Digital FX Design | Production | Post

One of the great unsung heroes of independant cinema, Monte Hellman, returns to feature directing after a twenty year absence (his last feature was the unfortunate, Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out!) with a film called Road to Nowhere. He also shot the picture with the Canon 5D Mark II - making this the first feature film to be shot with this camera.

Hellman, who is best known for a pair of interesting and very off-beat westerns he made with Jack Nicholson, Ride the Whirlwind (1965) and The Shooting (1967), as well as his 1971 masterpiece, Two-Lane Blacktop, starring James Taylor, Dennis Wilson and Warren Oates, seems to have picked up right where he left off and judging by the New York Times article, is still employing the guerrilla filmmaking techniques he learned under Roger Corman’s tutelage.

Elder Statesman’s New Story

As a true lover of cinema, but especially being that I am an editor myself, I must bid a sad farewell to the great film editor Dede Allen, who died saturday at the age of 86.

Influenced by the radical cutting styles of The French and British New Wave Cinema, Mrs. Allen, who got her start working under director Robert Wise (who began his career as an editor himself) at Columbia Pictures,  pioneered her own unique style of cutting, mainly with a technique called Audio Shifting where the dialogue or soundtrack from a previous scene would play into the scene immediately following, or vice versa, a flourish that would help quicken the pace of a film.

Such innovations as well as her oustanding cutting on such films as Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), The Hustler (1961), Bonnie and Clyde (1967) (what would that final shoot-out scene have been without her masterful sense of rhythm?), and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), just to name a mere few, helped elevate editing from just a mere assembly job to a highly respected artform.

I have always said that women make the best film editors (example: Jaws [1975] - editor, Verna Fields; Lawrence of Arabia [1962] - editor, Anne Coates; The Limey [1999] - editor, Sarah Flack; etc. etc.) and Mrs. Allen was easliy one of the best ever.