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T A I L P O P THE AUTHOR STARTED HIS FILM JOURNEY EARLY, VERY EARLY FAMILY TIES By Jeff Freeman I was born into a family of filmmakers. It was 1955, and I was four years old. My stepfather and mother, Art and Jo Na- poleon, were about to make a feature film, "Man on the Prowl." It was a low-budget independent movie and money was tight, so my brother Josh and I were cast as the two young children. To add to my con- fusion, the "set" was where we lived in Beverly Hills -- a bungalow apartment on South Maple Drive -- and the director, writ- ers and producers were my parents. What could go wrong? Being on a film set was crazy and won- derful at the same time. Being four years old, I felt excited, and was made to feel special by everyone in the crew. Suddenly I was living with 50 to 60 other people. The movie was about a psychotic killer (James Best) who spies a girl he knew in high school (Mala Powers) and decides to go after her and her two young children while her husband (Jerry Paris) is away on a business trip. It was a suspense thriller in the style of Alfred Hitchcock. The killer was supposed to be stalking us at our house. To have a four and a six-year-old look frightened, my parents had to really scare us. One scene involved a motorcycle with a side car coming straight at me at what seemed to me to be 90 miles per hour. I didn't have to pretend to be scared for that scene. I remember I had to do two takes, and of course no amount of reassurance from my parents could convince me that it was safe. I don't think I quite got that this was indeed "pretend." That filmmaking experience was just the beginning for me. I worked for my parents on another film, "The Activist," when I was 15, but this was behind the camera — hold- ing the boom and recording the dialogue on a Nagra sound recorder with my brother Josh. That gave me a different perspective. The film was edited in our house in Westwood, and seeing the 16mm Moviola in our garage was the be- ginning of my experience with film editing up close. It looked like spaghetti, and the sound of it whip- ping through the Moviola was constant. The young e d i to r wa s n o n e o t h e r than Michael Kahn, ACE, who was just starting out. My stepfather had known Michael for a long time. About that same time, I finally saw "Man on the P r o w l ." ( E v e n t h o u g h I was an actor in it, the subject matter made it impossible for me to see when I was younger.) I found it riveting. Shot in black and white, Jimmy B e s t w a s a m a z i n g a s the killer, seething with d a n g e r a n d i m p u l s i v e behavior at every turn. I remember the suspense building when the killer was in our apart- ment. There was a life-size inflatable of Bozo the Clown, and when the cut came to the close up of it rocking back and forth to- ward camera — I jumped out of my seat and began to understand the power of editing. I ended up going to UCLA film school, and when I took an editing class, cutting my first scene from "Gunsmoke" dailies, I loved it. The professor, Ed Brokaw, used my cut as an example of what to do with the scene for the class. That gave me confidence. Much later, after editing movies for 40 years, I got to watch "Man on the Prowl" again because I wanted the Academy Li- brary to have a digital print of the film, and thankfully, I got Technicolor to help me out. Seeing it this time, I realized how dated it was and how stilted the dialog now seemed to be next to current films. Some movies are like that. You see them and think they're the best things ever made, and then you see them again and the pacing is slower, the dialogue is dated, and it just doesn't affect you the same way it did when you originally saw it. However, being on that set in 1955 was the beginning of my film journey… from the inside out. ■ JJeff Freeman, ACE is a film editor ("Ted," "Cruel Intentions," "The Craft," "Hamlet 2," "The Waterdance"). He can be reached at: ffejers@yahoo.com. 'MAN ON THE PROWL': The set was the family home. 62 C I N E M O N T A G E