Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/600849
21 FALL 2015 / CINEMONTAGE associate director — which is a totally different job. In addition, AD is also the initials for an art director. Conversations on the Members of the DGA Facebook page reflect this attitude. Assistant directors have just grown to accept the initialized moniker, but that doesn't mean they like it. While the title "assistant director" obviously dates back to the pre-cinema era of theatre, the origins of its acronym are still somewhat murky. The entertainment industry trade publication Variety, which has been coining its own distinctive "slanguage" soon after it debuted in 1905 — likely as a means of fitting long words into limited space for headlines when type was still set by hand — includes a dictionary of its famous (or infamous) made-up terms on www.variety.com. Among them is "a.d." (in lower-case letters and with periods), meaning assistant director. This connection may be far from conclusive, but it's a fair bet that this abbreviation to mean an assistant film director (the term's not really used in the stage world) was born as a last resort of a space-challenged copy editor trying to squeeze a headline onto a page in the early days of the trade paper. For what it's worth, "d.p." is also included in Variety's slanguage dictionary. Now, however, in 2015, I think that we (fellow picture editors and assistants, reality or scripted, union or non-union) are at a crossroads with the relatively new term AE. And we have an opportunity to stop it, or it too will become "stuck." So, what do we prefer? I worked in scripted television for 27 years and yet it was not until working on my first reality show in 2004 that I heard an assistant editor referred to as an AE. "The association of the term AE with reality television seems to be where it started," says sound editor F. Hudson Miller, MPSE. "In the 75-plus years of the Editors Guild's history, assistant editors have always been referred to — both contractually and in working relationships — as assistant editors; 'editor' being the operative word. The term AE serves to divide the assistant editor from the editor. For the past dozen years or so, one of the Guild's big concerns has been that assistant editors are no longer being mentored into the editor's chair. This moniker serves to stress the difference, and not the similarity, of the jobs." "If you want a cause to champion, it should be dropping assistant from the name and changing it to something that doesn't make producers think it is okay to ask you to get coffee," comments the anonymous assistant editor. "The mentoring thing is an issue, but it has absolutely nothing to do with initializing someone's title. If assistant editors have an issue with people giving them an initialed title — just like that given to a creative department head like the DP — then they need to check their egos at the door." Editor Maureen O'Connell makes an interesting counterpoint: "I believe that there are people in certain segments of our industry who are invested in designating assistant editors — verbally and on paper — as AEs. This is very much technology-speak, intentionally moving away from the arts and into engineering or near-military terminology, and is just as dehumanizing. It reminds me of why we formed, and still need, our Guild. Guilds are siblinghoods of artists, learning their art, craft and trade in a journeyman structure, and apprenticed to be able to move up the creative ladder. Assistant editors are editors, as are apprentices. They just have not yet attained the highest level of their art. "To refer to them by initials rather than their Guild-conferred artistic title is to allow management to define them," she continues. "And I cannot possibly convey how eager management is to disempower us all." To which Miller adds, "Removal of the word editor from the title is just another attempt to reduce post jobs to technical rather than creative positions." In my opinion, the AE title sounds less important, like the title "digitizer," who could know nothing else (that's the implication), versus an assistant editor, "The association of AE with reality television seems to be where it started. Assistant editors have always been referred to — both contractually and in working relationships — as assistant editors; 'editor' being the operative word. The term AE serves to divide the assistant editor from the editor. "If assistant editors have an issue with people giving them an initialed title — just like that given to a creative department head like the DP — then they need to check their egos at the door."