Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487730
with me while I cut Foley for new scenes they added. It was a great experience to sit and work with Chuck as we put the polish on his old film. My brother Sam Crutcher also worked on the original E.T. in 1982 with Chuck. At that time I had just graduated from high school. Leap forward 20 years later, I get to share screen credit with him on the 20th anniversary release of E.T. A film I loved. That's just wild! My time in features was great but I found that they became few and far between. Your first day on a feature is your first phone call toward the next job. Nobody was bringing you a show. You had to call somebody and say, "Well ... you got a show coming up?" I remember back in the days when I was an apprentice. I worked on a show called The Pickup Artist with Robert Downey Jr. That show went on for over a year, and they paid you for the whole time even during the temp dubs. Once digital came in, those long schedules went away and they started laying people off after the initial edit was complete. The timeframes of features became six months and many times just three months. So to stay afloat, you had to have 3-4 films a year, at three months apiece. That's a lot of hustling for projects. In television, work is on a per-episode basis. If it's 22 episodes, you have 22 weeks of work. Everybody used to put their nose up at working in TV and now many want to work in it for the consistency. You started seeing big actors and feature sound editors shifting to work in TV. The luxurious timeframes on features are huge compared to the tight turnaround of a weekly TV show. I've had to let go of many feature editors because they couldn't keep up with the TV edit schedule. Those that eventually adapt, do well. My initial work in television was seasonal. Almost like that of a teacher's schedule, as streaming wasn't a thing yet. We'd be working nine months and be off for three, sometimes more. This usually meant I got time off in summer to be with the kids. Over the years, we kept wondering if the season would expand, to be yearly one day. Then when streaming started to expand we wondered if it would catch on. Today it's here in a big way, there are so many shows and streaming platforms. You can work year-round and make a good living at it. I've been lucky to have had the career I have and it's not because of my family name. If you don't have the skills, nobody cares who your family is, and you're out of the job. The hours in this career can be very demanding. My friends outside the industry don't understand what we do and how we could work like this. There's nothing normal about how we work. Typical conversations go like this: