Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/370852
35 SEP-OCT 14 / CINEMONTAGE appropriate for the project, and found out about the self- publishing and distribution platform Smashwords from an article in Esquire magazine. A friend in Hawaii helped him get it on the Smashwords site in March and another friend, who had been hired to upgrade Smashwords as a premium site, helped Woo get the book uploaded as a premium submission. The premium site converts the files into multiple e-book formats for downloading onto various e-book reading devices. Once published, the books are made available for sale online at a price set by the author. For more information about Life's Abyss, see www. smashwords.com/books/view/422532. Woo also maintains his own website — www.lifesabyss. com — with other material about the book, including a gag reel he put together for the film. "It was a welcome timeout for the crew from the daily grind of production. Everyone felt included," he says. PICTURE EDITOR JOHN HEATH John Heath, the author of Concrete Wedding Cake: What I Have Learned about Motion Picture Editing and Other Stuff, comes from the third generation of a movie family. His grandfather, Frank Heath, was an assistant director from the silent days into the 1950s, and his father, Lawrence Heath, edited TV series, TV movies and features into the 1980s. Heath himself first started to learn editing summers and weekends watching his dad in the cutting room of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950-58). Although he learned the craft on the Moviola, he says, "I prefer the Avid over everything." With a hefty list of credits as editor, producer and director, he currently is editing the TNT spy series Legends (2014-present) and is also in post-production on a feature, The Last Night Inn (2015), which he also directed. Drawing from his lifetime of experience, it took Heath a year to write Concrete Wedding Cake and edit it down into a concise and straightforward account of how to approach the editing of a narrative dramatic film. The title comes from the classic editor's complaint, "Today's dailies were a concrete wedding cake — beautiful to look at, impossible to cut." Heath says the motivating factor in writing was "to explain why something does not work. You can't be a good John Heath working on St. Elsewhere in 1985. Photo by Alec Smight