Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/551510
30 CINEMONTAGE / SUMMER 2015 I n fact, D. Bassett & Associates is quite busy, with three union negative cutters and a PA on staff. The company just finished cutting a Christopher Nolan project and is expecting another "big film" soon. The company also spends a lot of time archiving film footage for Warner Bros. and Sony features shot on film but finished with a DI. Historically, the position of negative cutter dates back to the early days of cinema, when it was one of the first post-production jobs. Of course, her company doesn't have much competition; Henry believes she owns the last union negative cutting company, certainly in North America and, quite likely, the world. After a talk about her career at the Hollywood Post Alliance Tech Retreat in 2010, Henry ended up with a Wikipedia page and a Facebook fan club. That's quite the journey for the woman who very reluctantly joined the industry after graduating high school in 1974. Her father, himself a union negative cutter, heard that Universal Studios was so busy that the union had run out of members to call. "The union [IA Local 683, which merged into Local 700, the Motion Picture Editors Guild, in 2010] allowed them to start hiring off the street, and my dad heard about it and offered me the job," she recalls. "It was an unusual way to get in." Although Henry was already living on her own with a dream of being an interior designer, her father insisted she take the job. Her shift was 7:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., and her colleagues were "salty old women," as she describes them. "I was probably half the age of everyone else there," she says. "Now I'm one of the old ladies I used to work with!" The first thing she learned to do was to break down film; in those days, the negative cutter would break down every shot in a TV show or feature. "I started in opticals, which were the fades, dissolves and effects created there on the same floor as the optical department," Henry relates. "The reason they started me with these was that they could re- create them if I made a mistake." She quickly discovered she had a knack for the work. "I had the right personality and I was accurate," she says. The first feature Henry worked on was Jaws (1975). "At the time, the movie was in trouble and Verna Fields, an editor dubbed 'the film doctor' was involved," Henry recounts. "My boss, who happened to be my dad, asked me to start on it. He said, 'It looks like it's headed straight for TV, so if you make a mistake, nobody will know.'" When Henry couldn't get off the nightshift at Universal, she left for Quinn Martin Productions, a TV production company. "I bounced around at different TV production companies and labs, including CFI and Lorimar, " she says. "I liked TV because they'd go on hiatus during the summer, so I could work for nine months and then take the summer off at the beach." Because there was such a divide between features and TV, Henry found herself focused on TV shows, including The Waltons, Eight Is Enough, Cagney & Lacey and M*A*S*H. "I loved cutting M*A*S*H," she says. "It was only half an hour and the style was lots of long takes. Each reel had very few cuts, so it was fun to work on." Although 90 percent of the cutting she did in the late '70s was episodic TV, as an employee Henry did cut a reel or two of a feature for another cutter. "I had done some breakdown on features prior to learning to cut," she says. "The first feature I recall working on was The Empire Strikes Back [1980] for a cutter named Bob Hart." In her mid-20s, Henry tired of cutting negative and quit to become a real estate agent in Beverly Hills. "I loved houses and designs and thought real estate would put me in all these great houses," she says. "But it wasn't what I thought it would be." Soon she found herself back in the industry, as a PA for a commercial production company. She worked her way up to production coordinator but quit when she got pregnant and gave birth to her son Logan. When she and her husband were about to lose their insurance, it was Jaws. Universal Pictures