Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/462877
39 WINTER 2015 / CINEMONTAGE by Rob Feld portraits by Martin Cohen T he way Plummy Tucker, ACE, caught the film bug was almost unfair. Out of Middlebury College and visiting the Delaware boarding school where she'd spent two years of high school, she heard that a movie was going to be shooting on campus that needed a location liaison. It sounded cool so she applied for the job and spent the shoot as a location PA, also working in other departments, as Peter Weir directed Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. "It was a magical thing," the editor says. "The Teamsters would tell me, 'Don't get into the movie business because of this one, kid. It's never like this.'" But the dice were loaded and she was hooked. The film's location manager, Michael Meehan, gave her sage advice about the departmentalized nature of the film business. "He told me, 'You should really look at the jobs at the top of each track, see where you want to end up and get on that track,'" she recalls. "I'd been an English major and done a lot of creative writing and theatre, and I wanted to be involved in telling stories." Writing, directing and editing interested her, but she didn't know a thing about filmmaking. "Editing has an apprenticeship path where you can learn about filmmaking," she explains, "so when people asked, I'd say I was interested in editing — even though I didn't really know what it was." Tucker worked her Dead Poets relationships in LA to get internships in editing rooms, eventually working for Nancy Richardson, ACE, who became a mentor, and finding her way back to New York as a Guild apprentice on Weir's Green Card under William Anderson. After working for years as John Sayles' assistant and then additional editor, Tucker was asked by Sayles' former assistant, Karyn Kusama, to edit her first feature, 2000's Girlfight. Tucker has edited all of Kusama's films since, the latest being The Invitation, set to premiere at SXSW in March, with a distributor and general release date undetermined at press time. It's a creepy story about a once-loving husband and wife, the latter of whom disappears after the loss of their son — only to return years later as an eerily changed person with a different husband. In addition, Tucker recently finished work on the premiere episode of the NBC miniseries The Slap, directed by Lisa Cholodenko, which premieres February 12. It is based on the novel and an Australian TV series of the same name, and concerns what happens to a group of old friends when one of its members slaps the misbehaving child of another couple at a party. Her credits also include episodes of the TV series The Red Road and Power, and Alex Gibney's documentary, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. "Like Mike Meehan said to me back in the day, not only is the business departmentalized once you get on the track, but once you cut a romantic comedy that makes money, all anyone wants you to do is cut a romantic comedy," Tucker says. "So I keep trying to jump around." Between jumps, Tucker found the time to talk to CineMontage about her varied career, including her upcoming projects. CineMontage: Your path took you through some great experiences. What were some of the lessons learned from those apprenticeship moments? Plummy Tucker: I worked for many years with John Sayles. He is such an amazing storyteller; I learned so much about story structure, on the script level, from him. Working with him really was a family filmmaking situation. Cutting in his garage in the middle of nowhere, we'd edit all day and hang around at night and have dinner. It was a great intersection of work and life. I wish more experiences could be like that. As far as learning about editing per se, after Green Card, I went on to be assistant editor on Peter Weir's Fearless, again with editor Bill Anderson. Bill is such a good editor; he cut on a KEM and we'd go through the dailies to organize the material, which was a wonderful way to learn. I still have my assistants prepare my dailies notes the way he had us do it for him: scene, take, short description, camera, sound roll, date shot info. Then I make quick, first-impression notes while screening. In that day and age, it was nice because you would screen dailies with the director. That almost never The Slap, NBC.