Remembering Dorothy Spencer

Despite being nominated for four editing Academy Awards, The New York Times overlooked Dorothy Spencer. When she died in 2002, the Times failed to note her passing. But as part of its Overlooked series, the newspaper has made amends, publishing an obituary about the woman who edited Stagecoach (1939), Decision Before Dawn (1951), Cleopatra (1963) and Earthquake (1974).

Born in 1909, Spencer began working as junior employee at a film lab while still a teenager. During the silent era, she worked as an assistant editor. In 1937, she cut ten films in single year. While editing Stagecoach, she chose to break the 180-degree rule, which argues that to avoid confusing the viewer, the editor must never pivot greater than 180-degrees. during an edit.

“Disorienting and confusing the audience, it created a closer bond between viewers and the characters in the stagecoach, who are themselves thoroughly disoriented and confused. So, rather than compromising the cinematic experience, this deliberate breaking of the 180-degree rule actually intensified it.”

— David Meuel, “Women Film Editors: Unseen Artists of American Cinema”

Spencer also edited Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) and Valley of the Dolls (1967). For Valley of the Dolls, the Times credits her with using French New Wave techniques: “Patty Duke spits out water in the shower, does a multiple-exposure somersault, exercises on a rowing machine (with the top half and the bottom half of the screen deliberately out of sync) and gets married — a significant plot point, seen only in a black-and-white still photograph.”

Other Bodies In The Swamp

In The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America To Love Murder, David Thomson dedicates a chapter to movies deeply influenced by the 1960 thriller. The list is long and full of wonderful insights. Definitely buy the book for the full experience.

A few highlights:

• Klute (1971): “Klute ends with with the killer killed, but there are so many other things to be afraid of, not least the climate of paranoia.”

• Don’t Look Now (1973): “This is the Daphne Du Maurier story that Hitchcock did not take up. … There in the middle it has one of the most uninhibited love scenes ever filmed (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie). In its warmth and tenderness, and in its solace for two wounded people, it is not just unlike anything in Hitchcock, it is beyond him.”

• Dressed To Kill (1980): “It was camp Hitchcock, a summer vacation Psycho for rich kids.”

‘She's Really Running Away From Everything’

Wanda is a film worthy of obsession.

Director Barbara Loden’s 1971 movie about a lonely woman wandering from bar to bar, man to man, trying to escape a sordid existence, was the filmmaker’s only effort. Before making Wanda, Loden was an actor, then married to Elia Kazan. After Wanda, she died young, at age 48. Her movie was largely forgotten until a restoration by UCLA Film Archive.

In this scene, Wanda asks a sewing factory boss for her old job. He declines.

I first saw Wanda at the Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis. Then I saw it again on Criterion, then a third time on Criterion, then I read Nathalie Leger’s excellent Suite for Barbara Loden. If you haven’t seen Wanda, this appreciation from Richard Brody at The New Yorker will give you a sense of the movie’s tone.

In 1972, Loden appeared on the Mike Douglas show at the invitation of Yoko Ono and John Lennon. One of the questions Douglas asks Loden references her husband’s reaction to her ambition: “How does he feel about you making your own film?”

Ugh.

Take the time to watch Wanda, a film John Waters called one of the best “feel-bad movies ever.”

The Fargo Audition Tapes

In researching A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere, The Untold Story of the Making of Fargo, I interviewed Jane Drake Brody, an acting coach and casting director. Brody wasn’t the top casting director on Fargo; John S. Lyons had that honor. But in working with the Coens on The Hudsucker Proxy, she begged The Boys to hire her to work on their next project. They did. She worked out of hotel and conference rooms in Minneapolis, watch local talent tryout for the roles of hookers, cops, customers buying cars, bystanders, and other parts.

Here’s an excerpt form A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere:

“Let me do the Minnesota casting,” she told the Coens. “I can cast a lot from up there.”

Brody got the job and a very specific set of recommendations for the kinds of actors they wanted in front of the camera.

“One of their instructions to me was, ‘We only want to see blond people.’ That was one of their big instructions,” she said. “I didn’t follow it completely, but I followed it a lot. And boy, there were some actors in Minnesota who were madder than hell at me that I couldn’t see [them audition]. I knew they were not in the picture that the Coen Brothers had in their head. They were too othered. They were not Scandihoovians.”

During the interview, I asked if she’d taped the auditions. She had.

Where are the tapes?

In the barn.

Can you send them to me? I wondered, trying to not sound desperate.

Jane agreed.

But first she had to find them. Things were disorganized at the country place she’d recently purchased. There was a remodeling project. I would have to wait. Over the next several months, I politely, but persistently asked for the tapes. Finally, a package arrived in the mail. I was very excited.

On this page, are the Fargo auditions of Larissa Kokernot (Hooker #1), Bruce Bohne (Deputy Lou) and Michelle Hutchison (Escort).

Thelma Schoonmaker: It's All About Timing and Rhythm

If you like Martin Scorsese (and I do), you gotta love Thelma Schoonmaker, his long-time editor. Over the decades, she's spent untold hours in the editing booth with Scorsese, fretting over cuts.  "Editing is all about timing and rhythm," she says.

Schoonmaker, who has won three Oscars for film editing (Raging Bull, The Aviator, The Departed), told Studio 360 it can take as much as a year to edit a Scorsese film. "It takes a long time to get it right," she says. "We re-cut much more than most editors. You have to live with a film. Really live with it."

Also in the interview, Schoonmaker analyzes the cutting choices in this famous restaurant scene from Goodfellas. “There are no close-ups at all because Marty [Scorsese] wanted to show what was happening to the people around Ray Liotta and around Joe Pesci," Schoonmaker says. "As it starts out very funny and people are laughing. Then pretty soon, things get a little scary, then scarier and scarier. You see on the faces of the people around them, they are really beginning to get worried. … You don’t always have to have close-ups. Sometimes a medium shot or a wide shot is just as good.”

The show also coaxed this analysis of a Raging Bull steadicam shot from Schoonmaker, which shows Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci walking into a boxing ring.

If you want more on Raging Bull, I've unearthed this Schoonmaker interview from 2005. She discusses when sound was removed from a fight scene, when a piece of film was placed upside down (on purpose) and many, many more details, including the reason the fight scenes in Raging Bull look different than other boxing movies. "He {Scorsese} had looked at every boxing film every made and the thing he noticed about most of them was that the camera was outside of the ring, of course, because it's so hard to shoot in. But he wanted to be in the ring," she says.

Oh! There's also this American Cinema Editors interview from 2010. In the video, Schoonmaker describes how tough it was to cut an improvised scene from Raging Bull with Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci inside a kitchen arguing about fight scenarios.