Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/756468
67 Q4 2016 / CINEMONTAGE could do and then undo things, and the most important part of doing [was not knowing what you might have to undo]. It was the after-editing — or self-editing, if you will — and Dede was a master of that. That was the first thing I adopted from her as a tenet. That was instructional for me, and it was part and parcel of watching her physically operate. There was a closeness that doesn't exist now [between editors and assistants]. I was very fortunate to experience that." TAKING THE LEAD CHAIR After rising to serve as her assistant on many notable projects, Greenberg says Allen eventually recommended him for his first editing job — on Sidney Lumet's comedy Bye Bye Braverman in 1968. He says Lumet interviewed him for the job on, of all things, a New York City bus, which he was using to shoot a scene for the film. The interview was short and sweet, according to Greenberg. "I stepped off the bus, and I don't think I felt the ground," he recalls. "I was over the moon." Lumet tightly took charge of the editing process on that project, but Greenberg calls it "a start" and his opportunity "to meet a lot of the glitterati of New York filmmaking." It launched his life as a professional film editor, though he was not yet, in his words, "anyone's first choice." It was, he says, William Friedkin who helped him head toward that designation when the director hired him to edit a controversial comedy based on a play about gay life in the 1960s, The Boys in the Band (1970). This was another comedy, but what Greenberg calls "an integrated comedy." By that, he means that the script by Mart Crowley, author of the original play, "said an awful lot about the difficulty of living as a gay person in those days. I understood this material was not all just the camp kitsch it could have been in the hands of some other director. [The humor] was meant to interrupt the seriousness of people in pain, and I enjoyed that challenge. I thought I could play a part." Greenberg says The Boys in the Band was therefore the project on which he got his first real opportunity as a film editor to "make decisions about what shot to use or do, or how scenes should be presented" in a much freer manner than he was able to do in Lumet's orbit. The modest success of that film, and Friedkin's approval of his work, led the director to continue their partnership on his next project, 1971's The French Connection, which won Oscars for Greenberg, Friedkin, screenwriter Ernest Tidyman and actor Gene Hackman, as well as Best Picture. THE BIG CHASE The current anniversary of that classic film brings back fond memories of its classic car chase, which Greenberg edited. The chase, he says, was inspired in his mind by another famous car chase, in Peter Yates' Bullit (1968). He is proud of the accomplishment, but at the time, he says, "We didn't talk about the car chase that much, because when you write a script and put in an action scene, the scene might be 15 minutes — but it is described in a third of a page of the script. So you don't really know what you are going to get." What has been widely discussed are the