Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Book review - "A Long time ago in a cutting room far away" by Paul Hirsch

 Entertaining editor memoir. Close up accounts of collaborating with famed directors like Brian De Palma, John Hughes and George Lucas and composers like Bernard Herrman. There's also depictions of working with Charles Shyer (nice but could never make up his mind), Duncan Jones, Herbert Ross (a great experience for Hirsch), Brad Bird.

Hirsch seems to be upfront and honest - I'm sure it's biased in his favour and those criticised will go "that's not how it happened" but he has great credits. He made a lot of genuine contributions to cinema history - persuading de Palma to hire Hermann, the credits and 'Let's Hear It For the Boy' sequences of Footloose, 'Twist and Shout' for Ferris Bueller. He tried to be a director for a bit but not too hard.

This is full of fun stories: having to cut out the bad actor who played Jabba in Star Wars, dealing with temperamental yet brilliant Herman, offending Brian de Palma on Mission to Mars, the moods of John Hughes, the indecision of Charles Shyer on the money pit of I Love Trouble, extracting the juice out of John Hughes movies, what went wrong on Pluto Nash (apparently the original script was funny), James Cameron sledging him on the day Titanic overtook Star Wars at the box office.

Occasionally gets a bit nerdy with talks of splicing and dubs and stuff but consistently interesting. Composers - get to know editors and be nice! They can wreck you with the wrong temp track/edit.

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