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A thread about criticism of my recent Chris Rock column, the role of editing in comedy specials and credit in reviews. 1/
Directors of specials have been long ignored. I have tried to change that a bit, including in that column that contrasted his original special (dir: Bo Burnham) with the extended cut (dir: Chris Rock). In so doing, I pissed off an editor. 2/
First on Twitter, then on FB, @jenbrooks took issue. She placed the piece on a public forum for postproduction people with this post: “Here's a whole article about the power of editing that never once mentions the editor(s).” 3/
Jen B belongs to our golden age of posters who know how to be just inaccurate enough to generate loads of irritation. What followed was a good old-fashioned pile-on full of fun snark. One person called it a “trashing.” One poor soul stood up for me. Thank you, you fool. 4/
It’s not delightful to be on the receiving end of those, but you can learn from them. The substance was critics like me don’t give editors enough credit for their work. 5/
At one point, a guy on the thread said he knew the editor of the Rock special. And Jen B asked what this editor (along with the editor of the original special) thought about this “erasure” by the NYT. And then lo and behold, Chris Rock’s editor joined the thread. 6/
His name is Michael D. Schultz. He is a master of the craft, worked on a ton of great work that you know. He said actually he edited the original AND the new one with Rock, and that CR is hands on with every shot. 7/
OK, so takeaways: It is true that editors routinely get too little credit from the arts press. Guilty. This is something we can be better at. BUT 8/
Part of the reason, along with limitations of word count, is relationships between editors and directors vary and it’s always going to be hard to know the balance of power from reading the credits (see playwrights-directors in theater reviews) Is this 9?
Doc editors often get less attention than feature editors. Compare number of reviews that mention Scorsese’s frequent feature editor (Thelma Schoonmaker) with those that mention his frequent doc editor (David Tedeschi). Did anyone who reviewed Fran Lebowitz doc mention him? 10/
This disparity is odd considering doc editors tend do more in creating the narrative than feature editors. 11/
But doc editing is not exactly the same as comedy special editing. Despite what my editor critic said, my piece was not a “whole article about the power of editing.” It was about the formal differences between two comedy specials and how that relates to the content. 12/
Since the editors of the Rock specials (Rock and Schultz) were the same, but the director was different, it made the most sense, considering the goal and argument of my piece, to focus on the director. 13/
Last thing: Michael Schultz posted my piece on his page without rancor and in his response to the critics on the thread, he said in caps: “EDITING IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN A THANK-LESS JOB', so go get that $ (your real rate ) IMHO.” Good advice. The End
