Great Directors Made Small #4

Hal Ashby and his big brother.

Nick Dawson’s recent bio, Hal Ashby, Life of a Hollywood Rebel seems pretty good — it tells the story of the troubled editor-turned-director in what seems a fairly even-handed way, sympathetic to Ashby but also admitting his weaknesses and moments of cruelty.

However, I was slightly alarmed by a passage dealing with Ashby’s work as a junior editor for William Wyler on THE BIG COUNTRY (I know, it’s a strange meeting of talents, but Wyler was actually a big personal influence on Ashby)…

“When the film previewed in San Francisco, he was one of the few not brought along by Wyler, but he nevertheless paid his own way to attend the screening. Wyler was so impressed that Ashby was there that he had his expenses reimbursed. Everybody settled down to watch the film, and all was going well until, about an hour or so into the film, one of the reels went out of sync. It took a group of nervous editors almost ten minutes to rethread the negative and sort out the problem, by which time, as Ashby recalled, “a lot of people had come out to the popcorn stand to get candy and popcorn and so forth. And when they started the picture back up again, there was Willy running around in the lobby saying to people, ‘The picture’s started again, the picture’s started again,’ forcing them back into the theater! There was no question about it: he wasn’t polite, he was just grabbing them and throwing them back in! It was hysterical.”

It’s a nice anecdote, but what strikes me about Dawson’s telling of it is the blithe technical ignorance he displays. What would the negative be doing in the projection room? Does he have any idea what you would see if you projected a negative? You would see a negative! And you really wouldn’t want to risk your negative under such conditions, even if for some crazy idea you fancied previewing the film with all the colours reversed.

This kind of thing in film bios rather irks me, and puts me off because how, if you don’t understand the difference between a neg and a print, are you going to be able to talk about Ashby’s actual work as an editor, or even as a director? It certainly seems like a moderate amount of grounding in film language would help.

Incidentally, I used to wonder how a film could go out of sync when the sound was printed right on the print, in that optical film stripe ~

The answer lies in the loop. First, it’s important to understand that the sound is already out of sync — due to the impossibility of reading sound from a frame of film passing in front of the projector beam (I assume there’s just no room, plus the heat of the lamp might be deleterious to a sound head), the sound is printed several frames off, so that one frame is passing over the sound head to have the soundtrack read, while the corresponding frame of picture is passing through the gate and being blasted with light.

Meanwhile, there is the loop, literally a loose loop of film between the sound drum and the gate, a little quantity of excess that’s designed to stop the film tearing if it momentarily snags anywhere along the way. The trouble is, if the film does snag, the loop can shrink or disappear, which has the effect of moving the sound out of sync. The frame being projected would now be up to half a second closer to the frame whose soundtrack is being read. That’s enough to be very noticeable whenever a a character onscreen talks or slams a car door. (Dawson is quite correct in his use of the world “rethreaded” for the solution to this problem.)

This stuff might or might not strike you as interesting, but none of it is inherently hard to grasp, and anybody writing a book about an editor’s life might want to make a point of understanding some of it…

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