Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1515786
Pioneers CONTINUED FROM PAGE 28 at Twentieth Century Fox. She edited 62 out of her 64 films for Fox, and in 1960 she became the supervising editor there. However, she received more external recognition than Booth did, with seven Oscar nominations, including a win for "Wilson" in 1945, plus a Career Achieve- ment Award in 1988. She began her career in her father's film laboratory and arrived in Hollywood in 1921. She worked at the Pickford Company, sharing elevators with silent film star Mary Pickford and enjoying what she later de- scribed as "a close-knit family" atmosphere at the studio. McLean didn't escape the torment of the era's new technologies. In 1928, when she was working in the cutting department at First National on "Lilac Time," music was being added to pictures by way of a disc playing in the theatre that was supposed to sync up with the action in the picture. "Every day when the picture opened we used to go over to Carthay Circle Theatre and try to get it in sync," McLean later re- called. "Using a stopwatch and syncing the music crescendos to the airplane crashes, they would desperately try to get music and picture working together by adding a little more music or more length to the titles." McLean ended up doing some of the very earliest dialogue editing. Once, Mary Pick- ford had exclaimed on-camera about "these beautiful red roses" in a scene – although on black-and-white stock, the roses appeared white. McLean discreetly cut out the word "red." "You'd think I'd performed a brain operation," she later joked of the praise she received for the cut. McLean forged strong alliances with powerful leaders, including an extremely close relationship with Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck that in some ways resembled the ties between De Mille and Bauchens. "Stu- dio executives knew that when Mr. Zanuck prefaced a statement with 'Bobbie says...,' h e wa s n o t ex p re ss i n g a n o p i n i o n b u t announcing a decision," as one account put it. ■ Lucy Donaldson is a picture editor. 61 W I N T E R Q 4 I S S U E what he wanted. CineMontage: What was Mann looking for in the score? A p e l g re n : T h e re w a s o n e m o m e n t w h e r e w e w e r e e x p e r i m e n t i n g w i t h classical music, and he said, "Try these composers. I want to see if we can make some score out of all these different com- posers." We were experimenting with that up until the very end, but he nixed most of it because it was commenting too heavily on what was happening [on-screen]. It was either on the nose, or it was saying exactly what he didn't want. You realize that what he wants is a general vibe [in the music]. But it's funny because he also does want a score. He doesn't want just wallpaper, even though sometimes it feels like that, but that's not what he's looking for, either. It's a really fine balance. CineMontage: Did Mann always know which scenes he wanted scored and which scenes he didn't? Apelgren: His process is very fluid. He'll live with something that I'll find out he didn't like for a long time, just to remind himself why he doesn't like it. At the end, there was a lot of swapping out of cues at the very last minute. Again, when he's doing this last-minute stu, from my perspective, it could seem like "Oh, it's just kind of o the cu," but actually, he's clearly been thinking about it a while. CineMontage: Andy, do you feel the tight schedule aected your work? Nelson: The schedule for me was OK, and I'll tell you why: From its conception of script, through the discipline of shooting (because he had to shoot it within a certain, fairly brief amount of time), and the work that Pietro and he did to put the picture together in its edit, the picture was there. When I started on it, you never felt that there were scenes that were in play, or things that maybe weren't going to last. It played great. Scalia: There reached a point when we were coming close to "lock." I started to really see a change in Michael, and he really felt: "I think we're close. We got it." But that did not stop us from continuing to try different things. He always goes back and re-tweaks — maybe it's the sound, or the color, or something else is not quite right. But small adjustments don't change the overall movie. CineMontage: Did the close collaboration of the sound and editing crews help make the film come together in the end? Orloff: It was critical on this one that we had that degree of familiarity with each other, and Michael with us. Weiser: I've had this on a few occasions. It's not all that common where you have a crew that is so in tune with each other. No matter how difficult the project is, it makes it fun. And when you're sitting in that position, it's more creative and the communication is better. Everything becomes pluses. Scalia: I'm very happy that I got a chance to work with Michael and experience it with him. It wasn't easy; we dedicated a lot of hours to it. But I was very happy to be part of the ride. ■ Peter Tonguette is a frequent CineMontage contributor whose work also appears in The Wall Street Journal and National Review. 'Ferrari' CONTINUED FROM PAGE 41