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47 Q4 2016 / CINEMONTAGE by Rob Feld portraits by John Clifford K enneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea made big news at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival with a $10 million sale to Amazon. The film tells the story of a blue-collar family in the North Shore of Massachusetts; Lee (Casey Affleck) is left legal guardian of his nephew (Lucas Hedges) when his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) suddenly passes away, forcing him to deal with a horrific past that destroyed his family. Manchester, which opened in theatres November 18 through Amazon Studios, paints the rhythm and sonic universe particular both to that North Shore location and to its director. Collaborating with Lonergan to capture those qualities was picture editor Jennifer Lame and supervising sound editor, sound designer and re-recording mixer Jacob Ribicoff. Lame moved to Los Angeles after graduating college and cut her teeth at a start-up that invented commercials out of found footage for companies with little budget. She found the feature film space challenging to penetrate in LA until a friend's sister, Jennifer Lilly, called from Woody Allen's cutting room in New York. Her apprentice editor had quit; if Lame could be there by Monday, Lilly would hire her and get her into the Editors Guild. She packed her bags and hopped on a plane. "I got to work with Jen and Tom Swartwout, which made me love editing in New York," she recalls. "It was such a contrast to LA. They were so supportive and willing to teach me stuff; there was clearly a community here." From there, Lame moved through New York's scene, assisting editors like Naomi Geraghty, Arturo Sosa, Anthony Redman and Michael Taylor, until her work with Taylor on a low-budget indie garnered her first editor credit. She continued assisting, however, until she landed in Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha (2012) cutting room, assisting Tim Streeto, ACE. Lame would stay late to work with the massive amount of footage after Streeto went home and, when he finally had to return to HBO's Boardwalk Empire (2010-14), Baumbach gave her the chance to finish the film. It would be the end of her assisting days. For his part, Ribicoff caught his bug for sound and film around the age of 11. He and a friend developed a hobby of mail-ordering 8mm silent comedies — Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd — and experimenting with different types of music played against them. In his college years, taking film classes and sitting through the credits to the bitter end, he saw people called sound editors and re- recording mixers. Thereafter, he would sit in the park and take notes on what he was hearing around him. Ribicoff found a job with a pioneer in audio theory and practice, Tony Schwartz, and eventually found his way to location recording and post-production sound editing. "I realized that if you wanted to be in an environment where everybody was focused on the sound of the movie, it had to be post-production and not location mixing. I wanted a more creative experience with sound editing than that." In the early 1990s, Ribicoff was struck by how evocative the atmospheric sound work was in Ken Burns' The Civil War (1990): the birds, gun battles, voices, battle cries. "You could look at a still image and feel as though you were there on that battlefield at dawn, with bodies strewn about," he recalls. "You would hear just the right bird and it would place you right there." A break came when Ira Spiegel, one of Burns' sound editors, eventually hired Ribicoff to be sound effects editor on The West (1996) and since then has been part of the documentarian's core production group, currently wrapping up production on The Vietnam War (2017) as one of three sound designers. In between Burns projects, Ribicoff worked in many positions on many projects, such as Foley editor on Gangs of New York (2002) and The Aviator (2004), and supervising sound editor on The Wrestler (2008). But the second pillar of his employment came when he landed a job as associate supervising sound editor on The Hours (2002), which began a longstanding relationship with producer Scott Rudin, for 'Manchester' United EDITOR JENNIFER LAME AND SOUND SUPERVISOR JACOB RIBICOFF TEAM UP TO REALIZE KENNETH LONERGAN'S VISION Manchester by the Sea. Photo by Claire Folger/Amazon Studios