I’m a dad and husband, and an editor.  I’ve dabbled in acting and directing, and even made a few films, but the best fun for me is when I make a story that I love come to life.  And that’s what the editor does.

I remember as a kid the home movies my dad used to shoot, and my fascination with the tiny frames on the film that somehow came to life through the projector.  How this alchemy happened was a mystery to me, one that stuck with me for many years.  As a teenager my friends and I began making our own hopelessly melodramatic little films.  When it was time to apply for college, my amateur director friend told me about a film program at one of the State University schools.  I applied and was accepted.  To my surprise, I was learning to be a filmmaker.

Once out of college, I began my career as an apprentice editor, handling actual film in an old-style cutting room just off Times Square.  On my first job we didn’t even have a Kem or a Steenbeck flatbed editing machine.  These were the machines that fed the film across a tabletop and through a gate, displaying the image on a screen the size of a laptop monitor.  If your film had a big budget you usually cut with a flatbed, but we used Moviolas instead.  The Moviola resembled nothing so much as a big upright sewing machine.  Some Moviolas had a takeup mechanism, while others simply spilled the film into a cloth basket.  We called the latter a “cutter”.  You marked and spliced the film with the cutter, then spooled it onto the Moviola with the reel, then ran the sequence.  This is how film were cut until as little as ten years ago.

Back then, my job was to file the pieces of film.  Every piece, no matter how small, was carefully cataloged and put away in boxes.  I never enjoyed this part of the job, but I was paying my dues.  I worked as an apprentice on three different features.  Eventually I had the good fortune of meeting a director who had studied filmmaking at the American Film Institute.  Directing sounded like an exciting challenge, so I applied to the program.  To my surprise, I was accepted, and so I moved to Los Angeles.

The AFI was more challenging then I ever expected, and directing far more stressful.  I found I had the most fun when I helped my fellow directors with their editing.  It became clear to me then that editing was where I belonged. 

But editing had already begun to change.  Electronic editing systems were coming into use.  In the early days, hard drives were still too large and expensive for media storage, so the dailies were recorded to a bank of VCRs.  One of the early electronic systems, the Montage, recorded the dailies onto a set of 19 betamax cassettes.  Each cassette recorded the same video, but the computer would cue them to play a sequence.  As soon as one tape finished playing its shot, it was then cued to another shot further down in the sequence.  By advance cueing in this manner, a long sequence could be played.  Electronic editing was the future, and the prospect of learning a new technology was both exciting and daunting.

I signed up for a class on the Touchvision, a editing system rivaling the Montage.  I learned the system so thoroughly that I got a job working for the company, training editors and assistants.  This became my ticket into the industry.  At one point I had to take over a show when the assistant hadn’t mastered the system, and that led to other assistant work.  My then-girlfriend (now my wife) had found work on a series cut on the Montage, and she taught me that editing system.  Before long, I was assisting on big shows.

As an assistant, I made sure to cut scenes whenever I had the chance.  Eventually, a spot opened up on “Picket Fences”.  One of the editors was moving up to producing for David Kelley’s new series, so if I did well on my first episode, I’d win the opportunity to replace him.  I worked 16 hour days on that episode, cutting and recutting every scene until I felt I’d done the best job I could.  Everyone loved my cut; I’d won the spot.

From then on I’ve moved from one series to another fairly effortlessly, and have managed to stay busy ever since.  Recently I made the decision to move back to New York.  I’m settled on the east coast again, and am focusing my career on returning to features.