For Each Best Picture Oscar Hopeful, Film Editors Are Key 

(From L) Mark Orton, Alexander Payne, and Kevin Tent arrive for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 14th Annual Governors Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Los Angeles on January 9, 2024. (AFP)
(From L) Mark Orton, Alexander Payne, and Kevin Tent arrive for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 14th Annual Governors Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Los Angeles on January 9, 2024. (AFP)
TT

For Each Best Picture Oscar Hopeful, Film Editors Are Key 

(From L) Mark Orton, Alexander Payne, and Kevin Tent arrive for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 14th Annual Governors Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Los Angeles on January 9, 2024. (AFP)
(From L) Mark Orton, Alexander Payne, and Kevin Tent arrive for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 14th Annual Governors Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Los Angeles on January 9, 2024. (AFP)

Whether they are snipping an actor's lengthy stare, obliging the viewer to process rapid-fire images or creating tension with a pause, film editors who work in sync with directors play a vital role in giving life to a movie -- and its Oscar chances.

"You can't have a good movie with bad editing," Kevin Tent, who is nominated for an Academy Award for his work with director Alexander Payne on best picture contender "The Holdovers," told AFP.

Tent -- who has been part of Payne's filmmaking inner circle for nearly 30 years, including on Oscar contenders "The Descendants" (2011) and "Sideways" (2004) -- compares his work as an editor to that of a chef making a special dish.

After initial filming, "you're getting all these different elements, and you're chopping things and mixing them" to find the perfect recipe to tell the story, Tent explained.

"If you put too much salt in something, it's no good, or if you put too much sugar, it ruins everything," he quips.

For "The Holdovers," which received a total of five Oscar nominations ahead of the March 10 ceremony, Tent certainly found a winning formula.

Payne's film is a touching holiday tale of three lonely souls who end up spending Christmas together at a 1970s-era boarding school -- a crotchety teacher, a cafeteria manager in mourning and a fragile teenage boy.

Tent is vying for the best film editing Oscar with his peers who worked on "Anatomy of a Fall,Killers of the Flower Moon,Poor Things" and "Oppenheimer," the overall favorite for Oscars glory.

Best picture and best editing awards often go hand-in-hand.

For nearly a century, only 11 movies won the Academy award for best picture without also being nominated for best editing. And 40 percent of all best pictures winners also won the statuette for editing prowess.

Director-editor bond

Those statistics show the extent to which editing is indeed the essence of film, even more so than the screenplay or the cinematography.

Legendary directors like Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles said editing was the key to making a good movie.

"'Movies are made in the cutting room' -- many people say that, because it's there where you really have the time to be creative and think about what the movie is, and what it's going to become," explains Tent.

He worked with Payne on "The Holdovers" for nearly a year.

That gave the duo time to cut more than 30 minutes from the film's run time, as compared to their early cut, and find just the right bittersweet, funny-serious tone thanks to test audiences.

The film has been praised for its use of "dissolves" -- overlapping images that allows a new shot to surface while the previous one disappears -- which help to develop the emotional evolution of the characters or the melancholic beauty of winter.

Such precise work requires a director and editor to be exactly on the same page, which is why many directors have editors they bring from film to film.

Thelma Schoonmaker, the queen of editing with three Oscars to her name, has worked with Martin Scorsese since the start of his career more than 50 years ago.

Schoonmaker is one of Tent's rivals for her work on "Killers of the Flower Moon," which is also in the running for best picture. She has regularly mentioned in interviews how closely she and Scorsese collaborate.

"He taught me everything I know about editing. Our sensibilities are the same," she told the CineMontage website in February.

'Midwives' of cinema

Editors are usually hailed for their deep technical knowledge and for their ability not to leave their own stamp on the material, as the director's vision remains paramount.

"The editing cannot be noticeable, or branded -- it's really the craft of adapting someone's work," Laurent Senechal, a nominee for his work on Justine Triet's "Anatomy of a Fall," told AFP.

"We are like the midwives -- we accompany them," said Senechal, who worked on Triet's last three films.

Editing "Anatomy" -- a courtroom thriller about a writer accused of murdering her husband, which earned five nominations including best picture, director and editing -- took 38 weeks, Senechal said, calling the time a "luxury" in French cinema.

That pace allowed the pair to carefully master the desynchronization of sound and image, which helps to propel the ambiguity of the film, which depicts the couple's collapse and the unclear circumstances of the husband's death.

When the couple's son, who is blind, testifies in court, the audience sees images of the husband, who is speaking with the child's voice -- did these images occur in the past, or are they false memories?

"Justine is totally obsessive," Senechal said. "Editing is one of the most essential things for directing."



Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
TT

Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)

Hollywood's video game performers announced they would go on strike Thursday, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections.

The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement.

SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the two sides remained split over the regulation of generative AI. A spokesperson for the video game producers, Audrey Cooling, said the studios offered AI protections, but SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee said that the studios’ definition of who constitutes a "performer" is key to understanding the issue of who would be protected.

"The industry has told us point blank that they do not necessarily consider everyone who is rendering movement performance to be a performer that is covered by the collective bargaining agreement," SAG-AFTRA Chief Contracts Officer Ray Rodriguez said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. He said some physical performances are being treated as "data."

Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said.

"We strike as a matter of last resort. We have given this process absolutely as much time as we responsibly can," Rodriguez told reporters. "We have exhausted the other possibilities, and that is why we’re doing it now."

Cooling said the companies' offer "extends meaningful AI protections."

"We are disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal, and we remain prepared to resume negotiations," she said.

Andi Norris, an actor and member of the union's negotiating committee, said that those who do stunt work or creature performances would still be at risk under the game companies' offer.

"The performers who bring their body of work to these games create a whole variety of characters, and all of that work must be covered. Their proposal would carve out anything that doesn’t look and sound identical to me as I sit here, when, in truth, on any given week I am a zombie, I am a soldier, I am a zombie soldier," Norris said. "We cannot and will not accept that a stunt or movement performer giving a full performance on stage next to a voice actor isn’t a performer."

The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion dollars in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said.

Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months.

The last interactive contract, which expired in November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began in October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012.

The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 "off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers," according to the union.

Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered independent and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected. Games signed to an interim interactive media agreement, tiered-budget independent interactive agreement or interim interactive localization agreement are not part of the strike, the union said.