I'd like to field this one.  

I'll start by saying this sent HUGE shockwaves throughout the editing community.  Editors I know who never met her are grieving this like it was a family member.  My friend Sara Hillner who I worked with on a few shows, idolized her on a few levels.  With that said, if I'm going to be talking about the role of editing, it's importance in the craft, and Sally's position as a giant amongst her peers, I'll hope you indulge in a slight personal anecdote.

I got into editing because I wanted to be a writer.  In college I was convinced I was going to be the next Kevin Smith (oh, young Eddie, how adorable you were) and my writing was going to be my claim to fame.  During a Linear editing class my Junior year we had an assignment where we had to take existing scene elements and cut a scene, using at least one shot from every setup.  I hated it.  It was some Australian film school curriculum my professor somehow got a hold of, and it was beyond lame.  Being the punk I was, I decided to make a trailer for it like it was a Michael Bay movie.  It turned out kinda funny, and my teacher appreciated what i had done, for not really doing the assignment.  It hit me very hard right then, that I had completely rewritten the scene.  There was power in that.

That began my love for editing and it scratched a creative itch that few other things in this industry do.  Editing is the choke point of the creative process. When you hit the editing room, it doesn't matter what you wrote, shot, conceived, or wished for, it matters what you do with whats in front of you.
And that is where someone like Sally truly shined.I've always thought the auteur theory was a bit overhyped.  No film worth watching is one persons creative vision.  But QT is one of those guys (Rodriguez and Soderbergh being others) where its dominated by his own vision.  As QT said himself, "I write the movies myself, but I cut them with Sally."  Meaning, Sally is the one in charge of rewriting, restructuring, and overall reigning in what QT shot, to best tell the story that QT had in his head.  You'd be surprised how an extra 15 frames can literally alter the entire meaning of a scene.  Sally understood that with someone with the unique properties that QT has, 15 frames in either direction per scene can mean quite a lot.

Now, the least tasteful joke I've heard so far is "You mean Quentin Tarantino had an editor?!?!"  Firstly, fuck you.  Secondly, just because you think QT's movies might be a it indulgent, or drag in spots (which is a fair criticism) doesn't mean that Sally didn't have HER voice mixed in with Quentin's the entire time.  No matter who the director is, the Editor is often the biggest collaborator outside of the producer.  They are the ones who are going to be involved with every frame of footage, and Sally knew exactly when to cutaway, when to hang on a shot, which take best carried the emotion, and what rhythm the film NEEDED.  THe crazy part is, 99% of people will never know this.  Editing is called the invisible art for a reason.  If we do our jobs right you will NEVER see it.  Good editing isn't stutter edits, FCP plugins, cutting to a downbeat, or snapping your fingers in a rhythm and cutting according to that.

 It's carrying an emotion consistently throughtout a scene, based on the raw materials the director provides you with, and Sally was one of the best.
It's a damn horrible loss.  And I promise you this, irrespective of what people think of QT's work before, it will never be the same after this.  It wasn't just Sally who died, it was part of QT's sensibility too.

Last edited by Eddie (2010-09-29 16:10:50)

I own that on DVD and watching Murch cut is always a treat.

In the Blink of an Eye.

That's a great position from which to read the book. Murch was originally a sound design guy that got into film editing, and that informs a lot of his sensibilities.

And for you or anyone else that's interested in the book, don't let the "bible" term scare you off, its like  120 pages and can easily be read in a day, if not a weekend.

Most people praise the opening sequence of Inglourious Basterds for being edited exceptionally well, but personally I think there's a lot more done just with the edit on its own in the sequence at breakfast later on in the film. If you can get your hands on that (there's odd snippets on youtube) consider how the cuts lend themselves to the emotional weight of the sequence.

Pretty sure that and a few others are in the store.  Just sayin'.

Eddie: Thanks for the post, that's what I was hoping for.

No, they have the word right, it's just that they don't understand it's 50 hours of footage that's being cut down to that over long 3 hour movie. Actually a movie editor is probably closer to the editor of an anthology (as opposed to a normal book editor), deciding what individual pieces to put together to make a whole instead of what to cut out. But, that's not how the term is usually used... hell, I tend to have an immediate negative reaction on hearing anything is "edited"

Not everyone on this forum went to film school, Brian. And not everyone on this forum is aware of what misconceptions exist in the world at large. So, yeah, actually, it is a little helpful to spell out what the problem is. If the title were changed to something like 'sequencer,' we'd end up with a lot fewer people making stupid jokes about how can you win an Oscar for editing on a movie that's three hours long.

Last edited by Gregory Harbin (2010-09-30 03:59:59)