More or Less? It’s an Editor’s Dilemma

“I was at a meeting of the film editors’ executive branch at the [motion picture] academy the other day, and this whole thing about three-hour-long movies came up,” Kent Beyda recalls. “Everybody said, ‘I don’t get it’--people think that someone deliberately thought to do this? No one had ever had that experience of someone saying, ‘Let’s make a three-hour movie!’ ”

But Beyda--whose film-editing credits include such well-under-three-hour flicks as “Gremlins II” and “Innerspace”--knows such words carry little weight with moviegoers who have recently been treated to the likes of such long films as “The Thin Red Line,” “Meet Joe Black,” “Beloved” and “The Horse Whisperer.”

True, that same public lined up in droves for “Saving Private Ryan” earlier this year, and made the over-three-hour “Titanic” the all-time box-office champ. And few complained back in 1974 when “The Godfather, Part II” clocked in at 3 hours 20 minutes. But then there’s the case of the 3 1/2-hour “Heaven’s Gate” (1980), and the increasing perception that directors of recent jumbo releases have more in common with Michael Cimino than they do with Francis Ford Coppola.

In other words, the question of the moment is: “Is more less?” For film editors, that’s more than a subject for idle musing, it’s a practical and philosophical dilemma.

“Throwing things out is one of the most difficult and important things you ever have to do,” says Thelma Schoonmaker-Powell, who won an Oscar for film editing for 1980’s “Raging Bull” when she worked with director Martin Scorsese. She’s currently working on Scorsese’s latest project, “Bring Out the Dead.”

Her long association with the director began with their editing of Michael Wadleigh’s four-hour “Woodstock” (1970) and includes the three-hour “Casino” (1995)--which she says might have been even longer.

“On our films we’ve always had to throw out something that was either his favorite scene or my favorite scene,” Schoonmaker-Powell says. “It’s very, very painful sometimes.”

Schoonmaker-Powell recalls one example: “In ‘Casino,’ there was this scene where Bob De Niro tape-records Sharon Stone’s phone call. Then he asks her about where she’s going and he catches her in a lie. It was a great scene, especially for Bob’s work, but we found that, in light of the whole film, it wasn’t needed.”

To Beyda, it’s crucial to find the appropriate length for each film, whether that’s three hours or 90 minutes.

“Each film has to have a certain integrity in and of itself,” notes Beyda, seated before the editing console at Paramount Studios, where he’s working on a remake of “The Out-of-Towners.” “I didn’t find that ‘time sense’ a factor in the editing process. To me it’s, ‘Does it play?’ ”

Veteran film editor Tom Rolf puts it like this: “Certain stories take a certain pacing.

“There’s a majestic, kind of imperial way of telling a story, or you can go to the MTV way,” notes Rolf, whose credits include such epic-length films as “New York, New York” (1977), “Heat” (1995), and “The Horse Whisperer” (1998).

“You can tell the same story in a commercial in 30 seconds--and there are some brilliant commercials. But I don’t want to go to a movie and see a commercial. I want to get involved with the characters, hate them or love them. All those emotions I want to get into when I lose myself in a movie.”

But Beyda believes that some movies are too long because of forces outside the editing room.

“The main difference I see these days is that movies, instead of storytelling, are more market-driven,” he says. “They have to be available at a certain date, and nothing else matters. So that’s why I think that movies are in the shape they’re in. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the case.”

When Films Get Out of Control

Some films are long because they’re meant to be that way, others because they get out of control, say film editors.

“The difference between a film that ends up three hours and a film that is envisioned as three hours is that it’s written that way,” says Schoonmaker-Powell. “Because of the scale, the epic quality of ‘Casino,’ Marty felt strongly that it deserved that length, and it was shot with that in mind as opposed to something that ‘gets there’ somehow.’

“ ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ [1988], on the other hand, came out as long as it did because we had to get it out to the public to defend itself. We didn’t really ‘finish’ that movie in a sense. Had we been able to, we would have cut it down quite a bit. . . . It’s harder when you work on a film that long, as an editor.

“ ‘Life Lessons’ in ‘New York Stories’ [1989] was one of the easiest films to get ‘on top of’ in terms of the editing. You felt you had complete, total control over it, and you knew where you were going. It was a little jewel to work on.”

But audience awareness of such gem-like circumstance is rare, says Rolf. He realized that when he conducted a recent discussion on editing, sponsored by the academy’s editing branch; his audience consisted of both professionals and curious film enthusiasts.

“I don’t think they understand what an editor does in any way,” says Rolf. “They are so attuned to believing that the director is the be-all and end-all of the filmmaking process. They think every director is an auteur, so they don’t understand what the editor does. And, by the way, there are quite a few editors who don’t know what they’re doing, either.

“Most people seem to think editing is all about action scenes. But action scenes are the easiest thing to edit because they’re self-determined. You shot the gun, you’ve got to see where the bullet goes. . . . Creatively, I much prefer the interpretive dialogue scenes. The timing, the pauses, the hesitations. To me, that’s painting with film. Look, I showed these people at the seminar the cafe scene from ‘Heat,’ where De Niro meets Al Pacino. Someone asked why I featured De Niro more than Pacino. I didn’t. They just got that impression.”

Rolf says that it was hard to cut down “The Horse Whisperer” even to its released length of about 2 hours and 40 minutes because of the film’s drawn-out story line.

“One of the particular problems of the story in terms of the length of the movie was that certain events didn’t take place until about three-quarters of the way into the picture,” he explains.

“That’s always a problem because of the script--and if we’d left in some of the other material that we eventually lopped out it would have come even later. The picture was quite a bit longer when it was first assembled--a little over four hours. We could have possibly gotten another five to eight minutes out of it, but I don’t think it would have benefited the audience.”

The problems that films of any length encounter in the editing process will continue--sometimes for reasons that have more to do with technology than directorial choices.

“When the AVID system came along five or six years ago,” says Beyda of the machine that allows editors to do all their work on video monitors, and presumably save time in the process, “the studios started cutting back on post-production schedules. They started adding more editors to make the schedule even shorter. Movies are suffering.

“I think the studio people are realizing that and are changing that policy. Movies have to have time to be themselves, instead of rushing just to get something done.”

But Rolf believes the current spate of long films is just a “cyclical thing.”

“It takes a certain amount of time to tell a story. I remember going to see ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and all the other movies of that period and they were all long. . . . We get four or five pictures that are three hours long, and everybody thinks it’s a whole new wave of the idea that pictures are going to be long.

“Then the studios start to back off and say, ‘You can’t shoot a 150-page script.’ It’s nipped in the bud, they think. But then six or seven years later it happens all over again. You’ll see.”