Peter Bart: Awards speeches can use a clip, but so can marathon films

The season of endless acceptance speeches is upon us, which begs that uncomfortable question: Why can’t honorees learn to process their gratitude? Or are you looking for an editor to help you?

The answer lies in the process itself, for which Cate Blanchett won the Critics Choice Awards this weekend Tar, referred to as the “patriarchal pyramid”. She should know, because the Pyramid has given her more than 120 awards (including two Oscars) for her 70 films.

Whether it’s speeches or the projects they generate, filmmakers and writers traditionally distrust their editors. There’s even a new documentary about a classic sharp editing conflict. Titled Turn each pageit’s about books, not movies — and it’s predictably too long.

But also big films, some with a running time of around three hours – Avatar: The Way of the Water, Babylon, white noise and even the musical elviswhich lasts 159 minutes, filled with documentary footage.

In the past, filmmakers have favored films of this size because they bring awards. witness to George Stevens’s HugeRichard Attenborough Gandhi or David Leans Lawrence of Arabia. The IrishmanMartin Scorsese’s Netflix opus about the mafia lasted four hours.

Some filmmakers have faced stiff opposition from studios to their editing methods. Michael Cimino is known to have threatened a studio executive with physical harm gate of heavenjust sued Elaine May (A new leaf), and several directors, including Robert Altman, even ran away with the prints.

Clint Eastwood resolved conflict through rigorous self-editing. Given Iwo Jima’s challenging background, he created two separate films with different angles: Letters from Iwo Jima and flags of our fathers. Both are more tightly edited than John Wayne’s preaching opus Sands of Iwo Jima.

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Documentaries face their own unique editing challenges given their appetite for detail. Rory Kennedy’s new Netflix doc The volcano: saving Whakaari offers compelling images of an eruption on White Island off the coast of New Zealand. It features emotional interviews with severely burned survivors and contemporary witnesses.

In editing, the film makes clever use of its time clock: the volunteer rescue team must save the survivors from the lava flow, even as their own physical condition deteriorates. The doctor has an extensive story to tell in a short time of 1 hour and 38 minutes.

There is no clock ticking Turn each page, which chronicles the spirited but prolific 20-year tug-of-war between a veteran editor (Robert Gottlieb, age 91) and a talented but comprehensive writer (Robert Caro, age 86). Their collaboration resulted in award-winning books The power brokers (via Robert Moses) and The Formative Years: Lyndon B. Johnson. But the process was difficult.

Gottlieb cut the Moses book down from 1 million words to just 700,000, but the LBJ book is still a work in progress after four volumes, and Caro is still writing the fifth. Caro was outraged when his editor edited out a section of the LBJ biography that explained the history of weed in Texas. “It’s not like I’m going to rip his heart out,” explains the editor.

But Gottlieb can also be expansionist: he famously changed the title of Joe Heller’s novel catch-18 to catch-22.

Turn each page Director Lizzie Gottlieb shortened her film to 1 hour and 52 minutes. I’m looking forward to her speech at the awards ceremony: Since her doc is about her father, will she repeat Blanchett’s charge that awards reflect “the patriarchal pyramid”?