Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/551510
33 SUMMER 2015 / CINEMONTAGE Staenberg, was also my friend, and he won an Oscar for it." Earlier in her career, Henry cut Ghost (1990) when she was an employee at Paramount Pictures. "Fortunately, I was cutting in sequence," she says. "When you cut with a work print, you take a look at the shot so you can determine if you actually have the right shot; in the old days, key numbers were duplicated so you really had to stare at the shot in the positive print and then the negative to eye-match it." Although there was no sound, cutting Ghost in sequence allowed her to follow the story. "When I got to the scene at the end when Patrick Swayze comes back as a ghost, I was crying my eyes out," she says. "And I was right…it was a big hit." Another favorite is Garden State (2004), the indie movie written and directed by actor Zach Braff. "It was done on a shoestring and the editor was Myron Kerstein," Henry recalls. "We'd hang out at Zach's house in Laurel Canyon and wound up having this film school to get it done. I had always been in the lab before and never actually worked next to filmmakers. They were great people. I got treated like a real colleague and it was really a pleasure." Although the future of film didn't look bright when Kodak appeared to be winding down its film-centric activities, directors like Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, J.J. Abrams and Judd Apatow banded together with studios to save the medium for use in filmmaking. "When people realized film was an option, we got busier," Henry reports. "People who would have chosen to work with film in the past didn't because they were afraid film would dry up mid- production. Once everyone knew the film would be there, people started shooting on it again." D. Bassett & Associates continues to be busy with archiving of film for features shot on film but finished in a DI. "My group gets the Avid list from editorial and we pull out all the shots that ended up in the final product and put them together reel by reel," she explains. "We have a logging system that combines computer software and old-fashioned synchronizers to create metadata for the studio to use. It'll tell you the event number, scene and take, original lab and camera rolls. It's a GPS for scanning the film and re-assembling it." What does Henry think now about the future of film? "I think it will continue to be a boutique way of filmmaking by a handful of people," she says. "But I don't think it'll ever really have a renaissance as far as the number of people doing it. There are fewer people in the Editors Guild who know how to handle film, and there aren't the resources needed. When we were cutting The Dark Knight [2008], Chris Nolan's editorial team called to ask for splicing tape, and we went on eBay and Facebook to find it. That's where we are. It'll be difficult to find the stuff and it'll be expensive. Only big filmmakers will be able to shoot film." And will there be negative cutters? "I begged my people to buy my company from me, but they don't want to," responds Henry, who plans to semi-retire in August. "All of my talk about the end of film came back and bit me." Still, she notes that she employs three union negative cutters who can take over: Andrea Ficele, Jim Hall and Phyllis Modugno. And she's not going anywhere for a while. "I'm sticking around," Henry says. "I want to see where all this ends." f "I thought negative-cutting would end fast, and I'm shocked that I'm still doing it."