the mailroom at Twentieth Century Fox in 1964 and that led to some work on a documentary of the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But, your career was over almost before it began. What happened?
SC: You needed eight years of editing experience before you were allowed to cut. George Roy Hill gave his assistant, Ron Priceman a 16mm Bolex with a 12:120 Angenieux zoom lens and told him to shoot some material. I started to put something together at night after I finished my assistant job.
I would call Ronnie and say, ‘Hey, why don’t you do an interview with Newman and with Redford’ and we would talk constantly about what he needed for the documentary. We showed how the “Oh Shit” jumping off the cliff scene was done. They shot part of it in Colorado and then when they got back to Los Angeles at the Fox Ranch, they put the two actors on a crane against a blue background and shot them jumping off into a tank. Then they married that with the footage done in Colorado. It won an Emmy. I cut this on the side and it violated the eight-year rule because I had only been in the guild for four years. I got called up before the union and they were very possibly going to kick me out. I explained that I thought it was only going to be an educational piece and I wound up talking my way out of it.
TO: What a start. You were an associate editor to Lou Lombardo who edited for Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah on The Long Goodbye.
SC: Louie and Danny Greene, who cut M*A*S*H, were two of my very strong influences. Bob Simpson was one of the most incredible editors I ever came across.
TO: He was nominated for editing for The Grapes of Wrath.
SC: Yes. And Louie was a very strong influence because he had done some very cutting edge editing on The Wild Bunch, mixing slow motion with regular speed and I admired his style. I cut quite a few scenes on The Long Goodbye.
TO: You’ve edited across almost every film genre. When do you say yes as opposed to no to a project?
SC: It’s the script and the personality of the director. I love being able to go across genres. I started out with comedies, with Cheech and Chong and I didn’t want to get pigeonholed, so I went to T.V. to be able to do dramas.
TO: And you got the Eddie award for Heart of Steel.
SC: Yes. Then I did thrillers for a while. And after doing drama and thrillers, no one thought I could cut comedy (Laughs). Did you know that Up In Smoke was the first film of its kind to break $200 million?
TO: Really?
SC: Yeah. Wagon’s East was one of the funniest scripts I ever read. John Candy, as everyone knows, died halfway through the making of the picture. His death, besides being a real tragedy, presented a lot of challenges. I found myself trying to take him out of one shot and putting him on horseback going across a river digitally and it was a very difficult experience.
TO: Tell me about The Temp.
SC: That’s an example of what can happen in Hollywood. It was written as a black comedy and it was directed, shot, and cast as a black comedy. Because of an administration change at Paramount, they wanted to turn it into a straight thriller. And it just wasn’t that. They brought in some top writers in Hollywood—Ron Bass and Frank Pierson to do rewrites and to reshoot about a third of the movie. And it just didn’t work. It was a very painful experience, both for me and Director Tom Holland.
TO: Rocky. It was made for $1.1 million and made over $117 million during its original theatrical run. How did you get involved?
SC: I had assisted Dick Halsey on Payday and he called me because they were about two-thirds of the way through shooting in Philadelphia. Dick had been on location and had just returned to L.A. He said there was a lot to cut. I started pretty much at the fight and worked my way backwards to the middle of the movie. The fight was, at that time, a lot of footage—it was 84,000 feet and six cameras.
TO: About 15 and-a-half hours of film for the fight.
SC: Yeah and on film you loaded each 1,000-foot roll up on the KEM and pulled your pieces. Our styles were very similar, and it was very homogenous. You can’t tell who cut what scene.
TO: Sound effects and music are important elements to Rocky.
SC: We were very lucky on that with Rocky because Bill Conti was brought in early and one of the best situations is where you are able to tailor the music to the film at an early stage.
TO: So, scenes like the training montage were tailored to the music and vice versa while you were editing.
SC: Yes, he was doing piano tracks that we would use to cut to or adjust the picture to and that’s why everything was in rhythm, both the training montage and the fight. When I did my first cut of the fight, I cut it to a Bad Company song.
TO: You’re kidding!
SC: No, and the director had an idea of using more classical music and the producers wanted something more popular. And that’s what Bill Conti achieved—a cross between the two. It has a classical lilt to it, but it has a very contemporary feel. The majority of the film was not difficult, but the fight was a big challenge. We just had so many pieces and there was so much to do because we were editing on film.
TO: Do you recall seeing the entire completed film for the first time?
SC: When we finished and locked the cut, I moved on to another film. We had done a lot of the sound effects for the fight scenes, but Richard was on the dubbing stage when it was all finished. I had only heard parts of the final score so the first time I saw the whole thing completed with the music was at the Academy screening.
TO: What was that like?
SC: It was an extremely rewarding experience because for your peers to give you a standing ovation at the end of the film was outstanding.
TO: Did you realize how big the film was going to be?
SC: I don’t think anyone really knew. We knew we had something really good.
TO: March 29th, 1977. Rocky, All The President’s Men, Bound for Glory, Network, and Two Minute Warning. William Holden was the presenter. Do you remember the moment?
SC: (Laughs) Richard’s mom taped that and I still have the VHS tape of our segment where Bill Holden gives us the award and it’s probably one of the most precious pieces of film that I have. You have no idea what’s going to happen. And then they said, ‘the winner is’…
TO: And you figured it wasn’t going to be you and Richard.
SC: Our hopes dropped because we thought it wasn’t us. And then he said, ‘Uh, excuse me, the winners are…’ and at that point, we knew we had it.
TO: To the very end…
SC: It’s a very daunting experience being in front of that many people and how big it is around the world.
TO: You moved from film to the digital nonlinear systems pretty early on.
SC: Yes, in 1993. But at first, it was a very big transition I have to admit.
TO: How so?
SC: Because on a Moviola or a KEM, you can stop on a dime and the frame is at your fingertips and there’s a different kind of timing. On an Avid, it’s
