The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing
with an introduction by director Wendy Apple
Sponsored by Avid
Screened in Avid DNxHD
Projected by Barco

Tuesday November 15, 2005
6:30PM - 8:00PM
OPEN TO ALL ATTENDEES

In “The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing,” the official documentary of the American Cinema Editors, some of film's greatest storytellers show, through clips, interviews, behind-the-scenes stories, and tricks of the trade, how the art of editing can change the emotion of a viewer by simply cutting a few frames from a scene. A host of acclaimed editors including Walter Murch (“Cold Mountain”), Zach Staenberg (the “Matrix” trilogy), Thelma Schoonmaker (“The Aviator”) and others share their editing techniques and describe how these techniques have changed over the years. Directors including James Cameron, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, and others, reveal the close collaboration with their editors.

Academy Award winning editor Alan Heim and Wendy Apple (Peabody Award-winner for PBS' “Lord of the Universe”) co-executive produced the documentary with NHK, STARZ! the BBC, and Warner Brothers Home Video. Apple, who also directed the film, will be on hand to introduce the film and describe how she became inspired to examine, share, and celebrate the craft of movie editing.

Don't miss the rare opportunity to see this critically-acclaimed documentary on the big screen!

From The Hollywood Reporter, Aug. 26, 2005

Docu 'Cutting' To Chase About History Of Editing
By Gregg Kilday

Proceeds from "The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing," which will be released Sept. 6 on DVD via Warner Home Video, will go to the American Cinema Editors Education Fund. But though that might suggest that the film, directed by Wendy Apple, is a spinach movie, a good-for-you instructional lecture it isn't.

Instead, it's a lively survey of the history of film editing: from the first experiments by "The Great Train Robbery" director Edwin S. Porter through D.W. Griffith's invention of "invisible" editing to the revolutionary techniques of such Russians as Dziga Vertov ("The Man With a Movie Camera") and Sergei Eisenstein to the classic Hollywood style of the '40s and '50s to the innovations of the French New Wave and its influence on such movies as "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Easy Rider."

Amid the history lesson, though, the movie offers plenty of human interest. Likening the relationship between directors and editors to a marriage, the docu offers up filmmaking partnerships like Quentin Tarantino and Sally Menke. Tarantino explains that he wanted a nurturing woman when he directed his first film, "Reservoir Dogs"; Menke recalls how she slowly coaxed him into shortening the date that John Travolta and Uma Thurman share in "Pulp Fiction."

Amid all the demonstrations of differing editing techniques, there are frank discussions of the choices directors and editors face. Steven Spielberg -- in discussing how his "Jaws" editor, the legendary Verna Fields, encouraged him to keep glimpses of the shark as brief as possible to heighten suspense -- admits that having worked so hard to film the recalcitrant model shark, his first instinct had been to include as much shark footage as possible. But, he confesses, he came to realize that the difference between using 38 frames and 36 frames meant the difference between "something really scary and something that looked like a great white floating turd."

ACE president Alan Heim, who served as one of the project's executive producers, says that not only has editing been known as the invisible art -- since in classic Hollywood editing, audiences are not meant to be aware of the cuts -- but that editors were often the invisible men and women in the filmmaking process. "I don't think editors are ever going to be celebrities," he says. "But we have earned more visibility than we've had in the past. It will be good if people understand a little bit more about the process."

Director Apple notes that at first even some of the editors she approached were hesitant about stepping forward because they are so used to remaining in the background. But because the relationship between editor and director is so close, she encouraged editors to speak with the directors with whom they'd worked and invite them to appear in the film as well. In a sense, "they donated the directors," she observes, and once the directors were on board, the editors then felt free to spill some of the trade secrets they all shared. "It's so wonderful," she says, "when you have directors like Tarantino, Spielberg and (Alexander) Payne saying basically that a film is made in the editing room."

The film -- a presentation of Starz Encore Entertainment, co-produced by Japan's NHK and the BBC, written by Mark Jonathan Harris, edited by Tim Tobin and narrated by Kathy Bates -- also periodically looks into an editing room where Walter Murch is working on Anthony Minghella's "Cold Mountain."

A veritable philosopher of the art, Murch stands up when he is working, pacing like a conductor, ready to pluck the right image at just the right moment as if he were orchestrating notes in a symphony. "You're able to journey through a cut with Walter -- he adds so much to the film," Apple says. "He shows that editing truly is entertaining."