The Butterfly Effect

Life is strange. Things happen out of nowhere and  can turn on a dime. This is one of those stories.

I do a lot of work for the American Cinema Editors (ACE). They are an organization that is essentially an honors society for editors that promotes the art of editing. Every year they put on the ACE Eddie Awards. Historically it is held one week prior to the Oscars.

In 2002 they asked me to cut a piece for the show. Previously I had only worked as an assistant on these pieces. So this was a big opportunity for me. Doug, the producer had an idea to do a montage of a series of images being “cut” from famous movies. The specific example he gave was seeing a throat slashed.

So I got to work and compiled a list of images from movies. Many of them are pretty innocuous things I remembered from myriad films. Like a paper cutter slicing stickers from The Distinguished Gentleman and cutting the wire on the nuke in The Abyss.

But I am a child of action films. So I also remember the arm getting hacked off in Spartacus and stuff from the Terminator and Die Hard films. I decide to end it with a shot from the Albert Brooks movie Modern Romance. The lead character is a film editor and there is a shot of him cutting a piece of 35mm film in a splicer.

Then a friend asks if I am going to use Un Chien Andalou. That is a classic short film by Louis Bunel and Salvador Dali. It opens with a shot of a man cutting a woman’s eye with a straight razor. It is a classic film in the Avant Garde genre by two great artists. As soon as he mentions it – I realize that shot should be the opening of the piece.

So I cut the montage together and show it to the producers. They love it. They are over the moon and have only three minimal notes. I incorporate the notes and turn in my final cut.

The night of the show I see Doug, the producer at the cocktail hour before the show. He tells me that he is really nervous. He had shown the piece to the emcee and some other people and they felt it was extremely violent. He tells me that he decided to play the piece as the first thing in the show to just get it over with.

Now I am nervous. I start thinking about it and realize, that yeah, I did have a lot of action/horror moments. But Doug and Ed saw it (two 80 year old men) and they loved it. So it can’t be that bad.... Can it?

When the show starts I go to the back so I can overlook all the tables. The piece starts and when the famous eye slice happens I hear all 1,000 people at the Beverly Hilton’s ballroom groan in unison. And they don’t seem to stop groaning. In the middle of the piece I put a few humorous moments. Gene Wilder stabbing himself in the leg gets a chuckle. Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare before Christmas, and Goldfinger saying “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” get no laughs. I sense even more groans when Robert DeNiro kills Don Cicco in The Godfather Part II. One person did applaud for a quick shot of James Dean in the knife fight in Rebel without a Cause. The piece is moving so fast, I am not sure if they even notice the shower scene in Psycho, Nicholson chopping down the door in The Shining, or Caribou sacrifice from Apocalypse Now.

For the entire one minute and seventeen second duration of the piece I am freaking out. I sincerely believe that my career is over. I am gonna get run out of the business. I think that the moment this piece is over I should make a bee-line for the door because if anyone finds out that I was the one who cut that piece they will string me up and torture me with a cat-o-nine-tails.

The piece ends and I am seriously getting ready to book. Suddenly there is huge applause. Thunderous applause. I am baffled for a nano-second. Then it sinks in. And I realize, “Oh my God! They liked it. They really liked it!” It was a Sally Field moment – and at an awards show. Except I was in back (where I belong) rather than on stage.

Doug later told me that he initially told the host to come out as soon as the piece ended, but ultimately had to hold him back because there was so much applause. Joe Mantegna made a joke about the piece when he got up to present an award. And the next day Mark Helfrich (editor of Rambo: First Blood Part II) pro-actively called me to tell me how much he enjoyed the piece.

While all that attention was nice, what I will always most remember from that night was that split second when I went from being totally dejected and freaked out to being totally over the moon. Everything changed in the blink of an eye. I wonder if that is what it is like to be bi-polar?

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