[Herb Sevush]

Simon –

While I’m sure the NLE has had some impact, it is my observation that an increase in the speed of cutting is the one constant in the history of movies. The silent films of the 20’s were faster paced than silent films before 1910, the films of the 50’s were faster than movies in the 30’s and 40’s. The cutting pace of the 70’s and 80’s were faster than what you would generally find in the 60’s. Watching an older movie with a teenager the thing that is most off-putting to them is the pace — “old fashioned movies” just seem too slow for them. I think a lot of this is because we have always over estimated how much information you need to give someone to tell a story. Every decade we prove that you can get away with a little less detail, tell the story in a more fragmented way, and the audience will adjust and accept.

As with most things human, this positive concept has led to some fairly terrible results, but I don’t think it’s particularly the fault of the NLE. Individual directors have broken these trends in both directions – your not going to find much faster cutting than in the opening and closing shoot-outs in The Wild Bunch – and conversely Peckinpah shot many of his conversational scenes multi-camera, and this was almost 50 years ago.

I absolutely agree that there is an aesthetic decline in the quality of studio movies, even as they become more technically polished, especially in the areas of sound and EFX, but I think the reasons lie outside the realm of any single technology. I can’t imagine any studio allowing a director to hold a single shot the way David Lean did when Omar Shariff appeared to come out of the sun in Lawrence of Arabia. I believe the audience would stand for it, but not the studio execs.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “that’s one of the charles/ray eames ones right? There’s a decent doco on him and ray from 2011 – james franco narrates because james franco. that exhibit must have been utterly crazy to see at the time you’d think.”

Yes it was designed by the Eames’s. I was about 14 at the time and lived in NYC so I was at the fair literally dozens of times. The IBM exhibit was a big deal but the thing I remembered most about it was you could get a copy of the front page of the NY times from the day you were born – that impressed me a lot more than the huge egg shaped theater and the mutli-screen presentation.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “but the mad thing is burt lancaster’s speech at an hour and nine minutes? relative to bush, blair and Iraq – particularly blair’s dodgy dossier – it’s crazily on the nose. I actually just paused it to post. Lancaster really knows how to deliver a line as well.”

It’s actually a fine movie, ignored in it’s time for it’s politics, which as you said are dead on accurate. The director, Robert Aldrich, while known for his action films – The Dirty Dozen – was very political in his own way. He made a “western” with Burt Lancaster called “Ulzana’s Raid” which is a very thinly veiled allegory of the US involvement in Vietnam. It’s also a great movie.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I love a bit of split screen. We were super excited and I’d worked up some style samples – then they were all like – no negative space and ramp up the wiping please. so, you know, whatever, but fine. I just really wanted to do the thomas crown affair frankly,”

I spent some of my earliest working years, this is back in the 70’s, in a unique film animation studio that specialized in making films from stills and it also had a very primitive optical printer. We designed and animated split screens all the time, 4 screens morphing to 16 then piece by piece back to one and so on — lots of fun.

[Aindreas Gallagher] ” I’ll definitely check out twilights last gleaming.”

What made that application so great was the use of sound to direct your attention between the screens during a major crisis moment in the film – it doesn’t have the visual look of The Thomas Crowne affair, if I remember correctly, it just kept multiple vantage points of the story going continuously over an extended period of time and used brilliant audio editing and mixing to keep the narrative flowing. Now that I think about it, I’m going to have to watch it again.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[James Ewart] “I think the Thomas Crowne Affair (1968) was one of the first movies to make great use of split screen. Previously more of a TV ‘Batman and Robin’ thing no? Great movie.”

The original Thomas Crowne Affair made extensive use of split screens but was not nearly the first. “Indiscreet”, a Cary Grant romantic comedy used them in 1958, but I think the modern use of split screens, to add excitement and tension into a an action sequence probably began with John Frankenheimer’s “Grand Prix” in 1966. It’s commonly believed that the appearance of split screens throughout the 60’s was actually motivated by the IBM exhibit in the New York Worlds Fair of 1964 which pretty much introduced the world to multi-screen slide shows. The “Woodstock” documentary, 1970, also extensively used split screens and helped popularize them. By 1977, when “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” came out to a pronounced thud at the box office, split screens were pretty much seen as a fad of the 60’s and would fall out of favor in Hollywood. Too bad I say.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Walter Soyka] ” I would still question whose voice is heard! There are two responsible minds here. How do you disentangle them?”

You don’t, unless and until they split up and produce separate work on their own. How could you untangle Lennon/McCartney songs until you had both Lennon and McCartney songs.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Walter Soyka] ” I’ve thought the paradox in auteur theory is the idea that one person (specifically the director and specifically not the writer), can have distinct intellectual ownership of and responsibility for the outcome of a highly collaborative effort.”

That isn’t the paradox, that’s the assertion, which is that in the case of certain Directors there is a wealth of aesthetic pleasure to be found in watching any of their movies in the context of that Director’s oeuvre. This is not an assertion about the making of these movies, it is rather a way of watching these movies.

Now with many of the more prominent Auteurist Directors there is no doubt of their authorship – many not only directed but also wrote, co-wrote and/or produced their films. Even thought they were studio controlled, directors like Ford, Hitchcock, Welles, Lewis and Capra were clearly involved with the development of the projects they worked on even if they didn’t carry the formal role of producer. Hawks, Wilder, Fuller and Sturges wrote or co-wrote their films. It is impossible to watch any John Ford film and not recognize the authorship no matter who the writer, the producer, the editor or the cinematographer was – the same is true with all of the above named directors.

With the above, and that list is not remotely exhaustive, the authorship is clear and unequivocal, mostly because of the French new wave critics. For me the greatest achievement of the auterist theory was in championing the less obvious work of directors whose control over the material they worked on was not nearly as complete – Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Raoul Walsh, Don Siegel and on and on.

Again this is a theory of a way to watch movies, not a theory on the way movies are to be made. The idea is we can watch films the way we look at paintings – there is the painting in itself, but then there is the way we react to the knowledge that this is a Matisse, from his blue period. If you know nothing about Matisse, you gain the pleasure from the painting in itself. If you are aware of Matisse’s work then you can gain the additional pleasure of watching how that painting fits into the flow of his career, notice the echoes of his earlier work and how those traits will eventually lead him to this work that you are looking at. This knowledge is not necessary to enjoy the painting, it simply deepens your pleasure if you have it. The auteurists were merely bringing this aesthetic principal to the understanding of American movies.

As to why the director was chosen to be the center of this aesthetic vision, the answer was that you could not find a producer or writer or cinematographer or editor whose work could be viewed as an aesthetic continuum. It could be applied to specific actors – Betty Davis, James Cagney, John Wayne, Bogart – but they were much more at the mercy of the material they were given.

In TV you can find such aesthetic continuity in the works of Aaron Sorkin and many other Writer/Producers. An auteur theory is not needed here because no one doubts whose voice is being heard.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “Previous NLEs were timelines that sat on top of a database… While FCP X is a database that sits on top of a timeline.
…
The X editor can EDIT in the database whether or not a timeline currently exists.. Setting In and out points, making coloring decisions, sound manipulations and a host of other frame accurate actual editing decisions which then carry over directly into the timeline when the editor eventually needs to employ one.”

Not meaning to be too petty, but to be historically accurate, 20 years ago the EMC2 had an “edit list” function that you could switch to at any time which showed your timeline as a CMX edit list (which is a pure data base construction) in which you could edit and manipulate your data, the results of which would show up in your timeline. So whatever it is that FCPX is first at, and I do believe there is something concrete to what you are saying, you haven’t defined it properly because with the EMC an editor could “Set In and out points … sound manipulations and a host of other frame accurate actual editing decisions which then carry over directly into the timeline when the editor eventually needs to employ one.”

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Walter Soyka] “How does the auteur theory espoused above fit in with two directors collaborating on the film?”

I wasn’t being particularly Auteurish above, although I have definite opinions along those line, I was being both historically accurate and practical. Historically people like Keaton, Chaplin & Griffith controlled every aspect of their films – the idea that the Hollywood studio system of isolated directors, writers and editors was always the case is simply not true.

As to the “Auteur Theory” – properly understood it never said that the director is always the “auteur” of every film, it said that certain directors, due to the immensity of their talent, should be considered as the “authors” of their films even when working inside the assembly line Hollywood production system.

These directors – majors like Ford, Hitchcock, Wells, Hawks, Peckinpah, Capra, Wilder, lesser appreciated like Aldrich, Fuller, Mann – had a singleness of vision that was so strong that no matter what material they were handed by the studio, the final work could best be understood within the context of that director’s career.

Ever since the French new wave brought forth the “auteur theory” for understanding American cinema, it has been distorted into the “cult of the director” with every novice getting a possessory credit.

However great movies were often made in the studio system without such strong directorial personalities. Casablanca was directed by Michael Curtiz, a very fine studio director who also made the Errol Flynn “Robin Hood” – but was he the “auteur” of Casablanca? I don’t think you’ll find many who would say so.

So in answer to your question, multiple directors as a team can be auteurs, witness the Coen Brothers, the same way music writing teams can be the authors of their songs, think Gilbert and Sullivan. It’s become more common in recent years but the Director’s Guild still fights against giving multiple directors credits on the same film and in the highly egoistical world of film directors, it is still unusual.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

Aindreas –

Love the split screens, liked the wipes as well. Have always been a big fan of split screen technique, the master of which in the feature film domain was the great Robert Aldrich – who made a political thriller in the 70’s called “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” (unfortunately hard to find on DVD) which was the ultimate use of the technique.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf