MADness—the Blog

Dede Allen, one of the top editors in the history of film, died Saturday.  She was 86.  You can read her obituary here.  (More at IMDb, Wikipedia)

Here are a few of her film credits:

* Academy Award nomination.

Film editing is a fascinating but largely unsung part of the filmmaking process.  If you want a great inside look at what editing is all about, I’d recommend The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, from novelist Michael Ondaatje.  Murch is one of the great editors himself.  He and Ondaatje discuss Allen along with other women editors:

Murch:  In fact, many of the editors of early films—back in the silent days—were women.  It was a woman’s craft, seen as something like sewing.  You knitted the pieces of film together.  And editing has aspects of being a librarian, which used to be perceived as a woman’s job.

Ondaatje:  And the man is the hunter-gatherer, coming back with stuff for her to cook!

Murch:  The men could bring it home, but they didn’t know what to do with it.  But there was a big shift when sound come along in 1927.  Sound was somehow a “man” thing—it was electric.  It was complicated in a different way, an engineering way.  A lot of men started coming into editing at that point, and women left.

But if you made a list of the ten best editors ever, Ann Coates and Dede Allen would be in there.  They’ve been an inspiration to a whole generation.  Dede got her start in New York.  I never ran into her there, because I had moved out here to the West Coast, but Richie Marks, Barry Malkin, Steve Butler, and many other New York editors my age grew up under her guidance.

A couple of other women that Murch cites among the top editors:  Margaret Booth and Thelma Schoonmaker.