Indie editor has Curves - News - Sloane Klevin was the editor involved in the film Real Women Have CURVES

Post, Dec, 2002 by Matthew Armstrong

NEWYORK -- When editor Sloane Klevin received the script for Real Women Have CURVES, one scene stood out immediately. "There's a bunch of women, who aren't the perfect movie stars, that strip down to their underwear and compare cellulite, stretch marks and body fat," notes Klevin. "When I read that I said, 'This is what the whole movie's about. If this scene is great, we've got something.'"

Well, the scene was great and they did have something. This HBO production went on to win numerous awards at Sundance Film Festival and, despite an intended HBO debut, the film was picked up and distributed theatrically by NewMarket Films.

Klevin, who recently moved from LA to New York to join commercial editing house Blue Rock, had freelanced for the past 11 years, cutting many independent features.

But cutting independent films that have little money and require long hours is an added challenge, as the lack of funding presents a host of logistical and creative constraints. "You learn a lot cutting independent films where your hands may be tied and you have to solve problems," notes Klevin.

In addition to time and money constraints, there's also the uncertainty of distribution of independent films -- whether it is released theatrically or on television/video -- that adds to an editor's tasks as they may have to cut a scene differently depending on where it will be viewed. "I do concern myself with that, but with this film, it was all about this actress's face and the movie was shot tight anyway, so I suspect I would not have cut it any differently had I known it would play in theaters."

With an already tight time schedule made tighter with delays in production, and the Sundance deadline looming only weeks away, Klevin had to work quickly and efficiently to complete the cut. "The first thing you do is find out how to tell each scene visually and how to put it together, what are the best performances and how to make each beat work," explains Klevin. "Then suddenly you've got a first assembly and it's three hours long and you realize you have to rewrite the whole script. That's what is really fun about cutting features because it's a process of peeling things away, taking things out, and shuffling scenes to figure out how to tell the story.

"The film is about a mother who oppresses her daughter and there were a lot of scenes where the mother insults her and the daughter sulks. In the first cut, even though the actress is brilliant, you didn't like her because she was a sulking teenager throughout much of the movie. So we had to eliminate a lot of great scenes so we could still be charmed by her."

Klevin edited Curves on an Avid Film Composer V.7.1, connected to an Avid MediaShare with 90GB of Fibre Channel storage, at Runway Video in Culver City.