Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1151081
45 Q3 2019 / CINEMONTAGE poor at that time, and all I could do was walk by and stick my nose up against the window and look in with a girlfriend." A few years later he was able to muster his first meal at Musso's — scrambled eggs for breakfast in one of the restaurant's best booths — but, soon enough, Leighton was a regular. At the time, he wasn't a martini drinker, but he became one thanks to a favorite bartender named Nick. "From sitting and drinking so many martinis there, I learnt how to make a martini from him," the editor recounts. By the time Leighton was in the midst of his multi-year collaboration with director Rob Reiner, including Stand by Me (1986) and Misery (1990), late-day jaunts to Musso's had become a sort of ritual. "I could go down at like eight o'clock," he recalls. "During that period of Rob's films, we were editing in a little cutting room about five minutes away from Musso's." BUSINESS AND PLEASURE The restaurant is often a place where work relationships are forged. "Business is conducted there, as well as personal affairs," says Tronick, who began going to Musso's in the mid-1970s. During that period, while cutting Robert Wise's The Hindenburg (1975), Cambern remembers being invited to share a meal there with the director — the ultimate compliment. "He took me to lunch there one time during The Hindenburg," the editor comments. "That was really a mark for me because Bob was such a highly regarded director and he was such a gentleman. He was fun to talk to because he had started as an editor himself at RKO Studios and had edited Citizen Kane [1941] and The Magnificent Ambersons [1942]." In 1982, picture editor and past Guild President (1988-1991) Carol Littleton, ACE, had just finished cutting Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when she went to Musso's for a celebratory lunch with assistant editors Bruce Cannon (now an ACE editor) and Kathleen Korth. Then she ran into her boss from her previous job at Grey Advertising, Fred Schiller. "He asked what I'd been doing since I quit Grey some six years before to become a film editor," she remembers. "I said that we had just finished E.T. and had been viewing prints for a screening that evening. Fred was not familiar with the film and said pointedly, 'What a lousy name for a film — who directed it and what did you do on the film?'" Littleton told Schiller that Spielberg was the director, that she was the editor and that the film had received a standing ovation when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. "Fred, as I suspected, had not heard me and rejoined as he walked toward the exit, 'Oh, so you were the assistant, right?'" she continues. "He had warned me when I quit that I was unbearably naïve and would never make it as an editor in this cutthroat business." The editor — who was nominated for an Oscar for her work on E.T. — considers this Musso's memory to be "the best example of selective hearing" she has encountered in her decades in the industry. In an interview with The Hollywood CONTINUED ON PAGE 69 Picture editor Bob Murawski and music editor Ellen Segal in the Orson Welles booth at Musso & Frank's in 2018. Photo by Christopher Fragapane Editors Tim Squyres, left, and Michael Kahn at the post- IA/VA luncheon at Musso's in 2013. Photo by Deverill Weekes