Valley and Catastrophe. As for how she connected with Mamet, Tulliver recalled, “I was really lucky to be an assistant editor on House of Games, a feature he wrote and directed. It was edited by Trudy Ship who was a mentor to me. I was also assistant on his next film, Things Change, and got to know how he worked. I got to know him as a person without the pressure of being the editor. In those days, because we were working in film, the assistant was always in the room with the editor and director. You were constantly bringing film in, going back and forth, hanging trims. By contrast, now in the digital age, the assistant editor doesn’t always have that privilege of being in such close working quarters with the director and editor.”
Tulliver’s big break came when Ship wasn’t available to edit Homicide. “David asked her if I was ready to begin cutting,” recollected Tulliver. “She said yes. David offered me the job, meaning a big career change and opportunity for me.”
From this has emerged a strong working bond. “We’ve done a lot of films together,” said Tulliver. “I’ve certainly learned an enormous amount from him in terms of storytelling. We know each other really well. I know what he likes and doesn’t like. The rhythms of his dialogue are like music. I know how he shoots. I know what performance he will prefer over another performance. We have similar tastes–not that we don’t surprise each other. But you get to know each other’s moods, tastes, idiosyncrasies. All the while, you keep growing individually and collectively.”
Jeff Beal
Jeff Beal earned two Emmy nominations this year–in the Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Original Dramatic Score) and Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music categories–for his work on House Of Cards, the breakthrough Netflix series which received a total of nine nominations, the others being for Outstanding Drama Series, Directing For A Drama Series (David Fincher) Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series (Eigil Bryld, see The Road To Emmy, Part 1), Single-Camera Picture Editing (Kirk Baxter, see The Road To Emmy, Part 1), Lead Actor in A Drama Series (Kevin Spacey), Lead Actress (Robin Wright) and Casting (Laray Mayfield, Julie Schubert). Beal’s Original Dramatic Score nomination was for the first episode of House Of Cards.
While House Of Cards set historical precedent as one of three Netflix shows delivered online (the others being Arrested Development and Hemlock Grove) which collectively garnered 14 Emmy nominations–prompting Netflix to bill itself as the world’s leading Internet television network–Beal is no stranger to the Emmy nominees’ and winners’ circles. This marks the third year in which he has earned more than one Emmy nomination. Over his career he has thus far received a dozen nominations, winning three Emmy Awards–in 2003 for his main title theme music for Monk (USA Network), in ’07 for Original Dramatic Score on the strength of the “Battleground” episode of HBO’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King; and in ’08 for TNT’s The Company for Outstanding Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie or Special.
The other two years in which Beal copped two or more Emmy nominations were: 2006 for Original Dramatic Score and Original Main Title Theme Music for HBO’s Rome, and Original Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special for CBS’ The Water Is Wide; and 2007 for Original Dramatic Score on the basis of Rome, and the aforementioned Emmy-winning effort for Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King.
David Fincher, an executive producer on House Of Cards and director of its first two episodes, brought Beal onto the series. The two had only worked once before, on a Motorola phone commercial some time ago. Beal also worked with one of Fincher’s editors, Angus Wall on Rome (Wall earned an Emmy nom for his Main Title Design on Rome). The connection with Wall and the work on Rome may have also helped, said Beal, put him on Fincher’s radar. Upon hearing about plans to create a U.S. version of the UK show House Of Cards, Beal sent Fincher some music but didn’t get an immediate response. “I just thought it would be the right project for me, having done Rome [another ambitious political drama],” explained Beal. “I thought it would be something I could contribute to and enjoy musically.”
Fincher eventually did call Beal and now the composer is now working on season two of House Of Cards. “From the very beginning, David thought that music would be a big part of telling the story and this became the case. The music serves the drama, including a lot you don’t see, what’s hidden in people’s minds. Room was given for music to create that sense of intrigue and gamesmanship that’s always part of House Of Cards. David gave me some great advice early on. He said ‘just don’t score what you’re seeing. Everything in the show is a metaphor.’ That unlocked for me what makes the show. The music supports the drama while also referring back to that more metaphorical plane on which everything happens.”
Among the challenges House Of Cards posed to him as an artist was, said Beal, “the large number of scenes that have more than one layer of meaning happening at the same time. So you have to create in the music a sense of expansiveness where themes and ideas had an arc to them that was not simply just adhering to every beat of the drama. The music was also a character that gave the characters and scenes room to mean more than what’s happening in front of the camera.”
Beal said the multi-layered drama meant that the music had to be multi-layered, a combination of orchestral, lyrical and “an element with a much more gritty palette. We took elements you would not think of combining with each other. But instead of trying to blend them in a seamless way, we let the rough edges show.”
Extra impetus to make a great show came from the trust Netflix placed in its creators and the trust Fincher had in his collaborators. “So much was at stake in terms of validating the faith we had gotten from our employers to make our show. And when you work with a director who trusts you, you want to do your very best,” affirmed Beal.
Besides his current work on season two of House Of Cards, Beal has a couple of documentary films in the offing. He also recently did the music on Blackfish, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s controversial documentary on the plight of whales in captivity while performing at marine amusement parks. Blackfish explores what may have caused Tilikum, a 12,000-pound orca, to kill three people, including veteran SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010.
********
This is the tenth installment in a 12-part series that will explore the field of Emmy nominees and winners spanning such disciplines as directing, cinematography, editing, production design, animation, VFX and design. The series will run right through the Creative Arts Emmys ceremony on Sept. 15 and the following week’s primetime Emmy Awards live telecast on Sept. 22.
**********************
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 1.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 2.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 3.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 4.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 5.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 6.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 7.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 8.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 9.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 11.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 12.
