audience for the first time. There are always surprises. Things
you worried were unclear the audience tracked perfectly;
things you never imagined would be a problem turn out to
require a lot more thought and work. Previews were useful for
studios, too, helping them determine the kind of movie they
had, the more effectively to market it.
But in our
Monday morning headlines, even in Podunk, USA, are the
weekend grosses of the latest movies, the principal function
of previews now is to let the marketing people tell the film-
makers how to “fix” their movies to make them easier to mar-
ket. One of my favorite minor spectacles of our time is watch-
ing rich, powerful studio executives and movie producers
hang on the every word of teenagers in focus groups for some
scrap of a clue as to anything objectionable that might make
the movie under discussion unpalatable to the 16-25 age
group. They pay slavish attention to witless comments built
around words like “rad,” “awesome,” or “icky” as they bring
the common denominator lower and lower.
The studios don’t care about older moviegoers any more,
and you have only to look at the latest products – this is being
written as the summer approaches – to see where their sights
are set. Previews have become a degraded and degrading
process that only the most powerful or committed of direc-
tors can withstand and prevail against. It’s the only part of the
editing process that I actively hate, and every editor and direc-
tor I know feels exactly the same way.
Most movies are now cut on computers, rather than on film
itself, and only assembled as films relatively late in the process.
Does this affect the way movies are edited? I suppose it must,
but when I look at my work before and after Avid, I don’t see
any differences that I can attribute to the technology alone.
When Avids first appeared, you did see a great many more dis-
solves because, unlike film, the computer lets you see the dis-
solve immediately.2 A far bigger influence than the tools them-
selves is the whole home-video market.
Fifty years ago, Jack Warner used to say that the life of a
movie was basically three months, which may explain why
the studios were so careless in handling and storing the mas-
ter negatives once movies had their theatrical runs. But the
video market has not just given theatrical movies a whole
new lease on life, it has practically become their life. Most
people now see movies on video, whether via cable or
through rentals. (The best single thing about the advent of
DVD is the hope among many of us that it will supplant
videotape as the preferred viewing medium, so that home
viewers will have decent picture and sonic reproduction.)
This cannot help but affect the way movies are made. I
can’t recall that I’ve ever cut with anything other than the-
atrical viewing in mind, but just the other day something
happened that gave me pause. I wanted to end a particularly
intimate scene by dropping back to an extreme long shot
that Ron Shelton had filmed. I use big screen (30”) monitors,
but when I cut in the long shot, I realized I couldn’t even see
the two actors. For all I or anyone else knew, I was cutting
to a different scene or I was doing a time cut. The actors
completely disappeared, and I thought that when the movie
shows on television this is exactly what will happen there as
well. And because the medium I was using to cut the film is
video, it was driven home to me more forcibly than before. I
2 In computerized editing, the movie is only edited in the video/com- puter domain; the final product is still film, which is assembled from a
made the cut anyway, because I knew it would
be effective in the theater, and we continue to
make movies for viewing in the theater.
Peckinpah, old theater man that he was,
always believed that one of the most
important aspects of moviegoing was
leaving your house, joining other peo-
ple, and seeing the movie as part of a
large audience: in other words, the
communal aspect of the experi-
ence, and also, of course, the
giving of your full attention to
the movie that being in a the-
ater demands. But this is not the
way most movies are watched
these days, and it is sobering to think
through the implications of this from the
editorial point of view. Do most people who
watch movies at home actually set aside time
and watch the movie? Do they turn off the tele-
phone or at least silence it? Do they watch the
movie as an integral, unbroken experience? Or
do they, as I suspect, treat it as a social occa-
sion? In Understanding Media, McCluhan
argued, correctly, I think, that a televi-
sion in the home becomes rather like
another person in the house, its
content less important than its
presence as an electronic
device with sounds and
images of its own that it
brings to the party. Peo-
ple talk, go to the
refrigerator, pause
the movie for any
number of valid
and invalid rea-
sons. This is the
reality of what the
movie experience
has become after a
hundred years during
which it was hailed as the great art form of the
Twentieth Century.
Why, then, in making a movie do we
continue to lavish such care on pace, on
tempo, on rhythm, on timing, on conti-
nuity of performance, story
all the rest? If through the medium of
television, a movie becomes just
another member of the household,
merely one of the party, with no more
claims to our attention than anyone or any-
thing else, what becomes of the art of film or, indeed, of the
film experience itself?
I haven’t any brilliant answers right at hand. But when
I contemplate the future of movies as the technology
of home video becomes ever more sophisticated
and widely available, I do find myself feeling
rather like Dorothy after the tornado has car-
ried her far, far from home. Whatever else,
Toto, this really doesn’t seem to be
Kansas any more.
