Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/711111
26 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2016 Once an opening shot was selected, Elmiger and Rudolph would tackle the rest of the scene. "He would say, 'Well, you just need to cut when we're sick of this shot or we want to be somewhere else,'" she explains. "We would get done with a particular shot and then we would say, 'Okay, now what are we going to do?'" Especially challenging were complex scenes in which many characters congregated, often at parties or other gatherings. To add texture to such scenes, Rudolph photographed improvised dialogue exchanges between actors — even those in the background — and folded the resulting shots into the film. "Maybe Jane Adams and Rebecca Miller were having a conversation over there by the bookcase," she says, offering an example of the sort of material that was available to her in the cutting room. "And Martha Plimpton and Matt Malloy were fighting in the hallway." The editor remembers an especially challenging scene showing an afternoon party on the lawn of a lavish estate, during which Ross is heard discussing his concept for The New Yorker and other characters are engaged in conversation or play. Because so much footage had been shot, the editor faced an abundance of choices. "There were a lot of shots," she says. "People were at different parts of the estate. They were in different configurations at tables and getting up and wandering around. There were multiple storylines to keep going. Sometimes I would say, 'Oh my God, how is this ever going to become coherent?'" Furthermore, Rudolph's coverage did not always match in a conventional manner. In some cases, the solution was found in the sound. "If a shot didn't exactly go together where you might think it would, the sound would be the continuity," Elmiger recalls. "There was a smoothness to it, but a lot of it was audio. The sound kept things flowing properly." Many of the scenes came with wild tracks that had been recorded without image. "Alan would turn off the camera, because it was shot on film and it wasn't so cheap to keep the camera running all the time," Elmiger says. "But he would be interested in keeping the sound running." The editor was tasked with combining the tracks to create overlapping dialogue. "I would cut together selects and create different conversations that were off-screen and layer them in multiple audio tracks on the Avid," she recounts. "So there would be a smooth, simultaneous conversation, but it wouldn't sound like a mishmash." No dialogue was recorded during post-production; "Alan and Bob both really hated ADR," Elmiger adds. Mixing was done at the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, California, with a crew led by supervising re-recording mixer Mark Berger, CAS, and re- recording mixer Michael Semanick, CAS. From an initial cut that ran about three-and-a- half hours, the film was shortened to a little more than two hours over the course of a succession of screenings. "Alan and Bob had a whole group of people that they always invited, and the editing crew was always encouraged to invite our friends," Elmiger recalls. "We didn't fill out cards; there was none of that. Bob would always say that he didn't care what anyone said, he just would feel it in the room." When Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle was released, critics enthused about its representation of a long-lost literary epoch. "Rudolph shoots the table from above," wrote Roger Ebert in The Suzy Elmiger, flanked by assistant editor Dylan Tichenor, left, and sound editor Steven Borne, while working on Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle in 1994. Especially challenging were complex scenes in which many characters congregated, often at parties or other gatherings.