Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545099
32 M PS E . O R G BY VICKIE SAMPSON MPSE Stories from the TRIM BINS ver the years, I've accumulated a lot of "trim bin" experience. I was going to call this "Stories from the Trenches," later deciding that maybe "trenches" is too war-like a term, but sometimes post-production is war-like! I've enjoyed telling both people in the industry (like students and colleagues), as well as people outside of the industry, stories about my up-close and personal encounters with "stars" and celebrities. I'm sure everyone has great stories that have happened to them in their careers and it's fun to hear them. Over my 40-year career (and 10 more years of retirement editing), I want to share a few of them. ackground: I got into the union in 1973 when I was 20. But in the summer of 1970, before my last year of high school, I got to apprentice on a nonunion film that my mom, Kay Rose (sound editor), Verna Fields (film editor of Jaws), George Brand (well-known music editor), and even Richard Portman, re-recording mixer extraordinaire, worked on. It was a film directed by Ken Mattel (of Mattel Toy company fame) who wanted to try his hand at directing a film. I don't know whatever happened to it but it had a lot of top-notch people working on it! It was an exhilarating time for me to work with them as a "summer" job. We edited the film in the pool house in Verna's Encino home's backyard. Her black German shepherd dog "Bubbles" would leave her black hair everywhere—on the film tracks, in the trims and she would often just lie down across the Moviola pedals. I got bit by the film bug. But I went to college as an English major as I always wanted to be a writer. But hey, editing is a form of writing so that was fun AND I got to work alongside my mom, who had been so busy working during my childhood that I never saw her much. PLUS, I got a real paycheck that was more than any of my friends who were working at McDonald's. I had a chance to join the union on the film Cinderella Liberty in 1973 when Donn Cambern, the film editor (who later became President of the Editors Guild) decided that I would be a good fit for the film. I loved being around the filmmakers—director Mark Rydell and the actors James Caan and Marsha Mason. It was an exciting time to be privy to what went into editing a film. There were no film schools teaching post-production sound. If anything, sound was just something that got done before the film was released. Back then, you had to be on the roster at the union. And you had to hire someone from the roster before you could add any new people to it. Donn went through the list—there were about 10 people who were on the availability list. He claimed they were all alcoholics, so I was able to enter the list! My mom was the supervising sound editor on O B