ABSTRACT
A dear friend of mine and former colleague at Columbia, the late Ralph Rosenblum, one of the great film editors, author of When the Shooting Stops, the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story, had a jaundiced view of directors and believed that he and all good editors existed to salvage the film — to cover up errors of omission, to fabricate meaning when there was none — in short, to save the director’s skin. Ralph, like many editors (and producers), believed that the director’s job was to work with the actors and create life, but that life was then to be rendered in “coverage,” said coverage to be the palette with which the editor painted his story. I do not subscribe to this and have been teaching my students to design their films, to previsualize, to make their films in their head before shooting. If this is done, the editing takes care of itself. Well, not quite.
