day. I had met Eric Peters at NAB and saw an early Avid, and later met Bill Warner at a tradeshow in L.A. called Digital World.
TO: That would have been NAB 1989. Bill was Avid’s President, of course, and Eric was the Chief Technology Officer.
SC: At NAB that year there were several early systems competing. It was very clear to me that Avid had the best. I was working on Teamster Boss, with film piling up and problems with the Montage. I had talked hypothetically to Bill and Eric about what would be needed to do a show. At the last minute, I decided to take a chance and do Teamster Boss on the Avid. One big issue was that we had to cut negative. This was HBO, and in those days, they required a conformed negative—you couldn’t just deliver a tape master.
TO: Right. We had developed MediaMatch, the film matchback software, to deal with that. Just so we have everything clear for the record—this was film shot at 24 fps, transferred to video at 29.97 fps, edited at 29.97 fps on Media Composer, and then you needed a negative cut list created from the 29.97 EDL (Edit Decision List).
SC: Right. The original MediaMatch was a HyperCard stack, right?
TO: Yes.
SC: We ended up using Avid version 3. It worked very well but we definitely had some problems. At one point, one of the engineers came to L.A. and was actually tweaking the code in our cutting rooms. Larry Jordan, Mort Fallick’s son, was assisting me—he’s since become an accomplished editor. We got through the show, cut the negative, and I learned a tremendous amount about how hard it was going to be to do a feature with matchback. You know this, of course, but to clarify, every cut has to be conformed to the nearest frame in material running at a different frame rate. To keep picture in sync, the software can adjust cuts by a frame. This isn’t a major problem in television, where you conform only once. But in features we had to be able to conform the picture over and over again for screenings[SC1]. That was the beginning of a long association between me and Avid and led to Lost in Yonkers.
TO: I remember coming out to Cincinnati to see you on location.
SC: I remember! I was eager to use an Avid for that show, and Martha Coolidge, the director, was very supportive. Her openness to the new technology, her willingness to take a risk and embrace it, was absolutely pivotal. Eric had sent me a white paper that described a hypothetical 24-frame workflow, and I understood immediately that this would solve our problem. I realized that it would let you make a perfect change list, which was essential. At the time, there was a lot of skepticism about digital editing for features, partly because of the frame-rate problem.
TO: Just for clarification, editing at 24 fps offers you a 1:1 relationship with film shot at 24 fps. Therefore, no video pulldown to deal with, no matchback to deal with, and no phantom frames. You cut on the exact frame that was shot. The change list is a way of comparing two versions of the show and allowed you to conform your workprint for multiple screenings.
SC: Correct. The video we were working with wasn’t good enough for screenings, so we had to project film, and do it regularly as the editing progressed.
TO: Right.
SC: Eric knew that 24-frame editing was essential, and the underlying architecture for it was in the code, but it hadn’t been implemented. That’s what I helped with. Eric made a commitment to deliver the change list software by the time we would need it, when we had a first cut. So we had a window in which to make it work. It was an exciting time.
TO: You have a unique position in history in relation to this.
SC: Later, Martha and I did another show called Angie, and again I used early beta software. A lot of the features that editors now take for granted were developed during that period: JKL trimming, asymmetrical trimming, replace edit, and many other things that I advocated for and helped design. My assistants during that period were pioneers, too: Scot Scalise, Alexis Seymour, Kate McGowan and Chris Brookshire.
TO: What does it take to be an editor?
SC: It takes tremendous tenacity. That’s the first thing. The I Ching says, “perseverance furthers”—stick with it, but don’t expect it to happen quickly. You need to be very comfortable working alone in a room, and you need to be at least somewhat egoless. An editor has to find the right balance between their own point of view and working within someone else’s point of view. You can do one or the other well but doing both is harder.
TO: Are there things that stand out from the films you’ve done?
SC: You inevitably love the films that came out well. But a lot of what I’m proud of is that the films meant something to people, that they represented a complete, coherent statement that had a strong emotional impact on an audience. One of the most satisfying things is to reveal and shape a character in a way that moves people.
TO: That has to be one of the most underrated qualities regarding what an editor does.
SC: People inevitably focus on what the actor did, not how you molded it. I want to be seen as an actor’s best friend—someone he or she can trust to find the most honest moments and weave them together.
TO: What films have you liked over the years?
SC: I often find that I like smaller pictures, that maybe aren’t as well known. And I sometimes love stuff that doesn’t have a lot of cuts. The scenes in Children of Men or Gravity with those incredible long takes, for example. But my favorite movie from an editing perspective is Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, edited by Billy Weber. It’s rarely praised for its editing, though in recent years I think that’s changed somewhat.
TO: Why Days of Heaven?
SC: It’s a poem and a montage from the first frame to the last. I’ve seen the movie many, many times and it never ceases to move me. It remains a kind of wonderful mystery that always has more depth to it. It’s really a tragedy that we can’t see it anymore in the way it was intended. It was such an immersive experience in 70mm and six-track sound.
TO: If you weren’t an editor, what would you be doing?
SC: I almost became a psychologist, and before that, I figured I’d go into the sciences. So I probably would have pursued one of those paths.
[SC1] Repeated below. Didn't seem necessary to say it twice.
Scott Conrad, ACE
Los Angeles, CA
Partial Credits: Crazy on the Outside, The Virgin of Juarez, Alison’s Choice, Mortal Kombat (Action sequences), Wagons East, Masquerade, The Bedroom Window, The Wraith, Cat’s Eye, Heart of Steel, Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie, Up in Smoke, Outlaw Blues, Rocky, A Boy and His Dog, The Making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Long Goodbye (assistant film editor).
Scott started in the mailroom at Twentieth Century Fox and has worked in every major genre. And what’s one of the most important things he’s learned? “You have to be very honest with opinions of the script and it’s the same way with the film. You have to be honest with it.”
TO: Scott, you have been working in the film industry since 1964. You received an Academy
