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Another Psycho connection, on this board anyway, is ecarle fave Hotel, which O’Steen edited in 1967. He remembers director Richard Quine and his “f***-around buddy” Richard Conte, in a pink shirt, “going out swinging.” Quine did not pore over dailies and saw the finished film at the preview.
Q: And you shot the climactic elevator-plummeting scene, my favorite scene, which was also singled out by critics.
A: It was a miniature. We dug a hole in the stage and I shot it at different speeds.
There are many technical anecdotes about life in the cutting room, stitching together shots that don’t quite match, optical lab patch-ups, scenes where the director neglected to get key connecting shots. Of course the book is in an editor’s words, but a common theme seems to be Rescue-the-Director-from-Himself.
He went on to direct an acclaimed and popular TV-movie, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, with Maureen Stapleton, apparently a real character in addition to being an excellent actress. He introduced Stapleton to the make-up guy: “And he said, ‘I’m very glad to meet you.’ She said, ‘Yeah, everybody wants to meet me, but nobody wants to f*** me.’” On her birthday, they got her long-time crush, Joel McCrea, to telephone her: “Maureen grabbed the phone and, as she puts it, ‘This voice I used to hear in my dreams came through the receiver and said, ‘Happy Birthday, Maureen. This is Joel McCrea.’ But she couldn’t answer him. She was in such shock that they had to scrape her off the walls. Then we shot her in this dance sequence, and she was shaking so badly she fell down on the floor.”
And about a 1979 movie, Together, with Jacqueline Bisset: “I sat next to her at lunch one day and she started rubbing up against my leg, under the table, I mean, really rubbing. I knew what she was doing, she was trying to get control of that film.” I’m pretty sure if I was an editor in that spot, I’d sell the movie out.
O’Steen likes to say how unimportant mismatches are if you know the audience is looking elsewhere, a trick he learned from an older editor:
Q: When you cut together shots of Mrs. Robinson’s breast and belly with shots of Benjamin reacting, they don’t match up. When Benjamin looks down, you cut to her breasts, when Benjamin looks up, you cut to her belly.
A: I didn’t care about matching. I was cutting for performance, for the build-up of Benjamin’s panic and I knew from experience that the audience wouldn’t notice, because they’re having so much fun!
Another editing slogan he came up with: “Cut to the money.”
He was having a hard time editing a scene in a 1995 Julia Roberts film Something to Talk About:
Q: ...there all these characters sitting around the dinner table and it was boring, but you had a solution, you said:
A: ‘Cut to the money.’ Cut to Julia Roberts whenever you can. She’s the one you want to see, she’s the star.
O’Steen was editor on Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Of Polanski he says, “He’s the best with the camera, he’s just the master. I sit and drool over his dailies...I love cutting his pictures, it’s like a great jigsaw puzzle you put together...Polanski never shot a master [an overall establishing shot of a scene]...he shot it that way because then the studio couldn’t re-cut the film afterwards. His first U.S. film and he knew what to expect!”
O’Steen would know. He was later fired from directing a TV miniseries Centennial, because he refused to cover a scene with close-ups: “[The producer] said ‘But what if in September I want to cut to a close-up of them? G****** it, I need a close-up!’ I said, ‘I don’t shoot close-ups so some a****** sitting in a black tower can cut them in September.” [Universal execs have their offices in a black-glass building, nicknamed The Black Tower.]
At one point a big scene was all set to shoot on Madison Avenue, a big boom camera set up and ready to roll, traffic blocked, but no director to be seen anywhere. After a frantic search, O’Steen found Lehman around a corner, standing on the sidewalk being measured for a suit by a tailor, and he had to plead with Lehman to show up to say ‘Action.’
And on Karen Black: “[Lehman] cast Karen Black because she mind-****ed him when he interviewed her and he thought it was going to be a big romance, but it never happened....I remember she had a portable dressing room on the stage -- each star had one of them -- and she asked me to come to her dressing room, she was kind of after me, but I wanted no part of her. She had a coffee can she peed in and left it in there overnight and it smelled pissy all the time.”
O’Steen edited Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge.
Q: Mike Nichols told the cast not to indulge in a certain [vice] while they were shooting the early college scenes.
A: He told them not to smoke any pot, so they would look younger. Jack [Nicholson] said that was the first time in years he wasn’t stoned every day.
There are lots of stories about epic womanizers; Richard Burton, Brando, Sinatra all had steady streams of female admirers, visiting in trailers, hustled out back doors. And disastrous shoots: a Dino DeLaurentis mega-flop Hurricane was a location nightmare, with cast and crew falling in and out of love and lust, the director Jan Troell earning the nickname “Yawn” for his long, boring dailies, and cast member Timothy Bottoms drunkenly urinating on DeLaurentis’ shoes.
O’Steen had a fondness for editing maxims:
Q: You developed a saying...to remind the director not to become too attached to a moment, a scene.
A: “Movie first, scene second, moment third.” That is the order of importance for everything.
O’Steen worked on Auntie Mame under a former Hitchcock editor Bill Ziegler (Spellbound, Rope, Strangers on a Train; also, Gone with the Wind, Duel in the Sun, Rebel Without a Cause). Ziegler was surly and, if a director decided to show up during the editing, “he’d grab the film and hold it until it would grind up in the Moviola, then the director would say, [in a panic] “Uh, I’ll come back later.”
Q: Ziegler also worked on Hitchcock’s Spellbound, Rope and Strangers on a Train.
A: Until Hitchcock said, “I don’t want to put up with that s*** anymore.”
He intersects with many Hitchcockians:
Q: Of all the female stars, who impressed you the most?
A: Ruth Roman. She had a set on her…[Laughs] she was gorgeous. And she was a pretty big star, too, but not too big, so she was...possible. I remember one day she was wearing this white shirt. Oh God, I walked around the sound stage a second time, hoping to run into her, but I didn’t.
O’Steen edited a 1964 drama Youngblood Hawke, which included Suzanne Pleshette.
Q: You liked Suzanne Pleshette, who talked like a sailor.
A: Yeah, one day she brought her Mom on the set and said, ‘This is Sam, he’s cutting our picture, and I have to give him h*** so he’ll put my close-ups in.’ I almost fainted.
He recalls working on Nichols’ Catch-22, with lots of down time on the set: “Bob Newhart did some of his stand-up routines. Tony Perkins played out the staircase scene from Psycho.”
Nichols referred to critics as “eunuchs at a gang bang.”
O’Steen went on to direct TV movies, including a 1973 ABC Movie of the Week with Cloris Leachman and Martin Balsam. He says, “Cloris was smart as a whip. I loved Marty, too.”
Not so pleasantly, he worked with both Ernest Lehman and Karen Black on the ill-fated adaptation of Portnoy’s Complaint, and, as a first-time director, Lehman comes across in O’Steen’s account as completely not-up-to the task, unwilling to take suggestions from cast or crew, constantly late to the set.
That went for Hitchocck, too. Meanwhile, I've read that directors such as Joe Mankewicz and Billy Wilder didn't much know lenses, left that to their DPs while focusing on their own script's being properly acted.
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I'll be posting soon about a book-length interview with editor Sam O'Steen, who edited some of Mike Nichols' and Roman Polanski's best films, and was also an assistant editor on The Wrong Man ("I ordered the dissolve" he mentions proudly about the famous shot of Fonda's face dissolving to the real criminal's face).
He talks about an old-time editor, Doane Harrison, who edited Billy Wilder's films from The Major and the Minor to The Fortune Cookie, and who sat in on the set of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf:
"He was a brilliant guy for laying 'em out [deciding what angles to shoot], he really got some great shots...After Wilder stopped using Doane, his pictures started falling apart."
Wilder himself said:
"I worked with a very good cutter, Doane Harrison, from whom I learned a great deal. He was much more of a help to me than the cameraman. When I became a director from a writer my technical knowledge was very meagre."
Movie historian Sam Stagg has described their early collaboration, "In valuable early lessons, Harrison taught Wilder how to preplan each shot as part of a total editing scheme. The results: Time and money saved, and few protection shots required. (The term "protection shot", also called coverage, refers to footage shot from various setups and angles that may be needed for editing a sequence in the cutting room.)"
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Though he seems to have sent people out to film distant cities for him: Phoenix in Psycho, Newark in Shadow of a Doubt, Berlin in Torn Curtain.
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I read Hitchcock did scout some locations himself, such as Quebec City for I Confess, and no doubt he chose the camera angles while doing so, the beautiful shots of the city's architecture and religious iconography have that distinctive Hitchcock look.
Jason Reitman has also said that he chooses every single camera set-up himself.
They would seem to be the exceptions, because it seems most big budget Hollywood films are nearly assembly line products, with special effects farmed out and most any shot without the lead cast done by second unit and additional second units, like stunts, establishing shots, insert shots, extras, etc., being careful to match the photographic style of the first unit.
Nolan's biggest filmmaking influence is Kubrick, who supposedly knew more about lenses and lighting than most cinematographers.
Steven Spielberg once said that early in his career he insisted on doing as much second-unit shooting as he could, but he eventually realized this was inefficient and came to rely on his second-unit crews.
I think casting Mort Mills was a little joke on Orson Welles, taking two of the actors from Touch of Evil and giving them a scene together. I don't think they had a scene with each other in Welles's film.
[quote]We get a nice location long shot of the cop getting out of his car and walking up to Leigh's car -- I'm pretty sure that cop IS Mort Mills, and not a stand-in. But Leigh isn't visible in the shot.[quote] [/quote]
I'd like to think that the economically-minded Hitchcock used a stand-in on location for Mort Mills for the walk-up. All the shots of him with Marion, looking inside the car, checking the front license plate, are process shots. It would be a whole other shooting day for the location shots, and since the cop doesn't start talking -- acting -- until he reaches Marion, a stand-in, with dark glasses in a uniform, could easily replace Mort Mills for the three of four steps he takes before cutting to the soundstage shots. The shots of the cop at the car lot, when he pulls up in his car and cranes his neck to spot her, when he gets out of the car and slowly approaches Marion after a brief moment of eye contact before she speeds off in her new car, this requires acting, it's clearly Mills in these shots.
This, I think, must have been standard procedure in Hollywood. A particularly bad example of mismatching a stand-in with the lead actor happens in On The Waterfront, after the famous taxi scene with Brando and Steiger, a high overhead shot shows the cab pulling to a stop and Brando's character getting out, only it's clearly not Brando but a stand-in with a different build and movements than Brando, stockier and less graceful.
And in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the then child actress and now respected actress and independent filmmaker Sarah Polley has complained, rather bitterly, about a moment in the film where her character is running, in a high overhead shot, that doesn't show her face. That's because it is clearly not a little girl, but a male little person, speedily galumphing along, dressed in her clothes.
I remember both Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart making forays into TV in the 70s.
Stewart had a scene where he enters a local talent contest to play his accordion, perfect cornball Americana. The audience whoops it up, and Stewart
thinks they're responding to his musical performance, when actually a stripper has gone onstage behind him and is disrobing while he plays. His delight at the audience reaction is hilarious and endearing, as he plays his instrument with more and more enthusiasm. Total obliviousness has hardly ever been funnier. If I remember right, the cops come in and bust the show.
Fonda had a funny scene where he is peacefully camping out on his own, by a crackling campfire, reading a book (a murder mystery, so there's your Hitchcock connection). He is the picture of contentment until a garrulous Tim Conway arrives to pitch camp right next to him. Fonda plays the taciturn but polite straight man to Conway's friendly but obnoxious jabbering, enduring the invasion of his solitude with stoicism. Conway catches a glimpse of the book, and praises it, saying he read it also, and never guessed it was so-and-so who committed the murder. Fonda, after taking a moment to register this spoiler, quietly closes the book and drops it into the campfire.
I watched the church scene again online, and it doesn't have a word of dialogue. Hitchcock would indeed admire that.
I wonder if Hitchcock had this scene in mind while making the Tides Diner scene in The Birds. His stock in trade was silent suspicion and accusatory stares.
I just noticed from your gif that Mother's skull has two black holes in the back of the head that coincide with where the pupils would be in her eyes, so it looks like she's staring at us through her empty eye sockets.
"Acting honors were as widely tipped (Alison Janney had a great red dress and was along with Gerwig in gold/yellow, best dressed of the night - good for her)"
I loved Janney’s “I did it all by myself” opening to her acceptance speech. This actress is as witty as any of the characters she has played.
"De Toro as expected continued the great run for Mexico-born visual stylist s for the Director Award….Both of GdT's acceptance speeches are excellent and brimming with cinephile respect for Hollywood past."
His speech about erasing the “lines in the sand” instead of deepening them was poetical as well as political, without naming names. DelToro, along with Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant) and Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men), is now an Oscar winner. They have been dubbed The Three Amigos by Hollywood and they have a production company together, Cha Cha Cha Films. It might be too soon to call this a golden age for Mexican filmmakers, but their successful run lately reminds me of how British actors have come to dominate Oscar wins. In any case, Viva la Mexico!
"I haven't seen the In Memoriam yet or any of the (apparently many) clips packages."
I saw Twitter blow up during one of the montages when music from ecarle fav Love Actually was playing under the clips. I don’t know the movie or soundtrack that well, but it was fun to read the gushing appreciation for this ensemble rom-com from the early aughts.
"Kimmel's opening monologue was OK. The 'take the celebs across the street' segment made me cringe and it made a mockery of all the fussing about time elsewhere in the show."
These “Millionaire Entertainers deigning to visit the Little People” segments are always cringe-worthy, although the movie theater crowd certainly seemed to enjoy it. Gal Gadot was lovely and looked happy to be there.
Queen’s guitar maestro Brian May blogged a great appreciation of her:
“Was watching a Doris Day movie out of the corner of my eye while writing, this evening. I really think Doris Day is the most wonderful lady singer in history…. I spend a lot of my evenings wondering what some of these singers would have sounded like with the benefit of Pro-Tools, to fix the little inaccuracies. But when the divine Doris Day comes, I go into a kind of trance. It is simply unbelievable how accurate she is. I think one day someone will be able to prove that she had the best pitch of any girl in history. But she is way beyond accurate. Every note is found, approached by various routes according to context, hit with a million different inflections, caressed, adored, and allowed to gently fall to the Earth. She is technically unmatched, adorable, mind-blowingly expressive, and probably the best interpreter of a song I ever saw. I just hope she knows how much she is still loved and respected. Will somebody please tell her? She is the ultimate, as far as I’m concerned. Doris Rocks!” — Brian May
[quote]Eva Marie Saint at 93 doing a bang-up job of presenting Best Costume Design. ...was impressively witty and forceful as well as definitely still a beauty-for-her-age. She called Hitch 'Fred Hitchcock'! What? Maybe a slight slip there, perhaps confusing with Zinnemann.[/quote]
Even accounting for age, that “Fred Hitchcock” line jarred me a bit. I hope it’s because she was confusing him with Zinnemann, or else just having an issue reading the teleprompter. Looking over her screen credits, you can see she was working with top Hollywood directors from the very beginning, including Kazan, Zinnemann, Frankenheimer, Preminger, and Minelli. I guess she’s entitled to a flub on live TV.
She did an interview a couple of years back with Robert Osborne (who was in the In Memoriam segment) and she said the secret to her health and longevity is to walk 90 minutes every day!
And she still is very much a beauty-for-her-age, slim and trim, with beautiful poise. Fellow Hitchcockian Doris Day is slightly older (95) than Saint (93), but Day has stayed completely out of the spotlight. I respect her choice, but it would be great to also see her onstage at the Oscars before the inevitable In Memoriam appearance. She might seem a relic of pre-Sexual Revolution times, but she was a huge star, known as a “triple threat” (singer, dancer, actress).
"Del Toro gave a lovely and erudite acceptance speech for Best Director at the BAFTAs"
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He certainly sounds more erudite than the typical director. How many who are foreign-born can go up and cite English literature in front of that BAFTA crowd, touching on Terrence Rattigan, Noel Coward, Mary Shelley, and Shakespeare's The Tempest? I love his line about Frankenstein author Mary Shelley: "She picked up the plight of Caliban, gave weight to the burden of Prometheus, voice to the voiceless, and presence to the invisible." It's time for me to brush up on my classics.
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"He's also looking *huge* (perhaps Hitchcock as his early model has been unhelpful). He must be courting a medical disaster with all that weight at 53."
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His weight is worrying; mounting those steps to the podium looked like an effort. I hope he takes a page from fellow director Peter Jackson, who dropped 50 lbs because he was rightfully worried about his health. It's very difficult to keep the pounds off without your weight yo-yo-ing up and down. Ricky Gervais dropped a lot of weight a while back and, unfortunately, from a recent TV interview I saw, he has put it all back on and then some. Not an unfamiliar struggle for many of us, though Hitchcock at least had a sense of humor about it:
[url]https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/1000_Frames_of_Lifeboat_(1944)_-_frame_290[/url]
"Back in the day, Clint Eastwood saw so much budgetary waste on the big budget musical "Paint Your Wagon" that he swore then and there to produce and direct(often) his own films as cheaply as possible."
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Eastwood has credited Don Siegel for showing him how to "shoot lean". Siegel's start as an ace editor gave him the knowledge to know exactly what he wanted to shoot without getting miles of coverage. The great DP Gordon Willis dismissed that kind of coverage as the work of "dumptruck directors", who overshoot footage and dump it all on the editors.
It's a surprise more editors don't become directors, it seems like a natural move artistically, but I'm guessing the completely opposite work environments wouldn't suit all temperaments. It's not a long list, but besides Siegel it includes David Lean, Hal Ashby, Edward Dymytryk (Murder, My Sweet), and Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Sound of Music, West Side Story).
I've got to catch this film now especially to check it alongside of Hot Fuzz.
From Wiki:
"The movie was inspired by an irregular series of elaborate, real-life scavenger hunts Sondheim and Perkins arranged for their show business friends (including Lee Remick and George Segal) in Manhattan in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[3] Herb Ross also took part in the treasure hunts with his wife Norma; he says one of the clues was spelt out by icing on a cake which had been cut up into different pieces.
The climax of one hunt was staged in the lobby of a seedy flophouse, where participants heard a skipping LP record endlessly repeating the first line of the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer standard One for My Baby ("It's quarter to three ... It's quarter to three ..."). The winning team eventually recognized the clue—2:45—and immediately headed for room 245 of the hotel, where bottles of Champagne awaited them."
[quote]I'm with Hitchcock in thinking that the game-playing aspects of whodunnits tend to flatten out our emotional responses, hence that they do not make for the most satisfying movies.[/quote]
I agree. The fun for me is all in the cleverness of the clues, like the one above.