Pal Joey: Veteran Friends editor Steve Prime continues a beneficial friendship

Post, Sept, 2004 by Randi Altman

BURBANK -- When I first spoke with Steve Prime, editor for the Friends spinoff Joey, he was setting up his new editing room on the Warner Bros. lot, within the show's production offices. The Joey offices are located in a new, turn-of-the-century colonial that is sometimes used as a back lot for shoots. Gone are the days of sterile brick buildings.

Multiple Emmy-nominated Prime, himself the Friends editor for nine seasons, estimates that 75 to 80 percent of the crew are the same, including executive producers Kevin Bright, Scott Silveri and Shana Goldberg-Meehan. How's that for comfort level?

The show stars Matt LeBlanc, continuing his Joey character, and co-stars Drea de Matteo, who is best known as Adriana on HBO's The Sopranos.

The Joey pilot was shot back in April. It was edited in the old Friends editing room on the Avid Film Composer V.7.2. And bucking the recent trend of sitcoms going high definition, it was shot on film. "We are not going to 24p," says Prime. "We are staying on film, but we will deliver 16X9 with full aperture telecine. We just prefer film. The options that are left available for color timing and focus and things like that, we felt worked better with our show. We will still shoot on three-perf film but deliver 16X9 and 4X3."

NEW GEAR

Prime's aforementioned new edit suite houses an Avid Meridien editing system, supplied by local LA Digital. "We didn't want to change on Friends in the last year or two," he explains, "so we stayed on the old Film Composer V.7.2."

But aside from the pilot, all episodes are now being cut on Meridien. When I checked back in with Prime, after editing on the first couple of episodes was underway, he was happy with the results received from the new system.

"So far the Avid has been holding up just great. The picture quality has definitely improved," he reports. "With the amount of storage that is available you can go at higher resolutions, so it seems to be getting better all the time. And my 4X3 scan conversion has improved. I have my computer monitors and then I have a studio monitor for 16X9, and then I have a large consumer 32-inch Sony Trinitron for the 4X3. And that seems to have improved in quality, too, because it has to go through a machine that blows the image up a little bit more and keeps the ratio right for a 4X3. A digitized image goes through yet another processor, which degrades the image a bit, and compared to what I was on when we did the pilot in the Film Composer, the Meridien has better quality."

Prime and his assistant Mark Dashnow are linked via the Avid Unity LAN. Dashnow has a full Meridien of his own for preshoots and such. "The Unity has been working great," Prime reports. "What I like about the Unity is my assistant Mark can be loading music or stock footage or whatever, and the minute he closes the bin in his room, all I have to do is open the bin in here and the changes are automatically updated. It's really seamless."

THE PROCESS

The show shoots on Friday evenings with either four or five cameras, and Prime starts the editing process on Monday mornings. Thanks to Wendy Knoller, the show's producer in charge of post, "I have been blessed with being allowed three days for my first cut; most sitcom editors are allowed two," he explains. "I think the producers here realize that giving me that extra day saves them a lot of time in the end because I am able to give a thorough analysis of what all the takes are, making sure everything is right, and if there are any sticky or clunky areas, I can smooth them out with my best effort. You only get one first impression on a cut."

The editor's cut goes to that particular show's director and producer Kevin Bright on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning. "First pass is time cuts," reports Prime, "and that's the first producer's cut." That takes about a day. The network, the studio and all the producers watch it over the weekend and he starts on their notes on Monday. "We look over everything and see if there is a pattern: does the show work, is it funny, what time cuts do you want to pitch? And then Kevin and I will make another pass on the show and that will become the second producer's cut." That goes back to Silveri and Goldberg-Meehan, and from there they just try to get it to time.

He notes that the first producer's cut is intentionally about a minute over "in case we cut something that people want back, which does happen. We need to give some buffer room."

So does the crew feel a lot of pressure to make Joey as successful as the ever-popular Friends?

"I'm sure it's there, but I don't feel it yet. We are all rather familiar with the inherent pressures of having a well-known show. Either that or we're just ignoring it," he laughs.