OT: Thelma Schoonmaker on editing Raging Bull

busterkeaton wrote on 3/21/2005, 9:06 AM
I finally got a chance to see the special edition DVD of Raging Bull. It has several commentary tracks.
The main commentary track switches between Martin Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker who won the Best Editing Oscar for Raging Bull and again this year for The Aviator.

I'm letting the DVD play with the commentary on as I do some other work. I'm half way through it and have already several interesting things about editing and making movies.

For a scene that they wanted to have a heigtened sense of unreality, they shot zoomed in with flames underneath the lenses with a lot of cigarette smoke in the frame.

Every time they shot slow motion, they did it a three different speeds to give themselves options in the editing room.

Sometimes they used regular sync sound below slow motion visuals for an slightly disturbing feeling.

Some of the crowd noises in the fight scense are animal noises played at a barely perceptible level.

There's also a lot good stuff in there on POV from a character or thematic level. Virtually every time Jake looks at his wife is in slow motion. In a lot of the fight scenes, they never show the audience, which reinforces the viewers identification with the boxers.

At one point in the movie they show a sections of home movies that are in color, in contrast to the black and white of movies. To get the old home movie look, they scratched the actual negative, cut in flash frames both white and colored and desatured the color. Thelma Schoonmaker went to different theaters to see how the movie was projected and found one projectionist actually cut it out of the movie because he thought it was a mistake.

Comments

baysidebas wrote on 3/21/2005, 9:22 AM
Indeed, directors, who strive for film deals giving them final cut, often seem to forget that it's the projectionist who always has final cut.
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 3/21/2005, 9:28 AM
That's happened to me before (kind of)

I go to see a movie, and then I go another time, and one of the sections that was in it before , just simply isn't there. - it's very disturbing because then you wonder if it ever really was.

(do they do this for releases to DVD? - there have been times where I was pretty certain that they did, but no way to know for sure - since it was already out of the theater.

Dave
filmy wrote on 3/21/2005, 9:43 AM
>>>Thelma Schoonmaker went to different theaters to see how the movie was projected and found one projectionist actually cut it out of the movie because he thought it was a mistake.<<<

LOL!

One of my fav stories is from the documentary on George Stevens and in a section about his film Shane they interview Warren Beatty and he tells how the audio on Shane was a huge influence on Bonnie and Clyde. So he went to great lengths to record gunshots and do the mix. He went to see the film over in London, I believe, and he is sitting there and the first guns come on they are low...very low. So he runs up to the projection booth and sees there is this graph on the wall, Beatty asks the projectionist what is going on and the guy says something like "This is a graph of the sound in the film, all these peaks are guns that I have to manually lower the volume on. I haven't seen a film this poorly mixed since Shane."
JackW wrote on 3/21/2005, 10:42 AM
A couple of weeks ago Thelma Schoonmaker gave a seminar on editing here in Seattle, using Raging Bull and numerous other Scorsese projects to illustrate points in the talk. The following night she attended the Seattle Art Museum's film series, which has been presenting the works of Michael Powell, Schoonmaker's husband, and spoke at some length about this wonderful British film maker (The Red Shoes, A Canterbury Tale, 49th Parallel, etc.) and his work.

What I found of great interest were her comments on the relationship between the director/cinematographer and the editor. Scorsese, especially, shoots very long scenes which often leave little leeway for the editor. She used several scenes from Good Fellows to illustrate this. Michael Powell worked with cinematographer Jack Cardiff on most of his films, and with David Lean as editor on some. Again, Schoonmaker spoke a considerable length about the creative aspects of this relationship and how much the shooting and direction impacted the editing process.

Busterkeaton's right -- the special edition DVD provides and excellent insight into the work of this fine editor. She is a very thoughtful, articulate lady and clearly a fine editor: if you ever get a chance hear her in person, don't pass it up.

Jack
busterkeaton wrote on 3/21/2005, 1:19 PM
My favorite Michael Powell movie is Peeping Tom, which is kind of a British version of Pyscho. One day I'm going to have to give The Red Shoes another chance.

Raging Bull was her first Hollywood feature. She said the first shot she saw of the movie was the famous Steadicam shot that goes from the locker room into the ring. Scorsese had given a note saying there was one take that was perfect, where ever body had hit their cues right. When she looked at the take she found the camera's registration pin was broken and the shot was ruined. So the take in the movie is actually the second choice.

She had worked on Scorsese's first movie which was really a student film. She also said, even back then she knew he was going to have an impact on American film.
Gonzoman wrote on 3/21/2005, 2:04 PM
That sounds like some very interesting material. Might have to run down to BlockBuster and see if tha'ts available for rent. Thanks for the headsup BK.
RexA wrote on 3/22/2005, 1:30 AM
>When she looked at the take she fought the camera's registration pin was broken and the shot was ruined. So the take in the movie is actually the second choice.

Not trying to nitpick, but I don't understand the meaning. Should it read, "she found"?
What's a registration pin? Does it mean the film was not centered in the frame (or vice versa per point of view)? Just trying to understand more clearly what happened.
DGates wrote on 3/22/2005, 3:15 AM
I saw Raging Bull on TV not long ago. I was surprised how lousy the sound is. Very *dirty*. I suppose that's what happens when you use location sound almost exclusively. Yeah, it's real, but sounds like crap.

Today's movies are so pristine, sound-wise. The audio craft has certainly excelled in the last 30 years.
busterkeaton wrote on 3/22/2005, 9:04 AM
The sound is much, much better in this new remixed version. There are lines I realized I never heard before. Schoonmaker talked about how much Hollywood sound people hate location shooting.

The DVD goes into the sound design of the movie too. When a scene takes place in tenement apartment, you hear a lot street sounds, coming in through the window. There a lot of scenes where they use those old flashbulb cameras take make a pop sound. The sound editor used 7 different sounds for every pop, to make them harsher and more explosive. The sound editor wouldn't tell Scorsese how he did it and at the end of the movie, he turned in his mix and he burned all his sound effects. People thought he was just paranoid, but he said, if I told you how I got the sound effect it would ruin the magic. He said he burned his work, because he figured it was work for hire and it didn't belong to him. Another, perhaps more important reason he did it, was that it forced him to come to every new film fresh. He couldn't repeat himself. He wanted to come up with new ideas for each film he worked on.


Should it read, "she found"?
yes, that was a typo. I'll fix it.

Because film is a mechanical process unlike video which is electronic the film must actually come to a stop for each frame. Videotape keeps rolling. Film stops 24 times a second. The registration pin is what goes through the sprockets of the film stock and hold the film in place while the shutter opens. So in this case with a broken registration pin, the film would look either a bit jitterly to totally smeared depending on how badly the pin was broken.