The Making of a Motion Picture Editor. Thomas A. Ohanian

      TO: David, you are an Academy Award recipient for your work on Born on the Fourth of July. How did you get your start in the film business?

      DB: I got out of college and I knew that I wanted to be in film, somehow. I was at Stanford, but it didn’t have a great film program at that time. So I applied to USC and UCLA but I didn’t have enough of a portfolio, so I got wait listed. My sister Leslie was an assistant to Les Charles on Cheers and I finally got a job as an extra for a showrunner she knew for a couple of days. I was a PA (Production Assistant) on a non‐union picture and it was a really humiliating experience. I spent the whole day standing by a generator and making sure it didn’t run out of gas.

      TO: Oh, gosh, what a start.

      DB: Some AD called me away and, of course, it did run out of gas. That gig didn’t work out. Finally, I found a job as a post‐production intern on a movie called Radioactive Dreams. I was excited about the editing room because I had some mentors who were editors. I knew Richard Chew through a friend of my father’s. And I went up to the Lucas Ranch and saw him cutting Star Wars on a KEM.

      TO: Talk about an introduction to the craft.

      DB: He had two eight‐plate KEM’s in interlock and I remember him cutting the scene where Darth Vader was holding up his general by the neck. I remember talking to him about his experience editing The Conversation and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. He is just an amazing guy. They hired three interns on Radioactive Dreams. I was just reconstituting trims, but in doing that I learned that there was an ingenious system, which connected this film I was holding to the script itself. The key numbers from the negative were transcribed to a coding system (Acmade codes) that were carefully logged and could point you to a shot and take number from a scene in the script. That concept of a connection between photography and writing turned me on right away.

      TO: I think it’s great that something as easy to identify as that really got you going quickly.

      DB: I really gave that job everything. And my boss at the time, one of the Firsts, was Joe Hutshing.

      TO: You’re kidding.

      DB: No. After the job ended I was unemployed for like six months and it was Joe who called me about an apprentice gig. This show he was on had an immediate need and my job was to sync dailies in a lab in San Francisco, drive them up to Santa Paula, and show them to everybody. And I was crashing in the production coordinator’s house in San Francisco. Those were quite tough times.

      TO: Sure. It’s really hard to get started sometimes and, as you said, many people just give up.

      DB: I got through it, though. The movie was called The Blue Yonder and we posted at Lionsgate in Santa Monica. While we were posting the movie, I heard that they needed an assistant across the lot on this movie called Salvador by the guy who wrote Midnight Express. And the word was that people were afraid of him and people were working seven days a week, but that it was a really fun and intense project. So, I got my foot in the door to interview and that’s when I met Claire Simpson.

      TO: It just goes to show that with passion and perseverance you can make your way through the industry, which can be hard to get in and stay in.

      DB: A lot of it is persistence. It’s talent. The industry can be very discouraging. I try not to discourage people because the elements can come together. But you have to get through the hard times.

      TO: You worked with Claire on Salvador and then Platoon, for which she won her Academy Award for editing. And then you became an additional editor on Wall Street. What did you learn from your time with her?

      DB: Everything that’s important about editing. She had learned to cut in the English documentary world and then eventually found herself in the cutting room of Dede Allen. She was Dede’s First, I believe. So what Claire learned from Dede trickled down to all of us early Oliver people—me, Julie Monroe, Joe Hutshing, Pietro Scalia, others. And then the people who we all mentored, Dede’s knowledge trickled down through all of them I like to think. Me, I really started to learn on Platoon. On Salvador, I was one of three assistants. It was an eye-opening experience to working with such a challenging director. I think that experience for me was about facing often grueling hours and intense personalities. It was saying to me, ‘This is your little window of what the world can be like.’ And it was really about ‘Okay, do you really want to do this?’

      TO: It’s pretty amazing that you recognized the moment for what it was.

      DB: And it can be difficult on relationships. Horrendously difficult. I was there sometimes seven days a week. But, then, when Claire said, ‘Do you want to be my first assistant on Platoon?’ I said yes. And that’s when I really started to learn. And I think the answer is that I learned everything. As an editor, you realize how much of your knowledge comes from watching films. As far as the technical side, I learned everything from sitting next to Claire in the Philippines while she was cutting on a Moviola. And when editors were on the Moviola, the first assistant was really important, because the first assistant was like the source machine.

      TO: Sure, and you had to be thinking one step ahead.

      DB: Yes, I basically had to watch what she was doing and know, with all the material that we had, what she would want. And I had to get that material, open up the trim roll, hang it on the bin, and open up the lined script so that when she wanted an extension, you had to be able to get that quickly—using that coding system that I described. And all of it was intense in terms of being on top of your game, the state of the lined script, the state of the trims. Because you were there the whole time, you got to see every edit and how it was made. And you got to look as she looked at the script and looked at the material and to just see how she made decisions.

      TO: What a great opportunity to see, first hand, how it was done!

      DB: For instance, I saw that when she was cutting a scene, one of the first things she would do was to cut the dialogue. Make that work, almost like cutting a radio show in terms of the performance. And that’s what I learned from her—that dialogue editing is really the driver for picture. It’s something that Paul Hirsch, who I had met on The Blue Yonder, had told me. He said, ‘Cut the sound and the picture will follow’. And I didn’t really understand that until I was sitting with Claire and then I got it. That was the big foundation that I got from her creatively. But it wasn’t just that. Once we got back to L.A. and were posting, I learned a lot about the importance of music and the importance of temp music in shaping a scene.

      TO: Temp music can have a major influence early on in cutting a scene can’t it?

      DB: Yes, and music will totally change your feeling about a dry cut. Claire was the person who found the Samuel Barber piece (Adagio for Strings) to use on Platoon. And I just remember how that shaped and changed the mood of the scenes and how you felt about them.

      TO: Right. It’s a heart‐tugging type of feeling when you watch the images with that music.

      DB: That became really important