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53 SEP-OCT 14 / CINEMONTAGE by Norman B. Schwartz Once upon a time, 1959 or so, assistant film editors wore suits and ties. As good children were taught to do back then, we only spoke when spoken to. But somehow, in that distant era before the next generation took off their jackets and burned their bras, there was a small group of us — courageous young men and women who dared to show up to work at Columbia Pictures wearing open collars and corduroys, or, if you were a woman, slacks. A dangerous act of non- conformism in those clean-cut, button-downed, post-McCarthy days, but we knew we could get away with it because we were good, and I do not mean in a moral sense. Our dailies were ready on time and in sync, our splices never broke, the code numbers matched and, if commanded as such, we were always ready to leave our posts in the cutting-room to run across the street to buy the editor we were assisting his or her morning bottle of vodka at the nearest liquor store. Sid Levin, Fred Brown, Ralph Hall, a single woman named Shirley Citron and I took our coffee breaks and lunches together at the Copper Penny restaurant across from the studio entrance, which, unlike other plants in town, had only a wooden door. There in the red Naugahyde booths, we talked on and on about the films we had seen the night before — not the conventional studio product, but the work of the great European masters, Fellini and Bergman, whose films were being shown in out-of-the-way cinemas for the first time. We were passionate defenders of this new way of making film so unlike the big studio product whose dailies we synchronized and spliced so expertly. One day, an old timer at the studio overheard us gabbing away noisily as we came back from lunch. "Who is this damn Bergman you kids are always talking about? Is he related to Ingrid?" We told him about the films of a man who viewed the world through a glass darkly, and he insisted that we take him. When the lights came on in the art house, the old editor had this pronouncement to make: "That Swede can't direct. The picture starts with a close- up. Everyone knows you always begin with the master." In those dark days of ignorance, Shirley lived with another assistant editor — not one of us at the studio — in a sun- drenched, cantilevered house that leaned out, precariously, across Beverly Glen. His name was Ernst Rolf, Jr., son of the great Swedish entertainer with the same name, but known to us as Tom. Tom and Shirley had spent a year or more travelling and working in Europe where he had been engaged as a film editor on a feature film shot in Finland, and then as an assistant in Spain. They had both just returned to Hollywood. Shirley would often invite us to their nest. Her boyfriend, with his good looks and surfer's tan, would pour the drinks and listen to the rest of us babble on about the Art of the Cinema — capital A, capital C — without saying a word. Scandinavian by birth but Malibu by upbringing, Tom was too much of a gentleman to enter into, or dismiss, our pretentious conversations. Still, there was a distinct expression of disbelief on his face, a look easily read, that said, "What the hell does any of this crap have to do with making movies?" To Tom, who had once worked as delivery boy carrying paper bags of booze to closeted alcoholics out at the Malibu colony, being employed as an assistant editor in a major studio, as we were all then, was a better and more secure means of earning a living than being a soda jerk, or just a jerk. It was a job. Years later, when I got to know him better, I realized that he saw all of this in a much finer light than the rest of us, with our artistic affectations and impossible dreams. To Tom, Hollywood was a company town where films were manufactured, rather than automobiles. The product coming off the assembly line was put together in a certain prescribed manner, one of whose more costly steps was the cutting apart and putting together of images and sound. Those assistant editors who had acquired the mechanical skills required in the assembly were paid very well, far better than most other entry-level jobs available in town. Those of us who did the assistant editing job exceptionally well, and paid our dues (union and otherwise), were promised that one day, for some eight years hence, we would qualify for the top job on the chart — feature film editor — which paid even better. That was what it was all about, as far as Tom was concerned. And if there was any art or — or ART — to it, as some claimed PASSAGES CONTINUED ON PAGE 55 THE SWEDE HEREAFTER MEETING TOM ROLF Tom Rolf in the early 1970s. Courtesy of American Cinema Editors Inc.