Cohen, ACE
Los Angeles, CA
Feature Films: Reach Me, Before the Rains, Material Girls, The Prince and Me, 15 Minutes, Blood and Wine, Three Wishes, Angie, Lost in Yonkers, Rambling Rose, No Man’s Land.
Television Movies: Five movies in the Jesse Stone series,Don King: Only in America, Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story, Crazy in Love, L.B.J.: The Early Years.
Television Series: Bosch, Wayward Pines, The Bridge.
I met Steve during the earliest years of my work as a co-inventor of the Avid editing systems. He was instrumental in shaping the development of editorial products across several companies. A talented editor and Emmy recipient, he has been deeply involved in the rights of motion picture editors and deserves a unique place in the industry’s adoption and transition to digital editing systems.
TO: Steve, you won an Emmy for your work on LBJ: The Early Years, an American Cinema Editors Eddie Award for Don King: Only in America, and the ACE Robert Wise Award for “journalistic illumination of the art of editing.” You were the first to use Avid Media Composer on a studio feature film, Lost in Yonkers. How did you get your start?
SC: I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to Yale, and though I’d focused on the sciences in high school, I ended up studying art and made a student film, a documentary about elementary school education. My mother’s sister was a script supervisor. She had just finished Alice’s Restaurant, and introduced me to a lot of people. The first call I got was from an editing company making commercials. I started there as a bicycle messenger, delivering film cans in midtown Manhattan. The understanding I had with the owner—a wonderful guy named Mort Fallick—was that if I could find time to learn, he would teach me. It didn’t take long for me to start assisting. About a year later, he decided to move to California and offered to take me along.
TO: You had a really good storytelling background due to the commercials and documentaries.
SC: I always enjoyed the mechanics of film. We worked in 35 and did most of what you would do on a feature, but in much less time. I learned a lot—synching dailies, organizing the editing room, cutting negative, ordering opticals.
TO: What were you doing at Paramount?
SC: Primarily carrying film around—very monotonous. But there were a lot of films in production, and if they needed help, they’d see who they could get. So, I was always going off and working on shows.
TO: How long were you in the apprentice pool?
SC: Roughly a year. The first feature I assisted on was Foul Play in 1977, with Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. Pembroke Herring was the editor.
TO: What did you learn from watching those editors?
SC: I assisted Pem on two shows and then began working with Dann Cahn. Both taught me a great deal, but I really learned how to cut from Dann, because he gave me scenes to edit—sometimes quite challenging ones.
TO: You worked in television before going to features.
SC: I cut TV movies for several years, eventually winning an Emmy working with director Peter Werner on LBJ: The Early Years. I eventually had a chance to interview with Martha Coolidge for a TV movie she was doing, which was going to be cut with the Montage.
TO: This was Bare Essentials.
SC: Yes. We did that show and then went on to do Rambling Rose and many other pictures.
TO: Winning an Emmy for Best Editing must have been a great morale booster.
SC: It was very exciting.
TO: Did you expect it?
SC: No! (Laughs) I mean, we knew we had made a good show, but I didn’t think I’d win an Emmy. I was surprised to get nominated and very surprised to win. The other thing that happened in those years was that I got involved helping to reform the Editors Guild.
TO: I’ve talked to a lot of editors who had a great amount of difficulty getting into the Guild.
SC: There was a rule that you had to assist for eight years before you could become an editor. You could get a medical degree in less time than that! A group of us came together and worked to change the rule. We put together an organizing campaign. All we were trying to do was to get it down to five years. But we did our homework and when the vote was finally taken, we won easily.
TO: If it’s a director you haven’t worked with before, what’s that interview like?
SC: You inevitably talk about the script, because the story you’re telling is the foundation of the meeting. But you might also talk about personal stuff because a director wants to know that they can get along with you for months at a time. And I have the same kinds of questions—how easy will it be for us to collaborate? Will our tastes and storytelling instincts complement each other?
TO: You were an early user of nonlinear, tape-based editing systems.
SC: I started using the Montage, and I was very eager to try it. I had written some fairly sophisticated software in the early ’80s and was very excited by the personal computer revolution. And I came to believethat the potential for computers in editing was huge. I did a couple of shows on the Montage, and I found the system to be brilliant and seminal. But it was also limited and at times, maddening. I ended up writing them a 30-page letter, describing what I thought they should be doing, and I worked with them for a while, helping to build a digital prototype. As a stepping stone, they had a hybrid system, which they called the Montage IIH.
TO: Can you describe that?
SC: The Montage had 17 tape drives shuttling dailies around to preview the show without actually cutting anything. The hybrid had an 18thdrive which was a bunch of SCSI hard drives. Same editing methodology, same controls, but digital speed. In practice, you cut everything off the 18thdrive, but if you had a problem you could check your work on the tape drives, which we knew worked.
TO: You mean check for picture quality, focus, and so forth?
SC: Yes, and also to make sure the cuts were accurate. I believe there were only two users of the hybrid. I used one, and Godfather III used the other. The biggest problem was systemic: a 30-frame system cutting 24-frame material.
TO: Because of the phantom frames.
SC: Exactly. I really got to understand why, and that turned out to be pivotal later on. The picture I did with the IIH was called Crazy in Love, also directed by Martha Coolidge. We were working with exposed drives perched on shelves, no cases, tied together with SCSI ribbon cable. A big drive back then held less than a gig, cost two thousand dollars and weighed about ten pounds—so storage was limited! Then I did another show for HBO, and by that time Montage had begun working with digital optical discs in an early RAID configuration.
TO: What show was that?
SC: Teamster Boss, written by Abby Mann. We set up the IIH, now with optical drives,
