effect on his marriage. Mickey shared Ashby's love of cinema (she would later end up working as a sound-effects editor), and as an artist she understood his dedication to his craft. When Eileen came to stay with them, Ashby hardly saw her, which Mickey suspects was because “she wasn't in a position to further his career in any way. That was the way he was.”10
This attitude won Ashby a job as fifth assistant editor on William Wyler's epic Western The Big Country (1958), where he worked under Bob Swink, the chief editor on every one of Wyler's films since Detective Story (1951). Wyler was a double Oscar winner for Mrs. Miniver (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and one of the most powerful directors in Hollywood. His relationship with Swink was as notable for its mutual trust and respect as for its unpredictable volatility. Wyler was known as “Forty-Take Wyler” and “Once More Wyler” because of the huge amount of film he shot, and Ashby, a noted hard worker, was hired because so many cutters were required.
Ashby once said, “My life changed when I met William Wyler and some others. Then all the doors opened, like in a movie.”11 The experience prompted a radical change in the way he thought about film, which he began to see as “the wildest, most exciting medium of all.” On Ashby's very first day on The Big Country, one of the editors had assembled a rough cut of one reel of the film, so Wyler and his whole editing crew assembled in the projection room to look at it. Wyler stood up in front of everybody and, for the benefit of Ashby, the new boy, said, “If you have any ideas…any…no matter how wild they might seem, get them out. I, or we, might argue with you, and tell you it's a dumb idea and you are a dumb son of a bitch…but that doesn't matter because the heat of our anger comes only from the desire to make a good film. You must understand how we all feel about this film, and know in your heart that the words said in anger have nothing to do with anything personal. It will sound that way because we are driven by those strong feelings, and we don't take the time to be polite, but personal it isn't. So get those ideas out in the open and remember, the only thing any of us wants out of all this is to make a good film.”12
This blew Ashby's mind. It was a thrill to be working with somebody of Wyler's stature but even more of one to feel so welcomed into the process. Never before had he been considered important enough to offer an opinion. In previous jobs, he had been told: “Whatever they say, don't open your mouth. Don't you say a word.”13 Wyler, however, believed in collaborative filmmaking, in which everybody was considered significant enough to contribute, and it was a working method that Ashby fell in love with and would employ himself when he became a director. He conceded that there was “a lot of yelling, hollering and swearing that went on down in those cutting rooms, but there was also about eighteen tons of love floating around there, too!”14
Though he would later say that he wished he had an editor he could work with as well as Wyler did with Swink, he admitted that he had “never seen anybody have arguments the way they had arguments.”15 Swink told him stories of the massive fallings-out they had working on Roman Holiday (1953), and Ashby saw incidents where their constant needling led to shouting matches and Swink throwing reels of film on the floor.
Three months or so after shooting finished, a rough cut had been assembled, and Wyler, Swink, and the editing crew gathered in Projection Room A in Goldwyn Studios to watch the twenty-eight-reel version of the film (approximately four and a half hours long). After fourteen reels, the crew took a break for dinner. As Ashby was the most junior person there, food had not been provided for him, so he stayed where he was. He waited for the crew to return and was still waiting at 11:30 P.M. when Bob Belcher, one of the principal editors, came in and asked him why he was still there.
“I'm waiting for them to come back and we finish running the picture,” replied Ashby. “They've only run the first fourteen reels.”
“Oh, God,” said Belcher, realizing Ashby hadn't heard what had happened. “They're not coming back.”
“Why?” asked Ashby.
“Bob quit.”16
During the meal, Wyler and Swink had been discussing the first half of the film and had a huge argument that ended with Swink walking out on the film. Nevertheless, he came in the next day and got on with the job at hand.
The flip side to Wyler's belligerence was his subversive sense of humor, which Ashby experienced firsthand. He recalled with great amusement a time when Wyler had asked his opinion on an editing matter. Ashby was rambling on somewhat, as he was prone to do, when he noticed that Wyler had an object in his hand, something like a watch fob, which he was spinning. “And as he would spin it,” Ashby recalled, “you could see that it said ‘Piss On You.' Needless to say, I wasn't sure how he took my thing.”17
Though Wyler's reactions didn't always inspire confidence, the veteran director started Ashby thinking not only technically but also emotionally and creatively. As a result, Ashby felt greatly attached and committed to Big Country. When the film previewed in San Francisco, he was one of the few not brought along by Wyler, but he nevertheless paid his own way to attend the screening. Wyler was so impressed that Ashby was there that he had his expenses reimbursed. Everybody settled down to watch the film, and all was going well until, about an hour or so into the film, one of the reels went out of sync. It took a group of nervous editors almost ten minutes to rethread the negative and sort out the problem, by which time, as Ashby recalled, “a lot of people had come out to the popcorn stand to get candy and popcorn and so forth. And when they started the picture back up again, there was Willy running around in the lobby saying to people, ‘The picture's started again, the picture's started again,' forcing them back into the theater! There was no question about it: he wasn't polite, he was just grabbing them and throwing them back in! It was hysterical.”18
Ashby was learning by example all along, and seeing Wyler's passion for his films reinforced his certainty that this was where he wanted to be. Encouragingly, there were a number of editors who had gone on to direct, most famously David Lean and Robert Wise, and Ashby had only to look around him to see others who had done so. The first editor he had worked under, Gene Fowler Jr., had progressed to directing and by the end of the decade had made a clutch of films, such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), that were bound for classic B-movie status. One of the senior editors he had worked alongside at Walt Disney, Basil Wrangell, had combined editing with directing short films, second-unit material, television shows, and even a few features and was about to direct Cinerama's South Seas Adventure (1958). But there was another example even closer to home: Bob Swink.
Swink was desperate to become a director like Wyler, and the love-hate relationship between the two was greatly fueled by this desire. Wyler encouraged Swink by allowing him to shoot second unit on Big Country and Friendly Persuasion (1956) and, when he was too ill to make it to the set, had Swink oversee directorial duties on the latter for a few days. But though Wyler tantalized Swink with tidbits of directing work, he needed him as his editor and never really intended to let him go.
It wasn't just their shared dream of directing that bonded Ashby and Swink. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind asserts that the absence of Ashby's father in his life from age twelve onward led him to seek out paternal substitutes, namely, Swink and, later, Norman Jewison. While there is definitely truth in this, Ashby and Swink were also particularly well-matched professional partners. In Swink, Ashby saw a master editor and mentor figure who could take him up through the system; Ashby, conversely, was the ideal pupil, a keen young man quickly becoming a skilled editor who, like Swink, was willing to work incredibly long hours to get the job done.
Ashby worked throughout the week but devoted weekends to Mickey and his friends. Ian Bernard had moved to Laguna Beach in 1956, and it was only a matter of time before Bill Box, and then Ashby and Mickey, followed. The Ashbys rented
