Where no editor had gone before - Back in the Day

Post, Feb, 2003 by Christine Bunish

LOS ANGELES -- When something becomes routine it's often hard to remember a time when it wasn't commonplace. Just a decade ago Steven J. Cohen, A.C.E., made history when he edited director Martha Coolidge's Lost in Yonkers, the first studio feature cut on an Avid system -- a precursor to the modem Media Composer.

None of us knew how to do this," Cohen reminds us. "The only models were a handful of film-based features done with the Montage Editdroid or CMX 6000." When Cohen took on Lost in Yonkers, an adaptation of Neil Simon's play about two brothers growing up with eccentric relatives, he assumed the role of editing pioneer.

Cohen actually had more experience with digital editing than many of his colleagues in the early 1990s. Although he had cut Coolidge's Rambling Rose in 1991 on a Moviola, he used a Montage system on the director's MOW Bare Essentials and a Montage 2H hybrid digital tape machine on her made-for-TNT feature Crazy in Love.

After the 2H, Cohen used an Avid to edit the HBO original movie Teamster Boss, the first TV movie to use an Avid and conform a film negative. He had extensive talks with Avid founder Bill Warner and others about Avid's next big challenge: a theatrical feature.

"The image quality by this time was adequate, storage was awkward but you could do it," he recalls. The big hurdle was that Avid was "a 30 fps system trying to edit 24 fps material. "Then, Avid co-founder Eric Peters gave Cohen a white paper "which indicated the system could digitize and play out material at 30 frames but work internally at 24 frames. Avid knew this was good," says Cohen, "but wondered what it meant to me.

Cohen soon realized that if Avid had solved the frame-rate issue, "this was everything. I told Eric If you can do this, you can do a perfect change list and you can own Hollywood.' My impression was that change lists were a new idea at Avid at the time."

Cohen understood that "what was glamorous for Avid engineers were things like realtime digital effects and a beautiful interface. A change list was a piece of paper used by a human being sitting at a splicer. There wasn't a lot of glory in it. But this was the empowering technology that would allow the equipment to spread to feature films."

ENLISTING SUPPORT

Avid made the commitment to support Cohen and provide him with what he needed to edit Lost in Yonkers. Martha Coolidge was "eager to be an early adopter, and her support was essential," he reports. "She trusted me and was willing to say,' If you can make this work I want it' She understood that the equipment could be very powerful creatively, allowing you to do things more quickly, more flexibly. She had already seen some of this on the hybrid show we did."

Cohen had to sell the studio on using an Avid, however." There was a certain risk from the studio's point of view," he says. "If I failed, they had a potential economic problem." Cohen and Coolidge met with Columbia executive Gary Martin who "had confidence that we could make it work His was a critical 'yes.' I will always be grateful to him for it"

WORK BEGINS

Cohen began Lost in Yonkers without working change list software. "Once we were into dailies we had cut list software and eventually we got change lists. It more or less worked at the beginning; there were some problems we could fix and some we couldn't -- and there are some things I still wish for. List software in general needs a big test environment with lots of material. You can't really evaluate it in a cubicle."

Even with bugs, "the system allowed us to cut digitally with all the creative advantages that implies, but we could screen film whenever we wanted. We could make changes digitally and go back and screen again. That was the revolutionary step -- we could evolve the show, keep the sound department up to date and keep screening it. It was one of the key things that sold the idea to the studio, for whom the preview process is critical."

After Cohen finished editing Lost in Yonkers he realized the world had changed. "I edited film for a longtime, and I loved cutting on a Moviola, but after that it was hard to imagine going back" says Cohen, who still uses Avids today. After Yonkers, he became an Avid consultant, helping to develop many of the features in their next big release, Version 5. He was the first to use it on a feature, Coolidge's Angie.

"Although it was well established in TV, even as late as 1995, people were not certain that digital editing would take over for features," Cohen points out. "Could film editors learn this technology? We were people who practiced our craft with Scotch tape and rubber bands, and used a machine whose engineering had a lot in common with a sewing machine. Most people did learn it because what really matters is talent, not technical prowess. Now we're facing another major change with 24p, digital intermediate and digital distribution -- the second digital revolution.

"The advantages to using an Avid really haven't changed from those early days," Cohen observes. "You can make more creative decisions in less time."