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25 S P R I N G Q 1 I S S U E F E A T U R E not wasted on sequences likely to be scrapped later on. Of course, eventually those segments of black screen do get filled in. During the preparation of any Burns project, a research team will start assembling archival stills one to two years before any editing is done. The images are imported into FileMaker to be accessed by the film- makers. "When I started 'Hemingway' I think there [were] probably around 500 images in the FileMaker database," said Ewers, but by the end of the process, some 17,000 were logged into the data- base, each with source, licensing, and quality information. To arrive at final selections, the directors and producers sit down with the editors. "We'd look at the pictures that are potentially possible, or footage, or we might say we don't have anything," Novick said. About 1,000 images are seen in the final film. "Hemingway" came with one big, inherent challenge: While many Burns p ro j e c t s re v o l v e a ro u n d i n h e re n t l y dramatic subjects, such as war, social change, or even baseball, this one profiles a writer, and much screen time is spent on his craft. "There isn't some huge, momentous event that we're centering around," said assistant editor Brian Lee. "We're talking about a guy's life that has a lot of drama and he's very interesting, but there's nothing like . . . a long battle scene or anything like that." To add visual interest at the get-go, Lee devised graphics that gave move- ment to the writer's handwriting: At the start of Episode 1, Hemingway's words on 'Films are only made in the editing room — period.' With scrupulously prepared scripts, meticulously chosen selects drawn from the interviews the f ilmmakers have conducted, and a strictly chronological narrative approach, at first glance it might seem that Burns' films offer little in the way of editorial invention. "We spend very little time in flashback, ever," Burns said. Yet, he added, within those parameters, there is enormous room for editorial adjustments. "The respiration, the rhythm, the inhalation and exhala- tion of it develops over time," Burns said. The specific rhythm and even length of any Burns project springs from the creation of what is called by Florentine veterans a "blind assembly": An editor will put together a version of an episode that includes on-camera interviews and narration (at this stage read by Burns rather than the f inal narrator, Peter Coyote) but no other imagery; a black screen is shown in lieu of yet-to-be- chosen archival stills or footage. "It's just so helpful, and people say, 'Oh, it's a radio play' — it's not that at all," Burns said. "You just hear it, and you begin to internalize a rhythm of a story. And then you are liberating the film by saying, 'OK, now go add pictures.'" As Burns and his collaborators de- scribe it, the blind assembly is something of an exercise in efficiency. By listening to passages of narration against a black screen, it's easier to recognize where the narration drags; and, where that narration drags, it might be cut before any actual substantive editing is done. "[The blind assembly] allows us to watch it and see how long it is and see where it's redundant," Ewers said. "We see what we can cut down so that we're not edit- ing scenes that are going to get thrown out anyway." "We're trying to nail down the struc- ture and get close to a running time," Novick added, so that editors' time is a page are seemingly being crossed-out and replaced by new ones. The animated scribblings have a kinetic poetry to them. "Famous lines or scenes or moments in stories are suddenly being edited before your eyes," Burns said. "That was crucial to us in telling the story." Working alongside Ewers were pic- ture editors Gifford, a seventeen-year veteran of Florentine productions who co-edited Episodes 1 and 2 with Ewers; and Harris, a relative newcomer who began as a research intern on "Vietnam," left Florentine to gain postproduction ex- perience, and returned to co-edit Episode 3 with Ewers. (Shepardson-Legere also co-edited Episodes 2 and 3.) Each editor stressed the importance of maintaining a uniform style between them. "There are different editing styles and then there's the Florentine overarching thread," said Harris, adding that one constant is a preference for letting episodes play at their natural lengths rather than rushing audiences from incident to incident. "There is a lot of breathing room for people to accept what you're seeing and hearing, in between narration, as well as while you're hearing that narration or different voices," she said. Not that there is anything shambling or shaggy about the documentary. In the end, the filmmakers say that the form of "Hemingway" reflected something of Hemingway himself. "Hemingway is the master of compression and sort of strip- ping away what's not necessary," Novick said. "We want the film to embody that, but not to be Hemingway-esque either — to sort of be within our style but to be the vessel of that." L a s t M a rc h , w h e n t h e C OV I D - 1 9 pandemic hit, the editors went from working as a team in New Hampshire to completing their work remotely. "Over SEE PAGE 53