Chapter 16

Editors Panel Discussion

Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

William Jennings Bryan

There is a passion for perfection which you will rarely see fully developed; but you may note this fact, that in successful lives it is never wholly lacking.

Bliss Carman

When a group of film editors gather, there is an old joke. If asked their opinion, four editors will have five opinions. But when it comes to their career paths traveled, or the expected etiquette of the cutting room, or the passion to succeed as a film editor, there is a commonality to each of our stories that binds us as a community—the search for excellence, the commitment to the truth of the scene, and an incredible love for the craft of editing.

American Cinema Editors has an internship program during which a panel of A.C.E. editors share their stories with an audience of aspiring editors and assistant editors. The subjects that the panelists touch upon can be recognized as some of the themes we have shared with you throughout this book.

The following excerpts include comments by the following editors:

•  Matt Chesse, A.C.E.

•  Lori Jane Coleman, A.C.E.

•  Diana Friedberg, A.C.E.

•  Alan Heim, A.C.E.

•  Mark Helfrich, A.C.E.

•  Stephen Lovejoy, A.C.E.

•  Sabrina Plisco, A.C.E.

•  Troy Takaki, A.C.E.

Lori

When hiring your editorial staff, what sort of traits do you look for?

Stephen

I hardly ever hire anybody that hasn’t worked for me or for somebody I know in the past. It’s really tough to evaluate somebody in 5 or 10 minutes. Of course, they’re putting their best foot forward and their resume can say they’ve worked on many things. So when I call people I ask who is hot, who is good, and who have they discovered.

Lori

So word-of-mouth is key for you?

Stephen

Yes, it’s really the thing that works the best. I look for somebody that obviously has done the job. It is more their approach that is important. We’re telling a story here and I want the assistant to be as involved as they can possibly be. I’ve had assistants who have liked to cut and I like that. I like to interface and discuss cuts with them and help them understand the cutting process too.

Lori

What I look for is someone with whom I feel comfortable. Someone I look forward to seeing every day.

Mark

I’m completely reliant on my assistants because I know next to nothing about technical things. Because if you do know it, like if you admit you can type, you’re going to have to type. My assistants do all the technical stuff. I don’t know how to input. I don’t know how to output. I’m not really proud of that but it’s a fact. And it’s changing all the time. I’m really reliant on their technical know-how. That knowledge and a good personality is what count the most. And be a nonsmoker. You can smell smokers, when they come in. If somebody is overperfumed—it’s just as bad.

Lori

So personal hygiene can be an issue. When interviewing, we look at personal habits as well.

Mark

A couple of months ago I edited a music video and the producer hired the assistant and assured me the guy was great, he’d done commercials. I said, “Great, how hard can it be?” It should have taken two days to cut this piece and finish it but unfortunately this well-meaning assistant was wrong in everything that he did. Every technical thing that he could have screwed up, he screwed up. I didn’t know until later that he had screwed up and I ended up working for two weeks on a music video that should have taken two days. Finally I was able to fire him because I said I could not take it anymore. I told the producer, “Just give me somebody who can output this thing.” So they did and then they went to do the online, and nothing matched the master HD. What they ended up having to do was to eyeball every single shot and it took three days to conform at an astronomical cost. So that one assistant cost this company hundreds of thousands of dollars—and will never again work in this town.

But seriously—if by some chance somebody asks if you know how to do something, and you don’t want to lose the job, and you really think that you can do it, then tell them you can do it and go home that night and find out how to do it. I’m not against saying, “Sure I can do that,” but you have to have the confidence to know you can get the task accomplished. We don’t expect you to have all the experience in the world from the get-go, but you have to be confident to know you’re not going to screw up. You get one shot at some of these things and then you’re blacklisted. You also don’t want to say you don’t know how to do that or “I’ve never done it before” when it could be learned. I’m not telling you to lie—but what I’m saying is—you’ve just got to know that you can do what you’re offering to do.

Alan

When I started, if I didn’t know something, I would call a friend and they would tell me how to do it. That’s what a network is about and that’s really important if you don’t know how to do something. You better either read the manual really fast or call somebody up. Know somebody to call.

Mark

But you want to jump on that opportunity. If you’re being offered a job and you feel that you can do it, then accept. If you feel you can’t, you might just want to save yourself for the next time. Say, “I don’t know that system, but I’m going to learn it.”

Alan

I’d like to say one more thing on this topic. I was a sound effects editor in New York and one day a guy I’d gone to school with called me and said, “Can you edit picture?” I said, “Can I edit picture!” I had never edited picture, except at school where I was pretty good at it, but this was a real job. It was a real job in St. Louis, Missouri on an industrial film, a political film actually. And I had never done this in my life. I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified. So I called my psychiatrist, I had one then, and I sat down with her. And she said, “You know, if you’re really as scared as you say you are, you better not take it.”

So I walked across the street, because they were across the street, and I said, “You know, I really don’t want to miss this opportunity, I absolutely can do this.” Again, I relied on my friends in New York. I knew I could call them, and I did the job. I ended up doing a couple more films for this company. At one point the director I worked with—we were quite friendly after the first film—and I were having a drink one night, and he said, “When you started, when you came out to St. Louis, you were really pretty green weren’t you?” And I said, “How’d you know?” He said, “Well you kept throwing the picture into the sound head.” You have to understand that in those days, sound and picture were separate. They looked different. Sound looked like audio tape and the sound was brown and the picture had picture on it. But because I was so used to working with sound, it just seemed second nature to me. Eventually I stopped doing that, I guess!

Stephen

When I got my job on Tales from the Crypt, the postproduction supervisor hired me unaware that only the night before, I’d been in a room learning the Montage editing system. Somebody had showed me how to do a splice in and splice out, and that’s all I knew walking in the door for the interview. But by the time I needed to know, I’d figured it out, because I could get on the phone and call friends.

Lori

The idea is not to pass up opportunities but not to be too cocky. My first job back after seven years of raising my kids was on Beverly Hills, 90210. The producer, Chuck Rosin, was a friend of mine—we’d gone to high school together—so I was sort of safe. They asked, “This show is digital, have you learned digital?” “Sure.” “Can you use a Montage?” “No problem.” “Good, you start on Monday.” This was a Friday. That weekend I went into the cutting rooms and worked that Montage to death, cutting every way imaginable until the machine crashed. I didn’t know how to fix it, so I went home. But on Monday I had this incredible assistant, Dan Valverde (currently an editor on Damages), talk me through the remaining problems. The Montage editing machine was just another tool to learn—I knew how to edit. You have to take some chances. And work your little tushies off.

Sabrina

That’s really the bottom line, just know the parameters of what you know, what you don’t know, what you’re willing to do, and what you’re not willing to do. I had a chat with my old assistant about this and he said, “You know the most valuable piece of information I have as an assistant is—I don’t know everything, but I can find out. That’s the most important thing.” And with the network, with the Internet, with everything that’s out there, there are ways to find out.

Matt

I actually lost a great assistant because she sort of stopped having the eye of the tiger, which I think you need to have when you’re an assistant. You can tell when somebody is really into it and really fired up. The first film we worked on together, she did a great job, had my back and I just never worried about it. Then we moved on to another film a year later and she was organizing the project and the dailies and there was a sort of lack of pickup going on. I asked about it and she said, “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay.” I started to get this very soft impression about her and by the end of the job she had let a visual effect go into the movie that she had miscalled the numbers on. The key code reader from the movie wasn’t accurate and she didn’t double-check those when she loaded them. We wound up with this very expensive visual effect that didn’t match what I’d cut. Once it was baked in there, there was no way to go back. I would never have changed assistants, but this one mistake really hurt. What it came down to was that she was tired of doing the job she was being hired for and really wanted to edit. Whatever the reason, I wound up getting burned and we had to have a big talk about it. She moved on and became an editor and that was great for her but it was frustrating for me to be stuck with somebody who had lost her edge.

It’s a big responsibility to be first assistant or second assistant. You touch a lot of things that nobody else touches. If you’re not holding up your end of the bargain, you can really cause a lot of havoc. It’s not to be taken lightly and it’s not all about learning and being green. A lot of it is about applying yourself, holding up your end of the bargain. Editors don’t have the time to double-check the assistant’s work, you’re busy cutting the movie.

Lori

Many assistants get to that point at the end of their assisting career and they’re not willing to work as hard. They get a chip on their shoulder. This becomes very difficult for an editor to work with because he knows they want to move on and he can feel their frustration. It burns the editor and possibly his relationship with the director, or the producer. It’s a reflection upon the assistant. The assistant is the final safety net in that editing room when dailies are wrong, when numbers are wrong, when visual effects come in, when things don’t get shipped, when playback is not on the stage—all the things that the assistant is responsible for. The assistant is the final safety net. Truly. The last stop. It’s too late by the time the editor sees it. The editor trusts the assistant.

Mark

Assistants are like the ambassador for the editor, especially in studio situations. The people in the studio get to know your assistants, your apprentices, your runner. They hardly ever come into the editing room and meet you or talk to you but they’re talking to your assistants and your crew all the time. So then the studio will say, “Oh, we love to work with Mark Helfrich,” but what they mean is, they love to work with Mark Helfrich’s crew because they don’t even know who I am! So that’s why it’s important to have a really good crew. I have to like them, they have to be smart and have good taste.

Troy

We will hire our assistants over and over if they have good attitude. One of my assistants is a really good friend of my director and of mine, and on the last movie, he stopped giving his all. Because we were friends, I’d walk in and I’d say, “Okay, stop the DVD, I’ve made a change, start the output again.” And he’d say, “What, why’d you do that?” His attitude was, “Troy is my friend and I can roll my eyes at him.” I’m never allowed to roll my eyes at my director when he walks in and says, “I’ve changed my mind, let’s put the sound effect back.” I say, “Okay, sound effect’s back.” And the sound effect is back.

Everybody has to be having fun and have his heart in it. You can never think that you’re such good friends with the director or the editor that you’re allowed to roll your eyes at them and complain. You’re never allowed to be late, complain, or disrupt. All of those things are just so important to everything working correctly when everybody is overwhelmed by the workload.

Stephen

That’s why working with friends doesn’t work, by and large.

Lori

Sometimes colleagues do become true friends, but you can’t confuse the boundaries while you are on the job.

On another topic, how does the editor know whether everyone on his team is doing his job, especially the second or third assistant?

Sabrina

I actually deal with everybody when I run the ship. I look to my first. I dialog with my first constantly because I want to know everything that is going on. I even want to know where the runner is going, but that is whom I am. I practically posted my last show. Even the post people at Disney said, “Well we didn’t do this because you did it all.” I probably work a little bit differently than most people because I keep my door open. I want to know what is going on all day long with everybody and I get my work done. I feel like I can keep the machine running smoothly if I know everything.

Matt

It kind of helps morale to connect with everybody that you are working with, so that nobody is serving you in a way that feels different or distant. If they know who you are and that they are working for you and you have an open room, then they want to do a good job. The first assistant will usually tell you if there is a weak link. Often the post supervisor fills other positions by recommending somebody for the job. I think this is good idea because if somebody screws up, it is going to fall back in the post supervisor’s lap. So, sometimes part of the team is assembled and maintained by the post supervisor. Usually, if something goes wrong, they turn on someone—there’s always a scapegoat. The first assistant carries a lot of that responsibility.

Sabrina

I worked at two different studios during the last couple of years and each ran things so differently. On Charlotte’s Web we had a post supervisor who was literally right next door to me and she handled a lot of stuff. But on Chihuahua with Disney, the post super was someone up in a tall building that had five shows and so literally, I was the post super. Every studio and setup is different and every show has its own way of running things.

Matt

Generally, I try to keep a small team because it makes it easier. Less people work harder and as a result there is better communication. The Bond movie that I worked on (Quantum of Solace) definitely had more floors and more people. The more delegations, the further it gets away from the creative cut in the Avid and your being in control. If you can, try and keep it tight.

Mark

Usually I’ll hire the first assistant and I’ll let the first assistant hire everybody under him or her because that’s who they like to work with and that’s cool with me. The responsibility of the first assistant is to not let me down with the crew. If you’re working on a feature for nine months or a year, then you are going to get to know them, no matter what, even if it is just during lunch.

I’ve had bad experiences with assistants on past films. My wife called me once and one of the runners or assistants answered the phone and she said to me, “Who was that on the phone? They don’t have very good phone etiquette. They sound dead and bored.” I had to go and take care of that problem and speak to that person. “Wake up!”

Lori

Would you give that task to your first assistant or would you go to the person directly?

Mark

No, I’d tell my first assistant. Tell her to wake up. But I’ve always had good luck giving that responsibility to my assistant because they’re really the ones running the show.

Lori

It’s quite different in every room. The television show I am working on now, I didn’t get to pick the first assistant that came on. He was chosen because he knows Final Cut Pro and I was asked by the coproducer, “How is it going?” and I said, “He is very proficient on Final Cut Pro.” Efficiency is one thing but it is challenging because he has none of the etiquette and knows little about the unwritten rules in the cutting room.

Troy

And the opposite of that can happen too. I was starting this pilot and I called and said I have to cut on Avid and they said, “Nope, it’s going to be on Final Cut Pro.” “Are you sure it can’t be on Avid?” “No, it’s got to be on Final Cut Pro.” I was talking to Joe Dervan, head of post, and I hang up the phone and I thought about it for a couple days. I called back and I said, “I will cut on Final Cut Pro.” They said, “This is what you’ll do, you’ll cut on Final Cut Pro, we’ll get you a really good assistant, a Final Cut Pro assistant. We’ll get you really good machines, it’s going to be great.” I hung up the phone, called back a few days later and said, “I will cut it on Final Cut Pro, but I am bringing my assistant, even though he doesn’t know Final Cut Pro, and you are training him and me.” I would much rather have a great assistant that knows me and knows how I work that will learn Final Cut Pro, than someone who knows Final Cut Pro and I have to train to be a great assistant.

Lori

If, as an assistant, you are assigned to an editor, it is advisable for the assistant to go to that person and say, “I realize I’ve been assigned to you and that might be an issue. And I just want you to know that I’m on your team. I work for you. You let me know—how do you like your dailies, what makes you happy, do you take your coffee black? What can I do to make this okay?”

Mark

…and “Am I talking too much?”

Lori

…and “Is there anything you want to tell me because I would like to know how to make it work here.”

Troy

Some of my best assistants have been given to me by the studios and just because they are given to you, doesn’t mean you are going to have a conflict and want to fire them.

Sabrina

I think a lot of it has to do with personality. If you are assigned somebody, it just means that you didn’t get to meet or chat with them in advance, to see if there is that connection.

Lori

I know as an editor, I’ve been put on shows and not hired by the executive producer and I had to win over the coproducer who had nothing to do with my hiring. You have to win them over and it is uphill. You just work twice as hard.

Mark

The oddest instance of not hiring an assistant or a crew happens when you are asked to take over a film. They’ve fired the editor and they want to bring you in to save the picture. I’ve done a few of those. Once I inherited the entire crew. The editor had gone, but I was left with his team. I said, “That’s fine, they know where everything is, they know all the dailies, I’ll be fine.” It was fine, technically, and we were all feeling very comfortable. We learn that what’s said in the editing room should stay in the editing room and you can say things to your assistant and vice versa and it will never go further than that. There is an unstated trust among your team. Quite often I will watch dailies and I’ll laugh out loud because they are so bad or I’ll say, “What the hell is he thinking?” I can say that to my crew, but I wouldn’t say it to the director or the actors. In the editing room, you’re constantly making fun of performances and all that stuff.

Troy

They are very funny until we get a hold of them.

Mark

In one instance I probably crossed the line and the trust was breached. The crew and I were looking at a cut of a scene that the original editor had done and in the middle of it I just let out this guttural moan, like “Oh, this is so terrible!” And I thought everybody agreed with me. But there was a turncoat whose allegiance was with the original editor. Somehow that got back to the original editor. As a result, the oddest thing happened. I got a letter from the original editor that read, “I hear that you don’t think much of my cutting.” I was so embarrassed that this had got out, but I was also furious that it had gone beyond the walls of the cutting room. We found the leak and the case was closed. He was “taken for a short ride.” I made up with the editor but that was very embarrassing for me. I should have been more careful because it wasn’t my original crew. But hey, I had already been on the show for about two months and thought that by that time they were my crew, but it wasn’t the case.

Matt

The crew that I worked with on the Bond movie, I inherited from the Golden Compass and they had been through three editors in a very intense, short period of time. They had to change their allegiances and support for three different people who thought they were all going to come in and finish the picture—and then didn’t. And then the first editor came back at the end and I think it was quite a dance. They really had to get into step with it all. They were great. They were road tested. I loved that British crew. They had that diplomacy to make it all happen in the end. I inherited them part and parcel from Golden Compass and they were totally trashed from that film but we kind of revived them and gave them a transfusion.

Lori

What advice would you give to those who are new to the whole assistant editor position, because you all seem to keep the same assistants? What kind of actions do they need to take besides doing a great job and standing out, going above and beyond? Do you have any other bits of advice?

Matt

I’ve hired from resumes, maybe five times out of eight movies that I’ve done. I’ve gone with totally cold calls from resumes and sat down, met three or four people and made a decision. I was looking for an assistant once when I got this really nice thank you letter. I liked the stationary and this young woman had really nice handwriting. I felt she just separated herself from the pack.

I’ve had really good luck with resumes and recommendations and just picking people. When I got to London for the Bond movie, I had about a week to pick the entire crew from top to bottom including sound people. I probably met with about 20 assistants who all wanted to be the first assistant. I got all of the editors they’d just worked with writing me letters of recommendation for them and calling on the phone. It was quite the derby of personalities, but I worked it out. I would say that the resumes and sitting down and having a meeting works, definitely.

Alan

What is good is to be yourself. Because we are editors, we read performance and so, just be honest when you interview.

Matt

Don’t lay it on too thick.

Alan

And the pretty writing is nice. Somebody’s got to do it, I sure can’t.

Matt

And having good recommendations, too. Have people that know and trust you on your resume because I call all those people for references.

Mark

Even if they have worked with another editor and they are not on the resume, I will call the editor and say, “So what do you know about this guy?” If they are on it as references, then you know the person is going to say “Oh yeah, they are great.” But call the person who is not on there and get the real feedback. But that said, you could have had a bad year and a bad experience with somebody many years ago, so you can’t just judge a person by one job or one thing. It’s the impression that you make when you meet that’s important.

Lori

Would you say that being calm and confident is an asset?

Mark

Yes and do not be meek.

Matt

You don’t want to be overwhelming, but you want to show that you are committed, that you have the eye of the tiger. It’s a fine line.

Lori

There are big personalities, which are wonderful and you’d love to go drinking with them, but not when it’s a 12-hour job. I tell myself constantly to remain calm, cool, and collected and sometimes I forget and I get very bubbly and happy but I know I have to keep check and say “Chill, don’t get excited.” It’s very hard. Then there are some people who are so quiet that they have to be told to energize and give more. That’s okay too. But that is what we gauge in the interview process and we are assuming that you are proficient and that you know the job.

Matt

I’ve got this pile of resumes to sort through and I almost always assume that skillwise, since they got to this point, everyone is on a level playing field. But it is in the interview process that the decision is made. It’s really about the tone of the voice and the connection and even more, it’s about the vibe.

Lori

Has anybody actually fired an assistant editor?

Mark

I did, just recently. That was my first and only. And I didn’t do it, I had my producer do it. Actually it was opportune because there was only money in the budget for him to work three days. After a week, the guy was still screwing up and they were going to keep him on even longer.

Lori

Did he ever admit that he made a mistake?

Mark

He didn’t even know he did. And to this day, I don’t think he knows how badly he screwed up unless the producer called him afterwards and said, “You owe us money” or something. Because I wanted him gone, I talked to the producer and said, “I know you don’t have any more money for him, so maybe you can tell him—I’m sorry but we don’t have any more money for you, but thanks anyway.” They got rid of him and found somebody who was willing to work for free who was perfect. He had to spend the next week trying to decipher and figure out what was wrong.

Lori

The producer made me fire my assistant on a pilot when he gave a wrong measurement to the network and it was a big to-do. We had to take out time, rather than put in time. It was horrible and I felt awful about it. Usually I just make the decision that we will not work together on the next project.

Troy

I’ve had to fire two people. I fired one assistant who basically had a bad attitude. He would complain and he was mean to the PA. I can’t stand when a first assistant is mean to anybody else on the crew. He was annoying me quite a bit, and I would not have hired him again. We had a screening for the director’s friends and family. After the screening everybody went to dinner. At one end of the table a discussion started about the changes we needed to make and suggestions were put forward about trying certain things. The director’s friend, the post supervisor, was talking about these things that needed to be done and it involved a lot of assistant work. The assistant said to the post supervisor, “You better shut your mouth or I’ll punch you in the nose.” That night the supervisor called the director and said, “Can you believe the assistant editor said this?” The director came to us and said, “You have to fire him,” and we were actually happy about that. We had to go and fire him.

The other person that I had to fire was a PA whom my assistant had hired and recommended as a great guy. He came in and just had this weird, low energy to him. His desk was in the same room as the director’s assistant’s desk and the director came to me and said, “You have to get rid of this guy. He’s just got bad juju, basically. He is spoiling and messing up my creative force.” You want to know something, it was true. You can’t have somebody in the room who has a bad vibe. There was nothing wrong with this guy, it wasn’t like he was weird or racist or anything—he just had this bad vibe. I had to agree with the director, he was like a bad apple in our room. You just can’t have somebody like that around.

Alan

You also said something important—don’t treat the people who work under you badly. There are ways to get things done without treating people like crap. And it gets picked up on and it makes the editing room an uncomfortable place. And as you might be able to tell, we like to be comfortable in the editing room, we really do. Once, I was doing this enormous industrial, political film, and I had about five or six assistants and I had hired a friend of mine to be the coeditor. It was cinema verité. The director was shooting in Pennsylvania and sending me all this film and there was just tons of it. In came thousands and thousands of feet of film, beautifully shot, with no identifying marks that you could tell. I mean it had to be sent to forensics to sync up. A slate on a cinema verité film was often two people who would take two pieces of paper and you couldn’t hear anything.

Then the director showed up and he took a dislike—immense dislike—to my coeditor. It took me a while to figure out what it was and it turned out to be a very personal issue. He said to me, “I can’t work with this guy. I just can’t work with him and I think we have to fire him.” And he said, “I’ll do it” and I said, “No, I hired him and it’s only right that I speak to him about this and, you know, work it out.” So I said to my coeditor, “Let’s go to lunch” and he said “Yeah.” Well, before having lunch, we went to the men’s room. We were standing there next to each other and he said to me, “You know, I’m really very uncomfortable since this guy showed up on the show, since the director showed up” and I said, “Funny thing you should mention that.” and so I was taken off the hook on this one.

The second one was much more awkward because I had hired a really good editor to work with me on Lenny, which was one of the first films I did. [Robert] Fosse and I decided we were getting near the end and we really needed some help and I gave him a very complex scene to cut. He’s a good editor. And he did an absolutely terrible job. It was Friday and he went off to his weekend home and Fosse and I looked at the cut, well actually we looked at it before he disappeared, and Fosse said, “Well, he just doesn’t have it. He’s not working out.” And I had to agree. So Bob [Fosse] said, “But don’t worry about it. I’ll come in Monday morning and I’ll take care of it. Because I don’t want to spoil his weekend.” This is the way Bob put it. And I didn’t really want to spoil his weekend either. So Monday, of course, Fosse didn’t show up and he said, “Well wait, I’ll come in tomorrow and I’ll do it.” And I said, “No you won’t.” And so I did it. I fired my friend. And in both cases, I mean these were both not colleagues, they were friends. And it’s awkward—it’s always awkward. I have only fired two people and they were both editors. I have never fired an assistant. I think I am too intimidated.

Mark

Too dependent.

Alan

That’s it.

Sabrina

I’ve never had to fire an assistant, but I got to a point where I wouldn’t rehire an assistant. It was because he got to the point where we had been working together for quite a while and he was letting his personal life interfere too much with the job. It was ruining his life and I could see it. It just wasn’t servicing the job or the situation and I ended up having to take the fall for it. It was sad to see how hard a time he was having, and as much as I kept trying to talk to him, it just didn’t get any better. It’s the only time I have ever seen this attitude. We finished that job, but I just couldn’t go back there anymore.

Lori

Did you ever tell him?

Sabrina

Absolutely. Constantly. “This is beyond reason, this can’t happen anymore.”

Lori

He didn’t hear you. You really drew the lines.

Sabrina

Twice a day, I gave him parameters of what was acceptable to me but he was just out of control.

Lori

That’s sad, but it does happen. I had an assistant once who gave me detailed accounts of the progress of her cat and his surgery. I grew tired of it quickly and didn’t know how to distance myself from the situation without hurting her feelings. It’s best to keep the personal issues at home and keep a professional presence in the cutting room.

Mark

Keep it interesting. Don’t be dull.

Lori

Would you like to share your worst nightmare of an assistant?

Alan

Overall I really have been very lucky in my choice of apprentices and assistants and for the most part I’ve been incredibly happy. And if I worked enough to keep people busy, which I’ve been doing the last couple of years, people stay with me and they cut with me and I then sort of push them out into the world. I try and get them jobs. I’m sharing a credit with my former assistant on the film I’ve just finished and he’s been absolutely wonderful and he will be a great editor.

Lori

Do you let your assistants cut?

Troy

I beg my assistants to cut but they rarely do. I’m like, “Please, please cut.” We’re in a situation these days where we have multiple machines and as long as their work is done, they’re often sitting there goofing off on the Internet for several hours during the day. After dailies come in and before I go home they have the opportunity to cut scenes and I ask them to and they just don’t. It shocks me.

Lori

Do you ask them when you interview them if they’re going to want to cut?

Troy

I’ve had the same assistant for years and he’s great so I’ll keep hiring him because I love him but it just shocks me that he does not want to cut.

Matt

I think there are a couple of kinds of assistants—some who really want to be editors and some who just want to be great first assistants.

Lori

And that’s okay too.

Matt

Absolutely and I think there’s room for both of them. I have both currently. One likes to maintain the mother ship and be in charge of everything and that’s his happiness. My second assistant really wants to get her hands on footage. I let her break up my dailies into strings and cut lines of dialog over and over again and that makes her really familiar with the dailies. If I see something coming up that I’m under pressure to do, I’ll let her do a version of that and then I’ll bring it in, see what she did and we talk about it. Somehow a little bit of her contribution usually winds up in the film in some form or another. We have discussions about how she approached the cut and we throw it back and forth and it’s very positive and open. I don’t press the other gent to cut. He’s very blissful in his position.

What you don’t want is to have a first assistant or anyone in the cutting room who is aggressive, who’s kind of wrestling your mouse and comes into your cutting room without being invited, “Hey I worked on something, what do you think of this?” People who are coming on too strong definitely can spook you. I think there’s a fine line. There has to be a give and take. You have to be comfortable with your assistants.

Lori

Definitely, presentation is so important. There’s a question that many young women ask—when is a good time to have a baby? For a woman it’s very hard because it takes you out of the race.

Alan

Well, there is a problem. My assistant on The Notebook, who was going to be my assistant on Alpha Dog, was pregnant when we began The Notebook, and about the time when we finished shooting, she just couldn’t stay awake. One day we were running some film with the director and she said, “Excuse me for a minute,” and she walked out and when Nick and I got up and walked out into the outer office, she was sleeping on the couch. We looked at each other and I said, “I guess she really should leave now because it’s not good for her.” She wanted to hang in and stay as long as she possibly could. We had discussions about it. I just didn’t think it was good for the baby in the womb to hear the language of the movie, which was terrible! I would buy her musical records like Mozart and the kid seems to be fine now! That’s how I ended up with the assistant that I’ve been working with for the last 2 1/2 years. He was available and I liked him from meeting him on a different film and he took over her place. So she stopped working for about 3 years. Now she’s back, but it does take a while to work your way back into the system again.

Troy

These days I’m cutting features and I get sent away for months and months at a time. I was in Australia for five months and my family only came for three weeks of those five months, so I didn’t get to see very much of them during that time. Now it looks like I’m being sent to New York for a year. Because they don’t want to go to New York for a year, I’ll see them for the summer, on Thanksgiving, and I’ll fly home for some weekends. It does get very tough.

Matt

Conversely, I was just in London for a year and got to take my two kids because they’re too young to object and we had a great time. It was a wonderful opportunity. And they were right with me and I was able to get home for bedtime and tuck them in and then go back to work on the tube.

Lori

But you can only do that for a while. Later on they dig in and want to stay in their school and be with their friends.

Troy

My 7-year-old said, “I don’t want to come to New York, daddy.” And I’m saying, “You’re 7, come on.”

Alan

You have to do it until they start grade school. It’s a pain in the neck. It goes both ways though. At one point my ex-wife went to law school and during her last year she asked me if I would just stay home for a year. So I turned down work and I just stayed home. For a year. I had been traveling different places, so she was left with most of the raising of our daughter when she was very small. It just seemed fair that I do that. Besides which, it was New York, there wasn’t very much work…

Diana

It is possible to keep working while raising a family. I somehow managed to follow my career path while bringing up the kids. You have to just pick the venues where you will not be working long hours into the night—and this did happen on many an occasion, even double jobbing day and night when funds were needed. But with careful planning of the children’s schedules and keeping them as busy as possible in the afternoons with extracurricular activities, you can be both professional and parent. Also I have for a long while had my own editing equipment with a cutting room set up in my home. With the introduction of FCP and digital editing and portable hard drives, there is certainly much more flexibility in being able to work out of one’s home.

Steve

If you work for a studio, they want to see you in the chair. They’re paying the money and they want to say, “Oh look, okay he’s in, he’s on the clock, he’s working.” The truth is, if you work at home, they get way more out of you because you get up, you get a cup of coffee, and you’re in your shorts and your T-shirt and you go to work. You don’t spend 25 minutes getting ready and an hour driving somewhere.

Lori

And when you can’t sleep at night, you get out of bed and you go back to cutting.

Steve

I’m sure it’s happened to everybody, where you’re working on something, it isn’t quite right, and you get an idea and would love to be able to get up and go to the machine and see if it can work. It’s happened to me on Final Cut projects where I’ve gotten up to go in to my cutting room and my wife will say, “What are you doing? It’s four o’clock in the morning.” When the idea hits you, you have the opportunity to play with it.

Sabrina

On my last show they were filming in Mexico and I stayed here in Los Angeles with my crew on the lot. In order to keep the visual effects schedule on time and on budget, I had to fly once a month to location and set certain sequences for the director to turn over and get into the big visual effects pipeline. We had a little laptop system that I wheeled in this little backpack. I shipped a monitor and some speakers down to Mexico and it sat in the director’s trailer. When I arrived, I had a whole Avid in my backpack with all the media that I had in Los Angeles. All I had to do at night whenever I got into an Internet zone was just email the file back to my assistant. They could then spit out the sequence I’d just worked out with the director. My assistant could walk it across the walkway to the producers at the lot and they could all sign off on the visual effects.

Well I did this trip to Mexico once and when I came back, I thought, “Why am I coming in to the office every day?” I live a good hour and a half drive away from the cutting room so I started cutting at home a couple of days a week. I saved 2 1/2 to 3 hours driving every day twice a week. I could sit at home without distractions of phone calls or people talking. Besides, I have a great window with a great view! I got a ton done and it just gave me a life back, too. I really appreciated that and realized where we’re all headed. It gave me so much more flexibility than I had ever had on another show. That was pretty great.

Lori

I like going in to the studio and seeing a bunch of friends and chatting with everybody down the hall. But it would be nice sometimes to take dailies home. On a recent show Nancy Morrison sometimes took dailies home with her. We were cutting on Final Cut Pro and found it actually relinked well. She has two little ones who get out of school early in the day, and that’s good for her. I wish that had been possible when my children were little. I think it is the future trend for postproduction.

Let’s change course here now. How did you get that first cutting gig? How did you switch from being an assistant to editor? Who was that someone who took a chance on you?

Sabrina

I didn’t go quite the normal route because I started in northern California where I cut something right off the bat. But it didn’t count and I then had to move to Los Angeles and get an assisting job. I did this for a couple of years and then I became Debbie Neil Fischer’s assistant on Fried Green Tomatoes. I had started work being an editor and I knew that is what I was going to do. The second I was done with my assisting work, and in those days we were on film, I would be in Debbie’s room, right there, working side by side. And she let me. And the director got to be very aware of that, too. It got to the point where nothing would happen without my input as well. He started asking me to cut scenes for Fried Green Tomatoes, even though I was hired as an assistant. At the very end they called me in to look at the credits and they had surprised me with a single card, associate editor credit. That director, John Avnet, then turned around and gave me my first editing gig on a TV movie the next year.

Lori

The Fates were with you at that point—a combination of a great mentor in Debbie, and a receptive director. But you were fully prepared when opportunity knocked.

Mark

I didn’t want to wait for opportunity to knock. My first job after I moved out to Los Angeles was as a PA on Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. I delivered the film to the cutting room and after production ceased, I hung out in the cutting room and became an assistant editor. There were two editors and they needed two assistants. I assisted for free for a couple of months and then I went to the producer and said, “You need me, please pay me.” And so they paid me $100 a week and I was very happy. While assisting, they needed a trailer for the film, so the other assistant and myself volunteered to edit it. And because this was Roger Corman, no budget kind of filmmaking, they said, “Sure you can do it. We’re not going to pay you though.” We were more than overjoyed to make a black and white dupe of the feature that was still being cut and come up with a trailer. And that was my first professional editing gig. Of course right after that I wanted to edit a feature, but I had to assist a couple more times.

I went over to Cannon Films, which was also a very low-budget, Israeli-run organization and assisted on a couple more films. While assisting on The Last American Virgin, I said, “I really want to cut, whatever the next film is, I want to be the editor. Please let me be the editor.” They said, “Well how do we know you can edit?” And I said, “I can, I’ll edit a trailer.” They said, “Okay, you edit a trailer.” They had a film they had just bought, a Mexican film, which at that time was called The Treasure of the Four Balls. And so, I took this movie and I cut the fastest-moving action trailer you have ever seen. I flopped shots and sped them up and played them backwards and added every trick in the book to make it look like the most exciting film ever since Indiana Jones. It turned out great and everybody said, “This is much better than the movie”—and it was. And in fact, the trailer got reviewed in the New York Times. “This trailer’s fantastic. Oh, and by the way, the movie is nothing like the trailer.” The fact that the trailer got a rave review was my proof that I could edit. I got to coedit the next feature with Michael Duffy, who was one of the editors there. And so my first feature I got to edit was Revenge of the Ninja. There was no going back after that. I was anxious to cut and I kept saying, “I can do it,” and I would volunteer and would do it.

Troy

I was assisting on Tales from the Crypt and one of the editors was interviewing for directing jobs on a TV show. It was the first day of dailies and he came in and put dailies in and left for the interview. The second day of dailies came in and he didn’t even come in that day. He called and said, “I have meetings, you can edit it.” It was only a five-day shoot on Tales from the Crypt and he came in, probably about two hours that entire week. And by the end of the week, he had this directing job and he quit editing. Steven Hopkins, who had directed it, came in and we finished the episode. That was my first thing that I edited.

Lori

Did they have to get permission from Steven or the producers to move you up?

Troy

We didn’t get permission from anybody [for this episode]. It was one of those things where nobody was admitting it was happening. Michael didn’t call up and say, “I’m not coming in because I’m interviewing for a different job and by the way Troy is cutting the dailies.” It just happened that the week ended and the director’s cut was coming up and there was no editor and I cut all the footage. Steven came in and said, “Oh, so what are we doing here?” We worked together and it worked out well. In fact, Steven went to the producers and tried to get me hired as an editor and they wouldn’t do it. So, by the next season an editor had left at some point in the middle of the season and I did one episode on the third season, too.

Matt

I was a commercial assistant and I had tried my hand at everything. Back in the days before Final Cut, if you had the keys to an Avid or access to a facility that had an Avid, it made you pretty popular in town. So you could take on a lot of projects. Because I was single at the time, I spent most of my free time, nights and weekends, just cutting anything anybody had that I could get my hands on—people’s reels, actor’s reels. This is actually really good training. They have specific demands like “I want to make it look like I am playing opposite this guy” or “Make it look like I am shooting at the star.” So you have to go in and take the bit that they did on some TV show and rearrange it so it looks like they are having eye contact with the main actor even though they aren’t.

I was working for Angus Wall, who has now moved into features, but was then cutting commercials. He had just cut Benjamin Button and I had to cut his hairdresser’s wedding video. Editors get asked, when cutting your hair, “Oh hey, I just got all this footage from my wedding video and it would be really great if I could get somebody to put it together.” And Angus said, “Oh, I’ll take care of it,” and he dropped off a truckload of VHS tapes and said to me, “You do it.” I put a lot of time into that and learned a lot from cutting that wedding video.

Marc Forster and a friend of mine wrote a script, Everything Put Together, about SIDS, and they gave it to me to read. I just saw the potential of the movie and knew what it should feel like if they shot it right. I knew how it should play and I told him, “I really want to do this and I have an Avid and ‘I got the skills to pay the bills’—let’s do this.” So my friend told his partner, “You know, my friend can cut this and he has an Avid” and they said, “Really? He has an Avid? Well, we don’t have any money left for the post, so let’s see what he’s like. What’s his vibe like?” So Marc brought in a reel of a friend who was an actress and a bunch of dailies to add to her reel. We then worked together and I put in some music and we put some titles on it. We spent about a half a day together and he said, “Well you seem like a good guy and you have this nice facility and it’s really comfortable and there’s snacks in the kitchen and I can hang out here while you cut my movie.” Then I said, “Okay great, let’s do it.”

So that began a very long process of working on the Avid when there wasn’t a commercial being cut. Often we would get bumped. I would say, “Come in at nine,” and then a dog food commercial would arrive and our day on the Avid would go away. So he would come back at nine at night and I would stay and cut till six in the morning, and then I would clean up the room and be an assistant the next day. Eventually we got a virtual movie that was in the Avid that we had cut with no help from anybody—I was my own assistant. I really busted my ass for him on this project. And then we heard, “We love the movie, bring it to Sundance,” but it was stuck in the computer. I then had to pull it out and bring it to all these finishing houses that I had established relationships with as an assistant commercial editor. All those people that I connected with who were colorists and mixers said, “Bring it here and we’ll finish it.” I got an online editor to do our titles and all of our graphics. I fronted the entire post of the movie to get it up to Sundance without a nickel from the producers. I just did it all with favors. By the time we got to Sundance, Marc and I were kind of the last men standing and he said, “You know, you’ve really proven yourself.” Luckily for me, I hitched my wagon to the right star and it really paid off. He parlayed that into Monster’s Ball and we haven’t stopped working together since.

Lori

What a wonderful success story.

Matt

Well, it’s rare that somebody will stick with you. Normally you get that phone call that sounds like, “I get to do a studio movie. Thanks so much for the freebee and I’ll call you on the next one. I’m going to get you back.” And they don’t do that. My director stood up to the studio and said, “You liked my first movie, which is why you hired me, and if you don’t use my cinematographer and my editor, I can’t promise that I will give you the same product, because those guys had a lot to do with it.” And they said, “Really?” and he replied, “Yeah, really. I produced something with these guys and I am comfortable with them and that’s my vision. And if you want me to stay, I can promise I will do a great job with them, but if you stick me with those other guys—I’ll do my best, but I don’t know what’s going to happen.” And they said, “Well, we can always fire the editor. We’ll let him take a shot.” So they brought me on and it went well.

Lori

It worked. It is rare for the director to fight for both the cinematographer and the editor. Usually the cinematographer wins.

Matt

It’s been the three of us for eight movies now.

Sabrina

It’s also rare that you stay on the same schedule, too. Just keeping the same schedule is very rare with directors.

Matt

You never know whom the freebee is really for. You don’t know who’s watching you or who you’re impressing. It could a producer, a director, a post supervisor, but if you are dropping off film, you just don’t know where it’s going to lead. And if you are doing your best at all times and trying to impress people, they are going to notice you and somebody’s going to pick you up. They are going to see you’ve got that quality.

Lori

You’re always on your game.

Matt

Yeah, you’ve got to pick, try to pick your projects well, so you don’t have your time wasted on a freebee for someone. Freebees don’t go away. When they don’t have the money to pay you, they will not leave you alone.

Lori

You still have to do those because you won’t know if they are going to lead somewhere.

Matt

But any aspiring Sundance director could become Marc Forster, so you just have to do your best.

Troy

The hardest movies that I ever worked on are the free movies. They’re so much harder than the normal movies.

Matt

I worked on a 60-second commercial for six months one time. Because they didn’t have any money, they just kept coming around. Why would they go away if it doesn’t cost them anything?

Lori

Pro bono films can be so much more demanding. I did an ERA [equal rights amendment] documentary once, I started getting a terrible toothache and I needed a root canal. I told the director/producer, “I have to leave… I have to go to the dentist.” And she said, “No, you have to stay,” and I said, “but…”

Matt

“But you’re not paying me.”

Lori

“…you have to let me go…”

Matt

“We’ve given you a great opportunity.”

Lori

It was a great opportunity and I believed in the subject matter, but the director/producer was just horrible. I was doing it as favor to her husband, a director I hoped to work with.

Stephen

I came to work here in Hollywood and in those days there were apprentices. When you were an apprentice, you worked in the shipping room and you basically carried film around to rooms, because there were screenings there all the time and you just tried to meet people. You would try and find an assistant that you got on with and you would say, “When are you doing dailies?” and they would usually reply, “Be here tomorrow morning at six o’clock.” You would go and in a very short amount of time, you would learn where he picked up the tracks and where he picked up the picture and you would start doing that chore and show initiative. Pretty soon you would say, “You can come in an hour later, I’ll do all the dailies for you.” And you were just thrilled to be able to do that.

After learning those skills, I got hired. I got invited to go up to this room where they were doing this film called Winning. It was a Paul Newman feature and at that time, etiquette between apprentices and assistants and editors was very different. If you were an apprentice, you almost never made eye contact with the editor. You didn’t speak directly to him, but I didn’t know that. I came into this big room and it’s full of people and the editor is sitting at a Moviola and behind him is a little 16 mm trim bin with the top down, and I look around the room and go over and flop myself down right in back of him and say, “Oh hi, how are you?” He turned around, put his glasses down and gave me the evil eye. I just flashed him my best smile. He could easily have picked me up and thrown me out of the room, but luckily it did not happen.

Paul Newman wanted to see all 300 thousand feet of some race footage so they hired a bunch of editors and they hired an apprentice. And the editor said, “Get the love kid that’s running around here.” I was hired to empty ashtrays and make coffee and that was supposed to be my job. But I had a certain sort of sixth sense about film that I had learned when I was in college and so I was keen to follow my instincts. We had a couple of people who would work all night when the other editors weren’t around and I would just watch how they laid stuff out. Somebody would say, “I need a red car with a green number going left to right on camera four.” And I would go in and look for it. “I think I found the shot.” They were impressed that I had the initiative to go in and find the material. I watched them splicing and I’d go by and think, “Oh hell, I can do that, no problem.” Then one day we were rushing for a screening which was 45 minutes away, and this editor, who is the main editor, is getting up screaming, “Gordon, where’s Gordon? Jesus Christ, I’ve got to make these changes. Where’s Gordon?” And I walked by and I sat down in the chair and I said, “I’ll do it.” I was pretty sure I could do it or I could figure it out. I was fortunate because the editor responded to that initiative and he guided me, “No, no, not there, cut here,” That was my first little interchange with him. About a month later, everybody that had been on the show left, and I was the last one standing. I became his assistant on that feature. He would constantly give me film and say, “Go cut it.” It became that kind of relationship.

When that film ended, the editor went on to a TV show, Marcus Welby, MD, and then his assistant died. Ed said, “I want Lovejoy.” He moved me up and I became his assistant in television. The worse the footage was, the more excited he would get and I thought, “I want to be like him. I want to get excited about this stuff.” It set off a spark in me, to strive for internal excellence. That’s where it came from; it came from that experience with him.

One day he gave me three pieces of film to cut and I came in at four o’clock in the morning to get it done before dailies would start. I struggled to get the shots to cut together. He sat across the room, looked back, put his glasses down and said, “Jesus Christ, what the___are you doing over there?” And I said, “Well, I can’t—and the thing—and…” He walked over and ran it [the film] and ran it again and said, “Mark,” and “Take this piece back and move this up there and extend these three frames.” Before he had sat down, just 20 feet away, I’d made the cut and put it in the machine and run it and said, “G–d damn…” He asked, “What is your problem?” I replied, “I worked on that for 2 1/2 hours and you fixed it in 15 seconds.” And he pulled his glasses down and said to me, “That’s 35 years and 15 seconds.”

Lori

That’s awesome. I love that “35 years and 15 seconds.”

Diana

In 1986 I moved to Los Angeles from South Africa with my family where I had worked as a film editor on many feature films and had cut countless hours of television programming from episodic to documentaries. My network of contacts in the industry in Hollywood was minimal and without local credits, finding work as an editor was proving extremely difficult. With two small hungry children, I was desperate to get my foot in the door of an editing room. Someone I knew was working on a feature film, The Man Who Broke a Thousand Chains directed by Danny Mann for HBO. She mentioned that the editor, Walt Hanneman, A.C.E. was looking for an apprentice editor and suggested I apply for the job. The film starred Val Kilmer, Charles Durning, Kyra Sedgwick, Elisha Cook, and Sonya Braga and promised to be a worthwhile project even though the work was that of an apprentice and entailed rolling and boxing the 35 mm trims—they were still working with 35 mm film and cutting on a Moviola. I went for the interview and got the job.

The first strange thing that happened when I went into the cutting room on the first day was that I took one look at Walt’s first assistant and could not believe my eyes. Rewind my life almost 20 years to 1969. The scene—Pinewood Studios, London, editing room of a movie of the week called The Gaunt Woman for Universal Studios directed by Boris Sagal and starring Lorne Green and Rachel Roberts. I am there as an intern sitting in a corner observing the workings of editor Archie Ludsky’s cutting room. The second assistant on that film in London was Brian Frost. Fast forward. Almost 2 decades later. Walt’s current first assistant in Hollywood is Brian. Here we were, working side by side in Hollywood on the same film. Serendipity or the Fates sure must have had a hand in this one! You just never know who you will be teamed with again in postproduction. It is a small industry.

Shortly after I started working on the show, Walt learned that I had a great deal of editing experience and gave me sequences to edit. The producer–writer also asked me to cut together a lyrical montage for the end of the show, which he loved. Then as fate would have it, Walt took ill and had to leave the film. The first assistant and I were then offered the editor’s seat and together we completed the show. We all ended up sharing [the] editor’s credit. It turned out to be a great movie and one I am very proud of having worked on.

This is really how I got my foot in the door in Hollywood. Sometimes you just have to swallow your pride and keep your eyes on the prize. Always be humble and know that you have to shine no matter what the circumstance.

Lori

What a great tale Diana. Great fortitude.

Alan

I started working in New York, which is another world and was another world when I started there. It wasn’t as formal in that you didn’t have to spend a particular amount of time in a category. There maybe were no categories. And I was never an assistant, I was a sound effects editor. And when I did have the chance to be an assistant at a commercial house, I hated it. So I went back to working in a music editing place and I did sound effects for several movies for Sydney Lumet. Sydney asked me if I wanted to edit his next movie. And what that meant was that Sydney would stand right behind you and tell you exactly what he wanted. But I figured yeah, I really want to do that because I was a little bored with sound editing. Before that happened, I got a call—I was doing the sound effects for the original film of The Producers and the editor and Mel Brooks did not get along for one moment. Ralph Rosenbloom was the editor and when he left, I took over the film. There was very little to do on it, of course in sound effects, but there was one sequence in the middle that never got a laugh. And Mel said, “Okay, you come in on Monday, we’ll work together and we’ll get that working” and I said, “You know, you worked on this with Ralph for quite a while. Why don’t you let me take a shot at it?” and he said “Okay.” So, I went in, looked at the dailies and discovered that only one big master shot was used in the scene. When I started editing it, I discovered there were close-ups and two shots and all kinds of treasures. And then I started cutting this scene together and discovered that Ralph had basically put the scene together the same way. And Mel had taken it apart. When you had film, you could see the splices and the old marks, so my splices were very similar to Ralph’s—a third of a second this way or that. And when we screened the movie, Mel came in and looked at the scene and I guess he figured that if two editors said it was funnier this way, he’d go for that. I don’t know, he never complained. And we had a screening shortly thereafter and the audience laughed so hard at the section, that they couldn’t hear the dialog in large part. And I thought, “Oh boy, I really love this.” I mean, you could take material and you can manipulate people, you can make them laugh, you can make them cry, you can do it. I didn’t know I had those abilities. Once I did, I didn’t want to go back to being a sound editor anymore. And then I did a couple of films for Sydney Lumet and he was over my shoulder and I learned an enormous amount about performance and things. That was how I got started. A few years later Sydney asked me to do Network and I was afraid he wanted to be over my shoulder again and I wasn’t going to do that, but it was on a tight schedule and he left me alone and we had a great time.

Lori

Thank you Alan. Thank you Mark, Matt, Stephen, Sabrina, Troy, and Diana! There is so much to learn from all of you. Thank you for sharing!

The messages from our esteemed colleagues are clear as a bell. When you dedicate yourself to succeeding in your chosen field of endeavor, anything is possible! Follow your dreams. Make them a reality.

The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

Ayn Rand

Make the cut.