Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1359892
22 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E bookshelf, I have the complete short sto- ries of Ernest Hemingway," Burns said. "It is not a week that goes by that I don't pick up and read before bed at least one. Several of them are — 'masterpiece' is not even the word: 'Hills Like White Ele- phants,' 'Up in Michigan,' and, of course, I would say 'The Killers.' . . . The best of all probably is 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro.'" Burns may be a longstanding admirer of Hemingway, but it took him close to a quarter century to turn his attention to a writer who, despite his demons and excesses, remains revered for the pithy honesty of his prose. Co-directed by Burns and Lynn Novick, the three-part d o c u m e n ta r y " H e m i n gwa y " w i l l b e shown over three nights on PBS stations from April 5-7. Burns, Novick, and a num- ber of key post-production personnel on the film recently spoke with CineMon- tage about its long and winding road to television screens — a process that included crucial decision-making during post-production, a phase valued by all who work at Burns' production company in Florentine Films, based in New York and in Walpole, New Hampshire. "We can collect all the rare and nev- er-before-seen archives . . . and you can have the best interviews in the world, but how you put them together is it," Burns said. "The whole editing process is just a continuation of the central creative process of our collective group." The seed for the project was planted by Burns' longtime collaborator Novick, who, in the mid-1990s, took a vacation to Key West, where Hemingway — who was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, but eventually blazed trails to Paris, Spain, and Cuba — had once made his home. Novick was already familiar with Hem- ingway's work, but when she took a tour of his residence — and had a close look at his writing room, which was staged to re- semble how it might have looked during the writer's lifetime — had something of The "Hemingway" post team: Ryan Gifford (left), Erik Ewers, Brian Lee and Cat Harris. P H O T O : E V A N B A R L O W