Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/309120
34 CINEMONTAGE / MAY-JUN 14 one of the leads." Schmidt was out of a dream job, and desperate for work. It turns out that English editor Jim Clark needed an American standby editor for Marathon Man (1976). "I'd been a big fan of Jim's editing for a long time," says Schmidt. "They'd already hired someone, a woman, but I think Jim's wife decided that wasn't a good idea because the last time Jim had a female standby editor he married her! I got the job by default." There was a huge backlog of film on the production. "One day, Jim said, 'Why don't you take this and see if you can make it better?'" Schmidt laughs. "Making a Jim Clark sequence better? I very nervously showed it to him and he went on about what a nice job I'd done." Clark, who usually edited alone, started giving his standby more scenes to cut. "He became a great friend and mentor, and gave me a huge opportunity." Soon, Schmidt was hired to edit running sequences for Michael Mann's TV movie The Jericho Mile (1979). "Michael came in with someone, telling me, 'He knows nothing about film editing, could you show him what you've got?'" the editor recalls. Schmidt only had 45 seconds of the opening edited, set to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." "Mann said, 'Thank you very much,' and left." The next day, Mann fired his other editor. "I had no idea they were having problems," Schmidt says. "Michael gave me complete freedom to do whatever I wanted. He has a reputation for being difficult, but he was wonderful to me. He had confidence in me — which gave me confidence in myself." Schmidt won an Emmy Award and the ACE Eddie Award for his work. Clark had recommended Schmidt to Michael Apted for Coal Miner's Daughter (1980). "I'd worked on so many difficult films that I was used to editors fixing everyone's mistakes," he says. "But there was none of that here. The performances, the directing, the shooting were so wonderful. Somehow, I needed to be that good." Schmidt received an Oscar nomination for the editing. "You're lucky to get one film like that in a career. I was convinced I'd peaked, and it was downhill from there." While editing Apted's Firstborn (1984), Schmidt first met director Zemeckis, who was looking to find the lead in Back to the Future (1985), Marty McFly. The director looked at the young actors in the edit on which Schmidt was working. "There was this long silence," Schmidt says. "Finally I said, 'Well, what do you think?' Bob said, 'Well, I don't think either of those guys is Marty — but I really like the way those scenes were cut!' I probably turned about six shades of red. It must have sounded like I was fishing for a compliment. I just wanted to break the silence." Zemeckis called Schmidt into Universal for an interview, and so began a long partnership. "We were very comfortable working together," Schmidt says of his first collaboration with Zemeckis. "It just seemed so natural and effortless. He's a brilliant writer, and always very involved in the scripts of his films. He's wonderful directing actors, and great in the editing room. We always seemed to be in sync." But the schedule on Back to the Future was so tight that Schmidt couldn't do it alone. So he recommended his friend and fellow editor Keramidas, who was hired as co-editor — and worked with Schmidt on both of the film's sequels as well as Zemeckis' Contact (1997). "Artie and I were very compatible in style," says Keramidas. "If either of us were stuck, we could pass scenes back and forth. And Bob is a strong director, he knows what he wants, and he tells you. He'd give us all the changes backwards while the KEM rewound!" The job was so punishing that afterwards, Schmidt took six months off — "Recuperating, and vowing never to do a schedule like that ever again. Of course, Arthur Schmidt, left, with fellow Guild members who worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit: the late supervising sound editor Charles Campbell, Foley artist Ellen Heuer, then Foley record- ist Greg Orloff and Foley artist John Roesch at the Editors Guild's Flashback screening of the film in Los Angeles in April 2012. Photo by Deverill Weekes CineMontage_May-Jun_14-3.indd 34 4/15/14 2:54 PM