Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/681807
18 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2016 by Peter Tonguette T he wordsmith and the war correspondent were an item for not even a decade. Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn made each other's acquaintance in 1936, married in 1940 and divorced in 1945. The two packed a lot into those nine years: He penned the acclaimed novels To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls, while she documented the latest developments in World War II. They each journeyed to write about the Spanish Civil War. The subject matter appealed to Joanie Diener, MPSE, who was hired to work on the made-for- television movie concerning the couple's personal and professional association: Hemingway & Gellhorn, which debuted on HBO in 2012. "I had read a lot of Hemingway's books when I was growing up, but I didn't really know about Martha Gellhorn," Diener says. "And I loved this strong female character in battle with Hemingway." Clive Owen was cast as Hemingway and Nicole Kidman as Gellhorn, but almost as impressive as the film's on-screen characters (which also included David Strathairn as John Dos Passos and Molly Parker as Hemingway's previous wife, Pauline) was its off-screen talent, including director Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff; The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and picture editor Walter Murch, ACE, MPSE, CAS, as well as composer Javier Navarrete, music supervisor Evyen Klean, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Douglas Murray, and re- recording mixer Lora Hirschberg. "Besides the subject matter, it was the people I was working with," Diener says. "Working with Walter was kind of like going to grad school again." The native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was raised in Southern California and attended the University of California, Berkeley with an eye toward a career in music. After receiving her bachelor's degree in music, Diener immersed herself in early music and musicology as a graduate student at Boston University. "Music is what I studied," she reflects. "I was a big lover of film." Following school, and several years of performing as a singer-songwriter, it was suggested that Diener merge her education with her enthusiasm. "Someone advised me, 'Wow, you should be a music editor,'" she remembers. "The person told me it would teach me about how films are made, how films are put together — and how music works with film." MY MOST MEMORABLE FILM Joanie Diener on 'Hemingway & Gellhorn' Hemingway & Gellhorn. HBO/Photofest Joanie Diener.