Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1397791
28 C I N E M O N T A G E Before the team even entered their re a l - l i f e ( a n d t h e n v i r t u a l ) c u t t i n g rooms, though, they had to hit the books — which, in this case, meant hitting the reruns. After all, evoking old sitcoms required re-watching, well, a lot of old sitcoms. "We watched a bunch — we watched from 'Bewitched' to 'Dick Van Dyke,'" said Roche, who edited Episodes 1, 4, and 7. Absorbing the style of those and other old shows, the editor trained himself to hold shots that, in most modern-day c o m e d i e s , w o u l d b e s h o r t e n e d o r scrapped in favor of singles or close-ups. "The big difference is that a lot of the jokes happened in two-shots and three-shots," said Roche, who, in his desire to let jokes land without editorial intervention, compared his role to that of a catcher in a baseball game. "My job is to get out of the way and not to be noticed. The only time you notice a catcher in baseball is when they're bad." As Khodai sees it, many of the sitcoms that influenced "WandaVision" had the cadence and pacing of stage plays. "'I Love Lucy' is so much more fast-paced than, say, comedies today," said Khodai, who edited Episodes 3, 5, and 8. "Those actors prepped, maybe more, I think, than we have time for today." In fact, to add to the authenticity, the "Lucy"-in- spired Episode 1 was produced in the presence of a live studio audience; subse- quent episodes made use of laugh tracks as needed. The discipline to let a scene play sometimes cut against the editors' grain. O n o n e e a r l y e p i s o d e , s a i d f i r s t assistant editor Webber, "we kind of went with what your standard belief C O V E R S T O R Y 'My job is to get out of the way and not to be noticed.' Nona Khodai. P H O T O : M A R K E D W A R D S the aesthetics of each sitcom era were artfully reproduced. That fidelity ex- tended to the work of the postproduction team, who sought to evoke the distinctive editorial rhythms and sound mixing of old sitcoms. "We were trying to support Wanda's emotional journey through the different eras," said Zene Baker, ACE, who — along with Tim Roche, ACE, Nona Khodai, ACE, and Michael A. Webber — was one of four picture editors to work on the series. "She's discovering things about herself in each episode." The result? The picture and sound editors crammed several decades' worth of references to the Golden Age of Tele- vision into the series, which premiered, to critical acclaim and high audience interest, in January on Disney+. "'WandaVision' was conceived as an intricate pastiche of TV comedy and big-screen action and, as such, the tone was a high-wire act," Schaeffer told C i n e M o n ta ge. "O u r p o s t p ro d u c t i o n team understood and enhanced each switchback and left turn of the show. The picture and sound editing team's excel- lence shines through every joke, jump scare, and heartbreaking clinch."