Tag: Bonnie and Clyde

Cut to 07: GETTING FRONT SCREEN CREDIT—FINALLY

Cut to:
Getting Front Screen Credit—Finally

The industry standard was to not credit the post-production crew “up front.” Male and female editors were relegated to the back end, usually sharing a page with many other crew positions, and therefore they usually went unnoticed (except on Oscar night).
Dede Allen’s innovations in editing greatly contributed to a change in this absurd practice.
Peter Tonguette in Cinemontage notes that, “It is widely acknowledged that Dede Allen, A.C.E., was one of the first editors to receive a single-card credit in 1967 (on Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, which garnered Allen an Oscar nomination), though an informal survey reveals that the practice was becoming increasingly prevalent several years earlier. In 1964, George Tomasini was given a single-card credit on Marnie—just five short years after he was listed along with the hairstylist on North by Northwest.”

“Allen made two massive contributions to the art of editing; the first, her trademark quick cut-in following a slow fade-out. The other, which gave her name to the “New York School” of editing, was the prelapse, which meant the sound of a subsequent scene would start just before the scene starts. Dede had to fight for other editors to stop correcting her “mistake”, but soon she had trained and taught enough editors for them to go away and spread the “Dee-doid” Gospel. After her work, editing would never be seen again as a mere technical discipline – it had become an art in its own right.”
—Excerpt from “‘A Tedious Job’ – Women and Film Editing” by Sara Galvão at Critics Associated.

“Sam Spiegel didn’t hire Dede Allen on The Swimmer because she wanted that single card front end credit that you mention. She quit the film before shooting to do Bonnie and Clyde, where she got it. Spiegel had told her that he couldn’t give her that credit because it would set a precedent and he would have to give every other “cutter” the credit!”
—Email from Chris Innis, sent to me after seeing this page.

Note: Chris Innis directed The Story of the Swimmer, a documentary about the making of The Swimmer. Her account was found in Eleanor Perry’s notes, which are housed at the Academy library, because Perry wrote the screenplay for The Swimmer, an adaptation of a short story by John Cheever.
Chris Innis is also an editor and has her own page on this website.

The front screen credit for Bonnie and Clyde.

(And you can see many more examples in the Screen Credits Gallery.)

 

ALLEN, DEDE

Dede Allen

1923 – 2010


Dede Allen is one of cinema’s most celebrated editors, known especially for her work with various auteur directors during the “Hollywood Renaissance” of the 1960s and 70s. She was one of the first editors to give sound as much importance as image. In 1943, at age 23, Allen joined Columbia Pictures and worked as a messenger and then an assistant editor. It took fifteen years before she got her first break editing a feature, on Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow. Two years later, her first notable work was on Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961). During her sixty-year career, Allen edited thirty-two films, with a break from 1992-2000 while she was head of post-production at Warner Bros. She received three Oscar nominations (Wonder Boys, Dog Day Afternoon, and Reds, which was co-edited with Craig McKay), three Eddie nominations (Reds, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Hustler), and won a BAFTA for Dog Day Afternoon. She also received Career Achievement Awards from ACE and LAFCA. On a 2012 list of the seventy-five best-edited films of all time compiled by the Motion Picture Editors Guild based on a survey of its members, three films by Allen appear: Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, and Reds. Only George Tomasini had more films on this listing.
In reviews about Bonnie and Clyde, Pauline Kael called it “the best editing in an American movie in a long time” and Judith Christ called Allen’s editing “infallible” and “incomparable.”

“Intellect and taste count,” she said, “but I cut with my feelings.”
—“Dede Allen, 1923-2010” by Matt Singer. The full text can be found in the Appendix.

In an interview about her work on Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, Allen said:
“If a scene played well, he’d say, “Don’t water the mustard, leave it alone.” I had a crisp way of editing, even then. I was already beginning to cut in a certain way. I remember cutting from something like a wallet to a car. Bang. It was unusual then; everybody does it now. Rossen was very fond of that style. When it was later referred to in Time magazine, he took credit for it. I think he thought he invented the style. I definitely think I had an influence on him as a director.”

“…and again, if you ask me what I do when I do what I do, I can’t always answer. I don’t intellectualize. I’m not that kind of an editor. There are editors who sit and figure out everything they are going to do before they do it, very rigidly. I work totally the opposite. I’m very intuitive. Obviously, I have a very definite reason for doing things; I’m very disciplined. And I’m sure that I have as much of a line of direction. I just don’t like talking a cut. There’s an awful lot of that in this business, and I don’t do that well…”
—Two excerpts from the chapter on Dede Allen by Patrick McGilligan in “Selected Takes,” edited by Vincent Anthony LoBrutto. The full text can be found in the appendix.