A year at the Opera: Terry Rawlings applies his knowledge as both a sound and film editor to cut Phantom of the Opera

Post, Dec, 2004 by Ken McGorry

LONDON -- Originally a sound editor for 15 years, Terry Rawlings was a solid choice to cut director Joel Schumacher's film of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera. Rawlings's professional interest turned to film in 1977, and by 1979, he had a breakthrough with the sci-fi classic Alien. Rawlings has a long list of big-budget films to his credit, including another Ridley Scott classic, Blade Runner, as well as Alien 3, Golden Eye, The Saint, Entrapment, and last year's The Core.

The 1998 feature US Marshals was Rawlings's last traditional film cut and the following year, on Jon Amiel's Entrapment, he made the switch to electronic nonlinear editing using the LightWorks system. Rawlings has stuck with this film-friendly NLE and currently uses LightWorks Touch.

LightWorks (www.lwks.com), which is fighting its way back into the Hollywood mainstream under the new ownership of Gee Broadcast Systems, is as easy to take on location as it is to use in LA or London, Rawlings says. "You can take it around with you--as long as you've got power."

For most of his career, he says, "We cut on a Moviola with a Steenbeck or a Kem, and cut with a joiner. The sound was joined with a white sprocket tape. I loved working on the Moviola and it took me a long time to decide to go to electronic editing. The thing that always bothered me about electronic editing is the fact that it's got built-in indecision. Everything you do, it will remember. If you're not disciplined, eventually you've got to make a decision and it's very difficult because, most of the things you've done, you like them when you did them. You'll end up with five, six, seven versions of a scene. I like to keep them down to two or three."

PHANTOM

Rawlings says that working on Warner Bros.' Phantom of the Opera "was one of the great experiences for me. Working with Joel Schumacher was fantastic. Joel allowed me to just do the film. He said, 'I will look at it when you've got it all together. I want you to give me your ideas as well as mine.' It was a wonderful way of working because you are allowed to do what you are hired to do--to edit the film." Rawlings's experience on Phantom, including his last months working directly with Schumacher, lasted about 11 months.

The first cut wasn't much longer than its final two-hours-plus runtime. This was due in part to the fact that the musical's songs are of a set length. One of the few sequences Rawlings shortened was a ballet scene early in the script, but little else. Scripts, once committed to film, he says, take on a life of their own. "It will match the script, but it won't be the same." The film reveals much more character and detail from the classic story of a "disfigured musical genius" (Gerard Butler) who haunts the Paris Opera and falls in love with a beautiful soprano (Emmy Rossum). There are exterior scenes and backstage sequences, as well as the spooky doings in the catacombs beneath the opera house.

Once Rawlings felt he had the film's story "together," he relocated to LA and worked directly with Schumacher for three or four months. Ultimately, Lloyd Webber got involved to work out the film's additional underscoring and segue sequences. "I'd run the film on my LightWorks. We'd have a keyboard in my cutting room and he'd see where he wanted to go, we'd pinpoint it, and he'd try something. It was a very interesting way of working." Lloyd Webber would have musical director Simon Lee and producer Nigel Wright with him. "In certain areas he wrote new music where we needed to cover a scene that wasn't attached to one of his songs. There's one new song in the picture for the end titles."

Rawlings worked on the dailies from the first day of shooting at Pinewood. "It was fantastic because Joel trusted what I was doing." Rawlings has two assistants. "One has been with me for 17 years, Tim Grover, and Tony Trompetto is my LightWorks technician. We haven't had one glitch thanks to him." The new Touch version of LightWorks is getting faster and faster. Rawlings says. "It's a very user-friendly system for movie editors who have worked on Moviolas and Steenbecks and Kems forever," he says, "because the controlling system is just like working a Kem."

Sound editing is one of Rawlings's loves and he creates his own scratch audio track of music and sound effects on the Light-Works. "I moved over with great trepidation," he says of his switch to electronic editing. "I was with Jon Amiel and he said 'If it doesn't work, we can go back to film.' I'd been editing for all these years on this equipment; if I had to go back to thinking what button to press and what to do it would negate what I'm trying to create. But after two to three weeks, it was like second nature. It was amazing!

"It is invaluable for you, yourself," Rawlings opines. "You can experiment and do outlandish things and throw them away. And for our storage, for the entire film of Phantom, we used half our memory."

That's discipline for you.

By KEN MCGORRY

mogorry@optonline.net