Digital FX Design | Production | Post

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.

Sam Dodge has the best movie memorabilia ever locked up inside his King Kong Camera Room. Sam seems to always outbid me at the last minute just as the eBay auction is about to end, and as a result he has amassed quite a collection of early hand-crank movie cameras. Almost as nice as my collection Sam. The difference is he restores them and offers them for sale. So, now’s your chance to become a director and produce the next great Blockbuster.