Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/756468
66 CINEMONTAGE / Q4 2016 — I don't go for all that. But my time [as her apprentice and then assistant] was about going from not knowing what I wanted to do in a moment's time to knowing that what I'm doing now is the only thing I want to be doing. How do you describe that?" He gets a bit emotional when talking about Allen, who passed away in 2010. So he slows down and then explains how he found his way into her editing room as an apprentice on Elia Kazan's America America back in 1963. THE BEGINNING Greenberg grew up in a middle-class Jewish home in New York with no connection to, or interest in, the entertainment industry beyond the fact that "movies were part of your fantasy world and your social life. They were part of every kid's life," he says. "We went to matinees all the time. But I certainly wasn't bitten by the show business bug." A school chum, however, eventually landed in the New York industrial film scene as a production manager for a start-up company. He helped Greenberg secure what he calls "the lowest job" there, doing a little bit of everything before eventually learning the basics of sound editing. Ironically, he insists, it was while doing simple sound editing tasks that he began to groove to the importance of picture editing in a sort of roundabout way. "I did small jobs, like choosing music," he recalls. "Editors would send a work print with all the splices in it. It was the only visual copy of what they had, because a lot of them didn't have the money to duplicate it so that we didn't have to run all those splices through the Moviola. But it was often the case that the splices would go through, and you could hear them. They had a rhythm — a clackety-clack that I would hear while I was choosing new music. Eventually, I began to see that all the decisions to go from one shot to another had to be thought out as to [how they would match] visually. Most of the time, I didn't have an audio track. It all was done silently, because all I had to do was choose underscoring, which was usually played very lightly underneath either dialogue or sound effects. "I realized there was a thought process that went into all those cuts," he continues. "That seemed magnetic to me. I was drawn to that, and began to realize that was something I could do. I was already fairly accomplished [with sound editing], but it was rudimentary and simple at the time. I wanted to put more thought into it, like playing with blocks again — picking them up, stacking them, putting them in certain relationships, then taking them apart and putting them back together again in different ways. I know that sounds philosophical, but that was the thing that ignited me. I began to see that sound editing, as it existed then, was much less inviting than the thing that preceded it — the visual item." Eventually, Greenberg objected to the mundane chore of applying sound effects to Shell's Wonderful World of Golf, so his bosses hired someone else for that task: Eddie Beyer, who went on to become an accomplished sound editor. Greenberg says that Beyer "knew the New York feature film world" and had learned that Allen's assistant was leaving as she was starting on America America (1963). So he recommended Greenberg to the production. Allen eventually agreed to take him on as an apprentice editor. "The way we worked was, I was right next to Dede. I was her handmaiden — as assistants were in those days — where she would hand you something, and you had to do something with it," Greenberg recalls. "She was talking mostly off the top of her head, and you had to be on your toes and not disregard what she was saying, because sometimes the question would come to you. So you had to be alert. "But you were also an observer, watching her dance around this crude editing machine," he adds. "Doing all those things — talking, looking in the machine, putting film together — it had this choreography. I was always aware of that. I was aware that at the heart of it was thinking. You had to think and also edit yourself. You In the Alice's Restaurant cutting room, from left, Richard Marks, Dede Allen, Frank Mazzola, Jerry Greenberg, Joanne McGarrity Burke, Stephen Rotter, Kathie Amatniek Sarachild and Dick Goldberg (seated) in 1969.