Public Access
(1993)
John's Thoughts
After having edited a few 16mm films, such as Lion's Den (Bryan's and my first project together), it was shocking just how much easier 35mm was to handle. The drawback was how much larger my film piles became throughout the house. What a mess. Lion's Den was edited in my house on a flatbed, yet ludicrously it was in a sun room and I could barely see what the hell I was doing. We held onto the flatbed-in-the-living-room tradition (with black plastic on the windows) through Suspects and into Apt Pupil, where I finally jumped into Avid midstream - plastic still on the window. Bryan and I also discovered a strange phenomenon. I had come on as the replacement editor on Public Access (long story) and had nothing to do with the film until that point. By not knowing the actual geography/setup of the sets or locations, I inadvertently solved problems, basically interpreting locations as the audience would. One time Bryan sat in the editing room and exclaimed, "How did you do that!?", and I said, "Do what?" From that point on, I never came to many sets!
There are so many hundreds of tidbits in a film to remember. There were some bona fide disasters to be sure. After filming most of a particular actor's scenes (the character of the teacher, Abernathy), the 300 extras were in place to film the main scene for this character - and the actor never showed, and refused to continue in the film. In the eleventh hour, Larry Maxwell, who had read for the part, came in and aced the scene. There was not enough time to re-film some of the other scenes with the new actor; so this became one of the editing challenges the film, especially since a key scene that involved him was now not part of the filming. Larry Maxwell valiantly saved the film by coming in at the last second and becoming Abernathy, and sadly died of cancer just a couple years after it debuted.
Just when I thought we had averted all conceivable disasters and the finished film was in the can, I got a late night call from Bryan telling me his life was over. I thought, "What the hell could have possibly happened to the film? It was done." He had discovered that there was an intermittent flicker problem throughout the entire film because apparently one of the cameras malfunctioned throughout the shoot. This was not detectable to us on a flatbed and I had never attended dailies coming on the project so late. The bottom line is that a new technology was invented for Public Access to solve the problem. Essentially we had to make an optical of the entire film, correcting the flicker problem shot by shot as it came through a machine they created just for this never-before addressed problem. (The process - covered by the film's insurance - cost as much as the film!)