Film Editor Sam O’Steen, A Man Who Could Tell a Joke

Yes, I’ve already written about Sam O’Steen. But I was so enthralled by his Cut to the Chase: Forty-Five Years of Editing America’s Favorite Movies that I  can’t resist turning the spotlight on Sam once again. Of all the films he cut, The Graduate is probably his favorite, because “it was such a huge surprise that it hit the way it did when we really didn’t know what we had.” Sometimes, though, movies he considered masterpieces never did find their audience. Catch-22, the film made by Mike Nichols immediately after The Graduate, is one prime example.

Like all editors, Sam labored hard in the cutting room to make good films better. Sometimes, though, the job entailed salvaging a project that just didn’t work. Take the case of Dry White Season, a movie about apartheid that was shot in South Africa in 1989. The novice director was proud of her “vision,” but it didn’t translate onto film, and because the original editor had “butchered up all the main takes,” Sam was called in for an emergency doctoring job. He was presented with a roomful of footage, but absolutely no paperwork. Fortunately, he enjoyed the challenge of assembling outtakes, jigsaw-puzzle-style, into a coherent story. For instance,“I found this film that wasn’t even shot for the movie: the camera had just been running while this white boy and this black boy [young actors in the film] were playing together, fooling around with a ball.” Sam chose to run this footage over the main title sequence, “because that’s what the story was about, that they were friends, but they were supposed to be enemies.” He ultimately considered Dry White Season some of his very best work, “because it wasn’t a movie, and now it is.”

Then there was the time Sam lopped off an entire season. The 1999 film debut of writer-director Tony Bui was the first American movie shot in Vietnam since the Sixties. Originally called Four Seasons, it told four separate stories, set against appropriate times of the year. But the “Rainy Season” segment was tedious, and Sam chose to highlight the appealing love story of a cyclo driver and a hooker at the expense of less dramatic tales (like that of a sad poet, as well as ex-soldier Harvey Keitel’s search for daughter he’d left behind). The result was Three Seasons, which was honored at Sundance and became a minor art-house success. 

Sam O’Steen had strong opinions on just about everything, like the introduction of computerized editing systems To him, computers were a mixed blessing. Yes, they speed up the editing process, and there’s no danger of ruining delicate film stock, so it’s much simpler to experiment now. On the other hand, because a computer is far easier to master than the old Moviola, everyone wants to get into the act. So the old days of the editor and director cutting in relative solitude are becoming a thing of the past, as producers and studio execs vie to take charge of the finished product.

At the end of this book, wife Bobbie (a veteran editor herself) asks Sam what kind of person makes a good editor. His answer is surprising: “Someone who can tell a joke.” Why? “Because the timing is right and he tells just enough.” Naturally, other skills are useful too, like an ability to be organized, to work independently, and to have total concentration on the task at hand. It’s important to be secure in your opinions, without having a need to show off. And you should recognize what’s important and what’s not. Sam’s favorite expression?  “Fuck ‘em.” 

Cutting Corners With Film Editor Sam O’Steen

Anyone who loves The Graduate admires the work of Sam O’Steen. He was the film editor who gave us such remarkable images as Benjamin Braddock sliding onto a swimming pool raft that suddenly becomes the body of Mrs. Robinson in bed at the Taft Hotel. In the course of a forty-five year career, O’Steen edited twelve films for the late, great Mike Nichols. Nichols encouraged him to be on the set during filming, so he could make suggestions that aided his work in the editing room. Here’s one more of his unique contributions: instead of simply intercutting between the nude Mrs. Robinson and the reactions of a very startled Benjamin, Sam juxtaposed quick flashes of her undraped body with an elaborate triple-take (Dustin Hoffman repeatedly whipping his head around). In his enlightening 2001 book, Cut to the Chase, O’Steen explains this as a sample of subliminal editing. He credits Sidney Lumet with pioneering this approach in The Pawnbroker; he himself considered it for Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf before trying it out in The Graduate. It’s not a logical moment: Ben’s eyes don’t match up with the body parts he’s glimpsing with such astonishment. Instead, O’Steen is following the principle of “cutting for performance, for the build-up of Benjamin’s panic.” 

His work with Mike Nichols is only one facet of  O’Steen’s career, which spanned the years 1961 to 1999. He also edited such classics as Cool Hand Luke, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown. As a director, he was Emmy-nominated for Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1976), starring Maureen Stapleton as a widow who finds a new lease on life through ballroom dancing. But though he was still directing as late as 1985, the editing room continued to be his real home. Fortunitiously, it led him to a long, happy marriage to a fellow editor with whom he had four daughters. Cut to the Chase is as much Bobbie O’Steen’s book as it is that of Sam himself. It’s basically a Q & A in which she quizzes him about every facet of his career. The fact that she knows the field and is intimately familiar with Sam’s best stories means that the answers she elicits are well worth hearing. The book is not short on good old-fashioned gossip about Hollywood personalities, but it also provides real insight into the tricky business of reshaping movies in the cutting room.

 Some of my favorite stories involve a 1979 debacle called Hurricane, produced by the outrageous Dino De Laurentiis. Here’s IMDB’s capsule description: “The desperate love affair between a young Samoan chief and an American painter, against the will of her father. Amid this man-made tension comes a hurricane so devastating, the lives of the lovers and the entire island are imperiled.” De Laurentiis insisted that this pulpy saga be shot in beautiful but remote Bora Bora, which at the time had no telephone service and no natural resources beyond fish and tropical fruit. Everything had to be shipped in from L.A.: sets, thousands of yards of fabric for costumes, and so on. De Laurentiis built a hotel to house cast and crew, then flew in two of Italy’s best chefs, along with enough food and drink to feed an army. Naturally, everyone went stir-crazy. O’Steen, not one to mince words, bluntly describes star Mia Farrow “eye-fucking” (and more) both director Jan Troell and cinematographer Sven Nykvist. And co-star Timothy Hutton, who turned paranoid during the shoot, is still infamous for the day he peed on De Laurentiis’s spiffy Italian loafers.

More Sam O’Steen to come!

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