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62 CINEMONTAGE / Q1 2017 thoroughly and carefully… Your first impressions are the strongest and the most critical." From their many years of experience, the authors truly know this terrain well. Friedberg spent five decades editing for companies like Disney, National Geographic and Stephen J. Cannell. Coleman has been an editor in Hollywood for over 40 years, working in features, movies-of-the-week, miniseries and episodic TV. They augment their own observations and hard-won insights with brief comments from ACE members who have made the transition to editor. Advice ranges from Editors Guild President and former ACE President Alan Heim's sardonic "A great amount of an editor's time is spent at the junction of what the director shot and what he thinks he shot," through Mark Helfrich's humanistic "Look for opportunities to get an editing gig, but remember to be respectful about wanting to advance. Once you get the break, be grateful," to Maysie Hoy's tongue- in-cheek "My piece of advice to all assistants making the move to editor is this: Find an editor who likes to have two martinis and a glass of white wine for lunch. Before they take their nap, ask them if you can work on a scene... Edit the scene and, at the end of the day, wake them up and ask them for their opinion." Hoy's intimate, conversational tone is characteristic of Jump Cut. The authors utilize their expertise, not only as editors but also as educators, to clarify and make accessible a highly specialized subject. They intersperse their own ideas with bits of wisdom from sources as diverse as Walter Cronkite, Stanley Kubrick and Buddha. One of the most repeated and wise pieces of advice is to understand and spend time editing sound. Another is to volunteer to cut the gag reel for the wrap party, and includes clues of how to do that so everyone is happy. Coleman and Friedberg hold out hope that one can make a transition from assistant if one works extremely hard and is extremely talented — and extremely lucky. Unlike Make the Cut, there are few diagrams and charts. One of the few images explains "stacks" for reality shows; unfortunately, it is so small and poorly printed as to be unreadable. There is plenty of advice, however, that transcends the technical. Examples include hints on how to place credits in episodic television and the difference between the Main Title sequence and the Opening CONTINUED FROM PAGE 57 Credits. There is also a small glossary and an index. There are some missteps about documentary history that are disconcerting. A blanket statement about network television documentaries — "On the whole, they were not regarded as prime viewing material" — repeats a misconception about the role of nonfiction programming for CBS and NBC in the late 1950s and early 1960s, ignoring the vitality of shows like Edward R. Murrow's See It Now and the first cinema vérité films produced in the US, made by Robert Drew and Associates (including Albert Maysles, DA Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock) for ABC. Also misleading is a reference to Pare Lorentz as an "early American film critic." Lorentz did write film criticism, but was not "early" in the game; poet Vachel Lindsay's 1915 book The Art of the Moving Picture is generally considered the first book of film criticism, and newspaper reviews existed since the first movie was projected. Lorentz is far-better known as the maker of the classic documentaries The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, edited by Leo Zochling, who in the early 1960s edited 25 episodes of CBS' The Twentieth Century) and The River (1938, edited by Zochling and longtime Hollywood studio editor Lloyd Nosler). Historical mistakes such as these are beside the main point of Jump Cut, but could have been easily corrected by the publisher employing a fact checker. Jump Cut is especially strong in the ways it approaches the art and craft of documentary editing, recognizing that there are far fewer rules in nonfiction forms than in fully scripted and acted films. In this half of the book, the authors continue to encourage assistants to experiment and network, and even to save their money for those times between jobs. Good advice from working doc editors also continues as Kate Amend, ACE, describes an experience that many editors, documentary and other, would cherish: In paraphrase, two co-directors of a documentary presented her with all of their footage and asked what the next step was for them. She replied, "Well, why don't you go away for three weeks or so?" They looked at each other and said, "What?" But they did. In three weeks, she called them to come watch a 20-minute segment of the film. After running about a minute, she saw tears in their eyes as they said, "You're making our movie!" Gems like this story make Jump Cut a book that appeals to everyone who edits — or who aspires to. f CUT/PRINT Jump Cut authors Diana Friedberg, left, and Lori Jane Coleman. Photo by Martin Cohen