Catechism

From A Sketchbook

I was traveling all over the place looking for the most interesting stories. It was good work, it was what I wanted to be doing, felt staggeringly lucky that I was doing it, and, here was the thing – nothing was interesting. It was funny, everybody I worked with acknowledged it too – we’d be in some out-of-the-way-town, a story about heroin addiction or political insurgency or environmental catastrophe, some worthy story that the producers had talked themselves blue selling, and then we’d be there and it would be the same chain hotels, the same strip malls, the same polite, deferential attitude of whomever we were interviewing, how impressed they were by the presence of camera gear, the timid way they’d ask some questions about how expensive the lenses were or when the film might air. “Every place is exactly the same,” a sound guy said once when we were driving from the airport to the hotel, and it was a surprise, beneath the usual crew reverence for whatever the producers were worked up about, to hear my own thoughts expressed. All the same – everybody looked the same – you didn’t imagine being friends with anyone – I was shocked that I wasn’t even fantasizing about any of the women. It felt like an illustration of some kind of pre-Socratic parable, probably these stories were interesting in themselves, as they had actually happened, but in the time it took for us to get to them, in the re-telling, the oversharing, they had dried up – the whole exercise was like a lesson in the futility of chasing after things.

What was interesting to us – and endlessly so – was the personality politics of the shows and films we were working on, the way gossip flickered through the industry, how one person’s reputation was dimmed, how someone else was suddenly on the rise, how each project, no matter the ostensible subject matter, became a kind of extension of the showrunner’s personality. And our interviewees felt it too, there was no such thing as fly-on-the-wall observation, it was very much a two-way street, our interviewees wanted to know how different scenes of theirs would edit together; they were very savvy consumers.

So everything felt like an extension of the whims and the personality traits of the showrunner – and, even more, of the project funders, who, often, I would never meet – and the work felt like an elaborate sous-chefing operation for the editor, who, as everybody conceded, was ‘the real artist.’ ‘Films are made in post,’ people would say, particularly when they’d fucked something up, ‘they’ll fix it in post.’ And, like cowed staff, everybody lived in terror of the editors. ‘There’s nothing worse than an unhappy editor,’ camera guys would say head-shakingly, like it was some ancient proverb. And, as I spent more time in edit suites, I started to understand the fear they inspired on the field side. The editors had absolutely no interest in the propeller planes or the off-the-road trucks the crew would take to get to some location, no sympathy for the bouts of jet lag or travel sickness, no patience for hearing the details about what it took to get such-and-such a character to go on camera, all the juicy stories about their off-screen life. But within days of having the footage dropped off in their suites, the editors would be on the phone with the DPs or the producer – and it was excruciating to be in a van off on the next shoot and suddenly get one of these calls demanding why an establishing shot hadn’t been done in a location, why there weren’t more cutaways of a particular shoot subject.

For a few projects in a row, I was working with an editor, Robin. She was the meanest, the most demanding of all of them – considered an excellent editor, but she was quick to call, quick to march into an executive’s office and pronounce the footage from a shoot ‘deadly’ or ‘unusable’ often before she’d even screened all of it. I was in a van complaining about Robin, complaining about the way she’d eviscerated an earlier shoot, and Damian, a DP who’d worked with her before, shrugged and said, “Well, she’s a haunted woman.”

This was the kind of statement that was hard to ignore, even if he’d meant it to be the end of the subject, and somewhere in the middle of a three-hour drive we had later that trip, I asked him what he meant, and he looked around quickly to be sure that the rest of the crew were sleeping or wearing earphones and told the story. She’d been in her early 20s, the usual low-grade alcoholism, she’d been living in Minneapolis, working in something different, maybe some sort of journalism, she and her boyfriend went to a bar, they both got loaded, he more than her, but her too far gone to drive, and then he’d been trying to correct himself when he missed an exit, flipped over a divider. She’d had plates in her skull, some complicated disorders were left even after all the surgeries – one eye not quite in sync with the other – and a wicked case of survivor’s guilt. It was hard even to imagine what that would be like, the endless working-over of the evening, just some shitty after-work bar in Minneapolis, keeping track of how many rounds they had, why she’d let herself be encouraged into one more than she really wanted, why the decision of one driver instead of another, completely ordinary, uninteresting decisions except that it had been decades by this point that she’d spent trying to unravel them. “You’re trying to figure her out,” Damian said, “that’s who she is – when she’s up all night in a windowless suite that’s what she’s really doing, why this beer not that one, why this bar, not one closer to where they lived.”

And, as always with gossip, it did its job, it softened me towards a person I’d taken it into my head to dislike. She’d apparently gone through a complete lifestyle change after that, gotten into women, got out of journalism, the city desk, got out of Minneapolis, the whole Midwest. It was hard to know how exactly she’d found her way into editing – she was the kind of person to whom you could never ask a direct question – but by the time I knew her it felt like she’d always been there, the gray armor of a haircut, the icons and crosses that, after a while, you noticed scattered all around her office, the light that was always on under the crack in her door. She as a snide, skulking presence at office birthdays and happy hours. I’d see the way she’d enlist different girls on the outskirts of a gathering – she was on good terms with the assistants, office managers, the permanent staff – ask them in a stage whisper who this person was for whom we were ceremoniously cutting cupcakes or pouring out thimblefuls of champagne. And when she was told that that person was a new researcher or an additional production coordinator, she made no effort to hide her skepticism. This was all, the office layout, the revolving door of young support staff, the field teams, the squabbling executives themselves, let alone the feel-good office gatherings, all completely irrelevant, a bizarre sideshow to the actual product, which was being cobbled together in her suite. She tended to sip and stare into her flat champagne, to run a succession of complaints by her enlisted assistants and managers. “This is deli-bought?” she might say. “It really makes a huge difference if these things come from an actual liquor store.” And she’d name a few bars where they should consider going – places with a good pour, even decent champagne, that’s where they should probably go the next time they had one of these. She was kind of spinning her wheels, talking to talk, frowning into the plastic cup, which she held with both hands, like a child at a tea party – it seemed not to process for her that no one was interested in optimizing these events, it was a glad-handing sort of office, all kinds of excuses were employed, birthdays, wrap dates, holidays, to stand around and eat pastries or drink cheap booze. Eventually, Robin would run out of non-sequiturs. I’d see her turn on her heel, the assistants had found one another, she would toss her cup in a trash can, the liquid leaping up and sloshing the bag, pulling the door to her suite firmly shut behind her.

When I started at the company, I was one of these L-train millennials, snuck extra glasses at the happy hours, timed my departures with all the rest of the subalterns. I did a couple of rotations there, got more onto the field shoots, which meant 5am wake-ups, these grizzled cameramen who all seemed to have been embeds in Iraq or Afghanistan, had my footage get pulverized, gently by the EPs, as constructive criticism, mercilessly by Robin. And then I got the handle of it – it was a steep learning curve, but the amount of information in it was finite; after all, the system had been set up for just these purposes, a quick, bruising apprenticeship and then a kind of flexible hang-loose approach so that any journeyman freelancer could be plugged into a shoot after asking only a handful of questions. And once I was past that, then I was in the real nerve center of the operation, sitting on the couch in Robin’s edit suite, drinking my cups of cold coffee, counting up all the weird little icons and medallions she had scattered around, trying to guess what each of them signified. The setup here was exactly like a driver and backseat driver, the editor with their hands on the wheel making the decisions, the producers lobbing suggestions over their shoulder. The trick usually was just to hang out, to wait for the editor’s sense of politeness to kick in, for them to start fielding requests – and, after all, the producers had spent weeks or months on a story, really did know something about it – but not with Robin. Why are we excluding such-and-such a character, I’d ask, they get really emotional, they have a few great bites. “Too many clauses in how they talk,” Robin would say, “can’t get it clean – and there’s no decent cutaway.”

She was absolutely adamant that way, there was no sweet-talking her into extending bites, adding another beat in scenes, everything was always getting trimmed, polished, stripped down to the essentials, and she worked on that forever – like most editors, she was usually first in, last out, it was impossible imagining her having any kind of home life, except the stovetop dinner, a splash of television, lying in bed with the images circulating of the next day’s edit. And in the end, I just sat there, not doing much to justify my pay, watching the ums and ahs get stricken, context get tossed aside, characters from utterly different shoots stitched together, their meaning slightly manipulated, forming incredibly unlikely pairings. The footage fast-forwarded and rewound, the characters talking in their sped-up cartoon voices, a whole passage of dialogue cut and music brought in over b-roll, making a character seem suddenly lyrical and cinematic in a way they’d never been in real life.

And, always, it was an improvement. I’d known in my heart of hearts, however much I’d tried to draw out a character in the field, however much I’d try to maximize a shoot, that it was in the end stale, boring, adjacent to the real thing, which was life itself. And at the screenings everybody always heaped praise on Robin – she was a real crown jewel of the office, a wizard making the footage feel like a film, ‘tight,’ ‘cinematic,’ ‘elegant,’ as unconnected as possible to the shaggy, discursive thing we’d encountered on the ground. She usually took her compliments wryly, her eyes down and off to the side, making faces to herself, it was like she was receiving catechism, being told things she already knew, what her faults were, and how assiduously she was trying to rectify them. Usually, as soon as a screening finished, she went back into the edit suite, incorporated the notes that same night. I’d gotten in the habit of joining her, no matter how late it was, no matter how little I was actually contributing, it was very pleasant, very soothing to watch her – detailed, painstaking, endlessly patient, the footage turning unrecognizably from its initial reality, the flickering of these images on her screen, the colors altered, the framing shifted, the sound spliced into unlikely combinations, this whole other creation she was weaving together as a kind of unremitting penitence.