Don’t know if this has already been discussed on BB, but since the article mentions this…
the release of an novelization of the first film by Alan Dean Foster and published in December of 1976 under the of Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker by Ballantine Books.
Disney is currently refusing to pay Foster’s royalties for all of his works.
I forgot how erotic that scene is. It’s even more erotic in the radio play.
That’s not what a film editor actually does.
Fair point. I was responding more to Thom’s comments about Greenwald’s tantrum and the role of an editor in making a piece better.
Count me as very surprised for not seeing this on BB either. Given the number of SF authors present and discussed here, it seems odd that major news outlets have picked up this story and yet there’s no mention of it from BB’s staff. Big Rat needs to hear about this from every available direction!
Peterson’s a deluded fool who is completely devoid of empathy: He thinks that there are obvious universal truths, but he himself is a victim of exceptional circumstances, while everyone else’s life is of course simple and straightforward.
This is in my list of things to post about, though I haven’t time myself yet to dive into it beyond “I saw this happened.” I did assume someone would get it covered in the meantime. I’ll try to get to it this weekend if not. (Newborn baby means I sometimes crank out a bunch of posts ahead of time, then don’t have a chance to read or write substantially for a few days)
100% this.
I’m a nearly fully-time YouTuber, and what I learned quickly is that the editing room is where all the story telling happens. It doesn’t matter what you had in mind when you planned your shot list, wrote your dialogue, or shot the footage. Whatever you can manage to create a story from in the edit is all that matters. When shooting you have no feel for pacing, and when writing you have no feel for continuity or structure. Everything gets “rescued” in the edit.
In other media, editing is quality control. In film, it’s everything.
I know. Its really underhanded on the part of Disney.
That was the one thing I learned in film school. You always plan and shoot for the edit, but ultimately the edit is where the real magic happens.
Which in turn led me to this essay…
I’ve always had a soft spot for Jung and Campbell (and Lucas) primarily for their ability to identify and play our innate human proclivity for powerful story-telling.
I guess it’s important for story enthusiasts like me (and those sycophants and fanatics of JP perhaps) to understand how the psychological buttons these men are adept at pressing tend to skew toward and resonate with some abhorrent prejudice, ignorance, and bigotry.
Unless you work in animation - then its script/screenplay, animatic/edit then production/shoot.
Or unless you’re Alfred Hitchcock where the edit and script happen at he same time and the shoot is the consequence of both processes with a final cut in post.
This is a true editorial decision in all meanings of the word!
I personally would expand this idea to acknowledge the fact that women were more involved in assistant editing (filing, secretarial tasks) and then down the food chain in the editorial department to neg matching and neg cutters, This predominantly evolved during the 2nd World War - essentially used as factory workers. Much the same as in-between framers were/are never recognised for their contribution to animation.
I’m a fan of slow movies, but even I cant stomach the self indulgent and unecessarily long “Apocalypse Now Redux.” Editors are ideally collaborators, like mechanics to inventors. They can make something good better, but they cant really save garbage. (And a bad editor can also ruin a good film, like when studio heads tack on a happy ending.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - HL Mencken
I’ve always been kind of amazed how distant a director can be from the editing process, and how little credit editors get from the mainstream for great works of art. As with Star Wars, The Godfather is an editing marvel. But who knows who William Reynolds and Peter Zinner are? They only know about Coppola.
Another thought on editing and how good editing can keep a long movie feeling brisk:
The Dark Knight and Batman vee Superman are both Batman movies.
They both have scripts by David Goyer.
And they’re both 152 minutes long.
And yet, one of them feels a lot longer than the other.
In the film All That Jazz there is a sequence of a film of a stand-up comic doing the five stages of grief being edited by the main character. Seeing how the edited bits of film change as the movie progresses is fascinating, and very easy to miss on first viewing.
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