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==DYKhook==
==DYKhook==
...that '''Lou Lombardo''''s film editing has been called "revolutionary", "seminal", and "brilliant", but was never nominated for editing awards?
...that '''Lou Lombardo''''s film editing has been called "revolutionary", "seminal", and "brilliant", but was never nominated for editing awards?

==Early career==
==Early career==
Lombardo's career began in Kansas City, where he was [[Robert Altman]]'s cameraman working on training films and "industrials" for the [[Calvin Company]]. Altman ultimately became a prominent feature film director. Lombardo and Altman both relocated to Los Angeles in 1956, where Lombardo was employed as a cameraman by [[Republic Pictures]]. Lombardo's goal had been to become a director. He decided that this was an unpromising career direction, and he became an apprentice editor at [[Universal Television#Revue Studios|Revue Studios]], at about half the salary he'd received as an assistant cameraman. As was common at that time for studio editors, an editing apprenticeship lasted eight years, during which Lombardo's work was uncredited. At the end of this apprenticeship, Robert Altman used Lombardo to edit a pilot program for television. This led to Lombardo's becoming an editor for the television program ''[[Felony Squad]]'', which ran from 1966-1970.<ref name=Lobrutto />
Lombardo's career began in Kansas City, where he was [[Robert Altman]]'s cameraman working on training films and "industrials" for the [[Calvin Company]]. Altman ultimately became a prominent feature film director. Lombardo and Altman both relocated to Los Angeles in 1956, where Lombardo was employed as a cameraman by [[Republic Pictures]]. Lombardo's goal had been to become a director. He decided that this was an unpromising career direction, and he became an apprentice editor at [[Universal Television#Revue Studios|Revue Studios]], at about half the salary he'd received as an assistant cameraman. As was common at that time for studio editors, an editing apprenticeship lasted eight years, during which Lombardo's work was uncredited. At the end of this apprenticeship, Robert Altman used Lombardo to edit a pilot program for television. This led to Lombardo's becoming an editor for the television program ''[[Felony Squad]]'', which ran from 1966-1970.<ref name=Lobrutto />
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===Origins and legacy===
===Origins and legacy===
The immediate inspiration for the gunbattle montage in ''The Wild Bunch'' was likely the 1967 film, ''[[Bonnie and Clyde (film)|Bonnie and Clyde]]'', which Peckinpah apparently screened a few days before filming began.<ref name=Prince4 /> ''Bonnie and Clyde'', which was directed by [[Arthur Penn]] and edited by [[Dede Allen]], has a famed scene at its ending showing the killings of Bonnie and Clyde by state police.<ref name=Monaco2 /> The scene mixes slow and accelerated motion and several cameras, which were aspects of ''The Wild Bunch''. Still earlier these techniques had been employed in [[Akira Kurosawa]]'s films, and in particular in ''[[Seven Samurai]]'' (1954). Kurosawa generally both directed and edited his films. Stephen Prince has written, "The kinetic attributes of Kurosawa's style, then, entered deeply into international cinema. In terms of the representation of violence, they influenced Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah and, from there, Hong Kong director [[John Woo]], as well as virtually everybody since. Every filmmaker who uses slow motion, montage, and multiple cameras to stylize violence in the ways that Kurosawa had demonstrated in ''Seven Samurai'' owes him a great debt."<ref name=Prince4 />
The immediate inspiration for the gunbattle montage in ''The Wild Bunch'' was likely the 1967 film, ''[[Bonnie and Clyde (film)|Bonnie and Clyde]]'', which Peckinpah apparently screened a few days before filming began.<ref name=Prince4 /> ''Bonnie and Clyde'', which was directed by [[Arthur Penn]] and edited by [[Dede Allen]], has a famed scene at its ending showing the killings of Bonnie and Clyde by state police.<ref name=Monaco2 /> The scene mixes slow and accelerated motion and several cameras, which were aspects of ''The Wild Bunch''. Still earlier these techniques had been employed in [[Akira Kurosawa]]'s films, and in particular in ''[[Seven Samurai]]'' (1954). Kurosawa generally both directed and edited his films. Stephen Prince has written, "The kinetic attributes of Kurosawa's style, then, entered deeply into international cinema. In terms of the representation of violence, they influenced Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah and, from there, Hong Kong director [[John Woo]], as well as virtually everybody since. Every filmmaker who uses slow motion, montage, and multiple cameras to stylize violence in the ways that Kurosawa had demonstrated in ''Seven Samurai'' owes him a great debt."<ref name=Prince4 /> But Tony Williams notes that ''The Wild Bunch'' "extended those influences in more creative and dynamic ways",<ref name=Williams /> and [[Michael Sragow]] argued that "Peckinpah did it right in ''The Wild Bunch''. He produced an American movie that equals or surpasses the best of Kurosawa. Scorsese tries to match it in ''Gangs of New York'' - and doesn't come close. ''The Wild Bunch'' is the ''Götterdämmerung'' of Westerns."<ref name=Sragow />

''The Matrix'''s "eye-catching violence upgrades the 'bullet ballets' of director Sam Peckinpah and the martial arts movies of Bruce Lee."<ref name=EdgarHunt/>


Recently, Gabrielle Murray summarized how ''The Wild Bunch'' affected filmmaking: "Peckinpah, with the help of the brilliant editor Louis Lombardo and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, developed a stylistic approach that through the use of slow-motion, multi-camera filming and montage editing, seemed to make the violence more intense and visceral."<ref name=Murray /> While these influences were very important, the gunbattle montage in ''The Wild Bunch'' ...HOW IS IT DIFFERENT?...<ref name=Prince5 /> Paul Monaco wrote, "Lombardo pushed the revolution in Hollywood editing further than anyone else, and ''The Wild Bunch'' was established at the end of the 1960s as the epitome for fast-paced editing in a narrative film."<ref name=Monaco />
Recently, Gabrielle Murray summarized how ''The Wild Bunch'' affected filmmaking: "Peckinpah, with the help of the brilliant editor Louis Lombardo and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, developed a stylistic approach that through the use of slow-motion, multi-camera filming and montage editing, seemed to make the violence more intense and visceral."<ref name=Murray /> While these influences were very important, the gunbattle montage in ''The Wild Bunch'' ...HOW IS IT DIFFERENT?...<ref name=Prince5 /> Paul Monaco wrote, "Lombardo pushed the revolution in Hollywood editing further than anyone else, and ''The Wild Bunch'' was established at the end of the 1960s as the epitome for fast-paced editing in a narrative film."<ref name=Monaco />
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==Unincorporated quotes, etc.==
==Unincorporated quotes, etc.==
⚫
*{{cite journal |title=The Wild Bunch |last=Williams |first=Tony |work=Senses of Cinema |issue=39 |year=2006 |url=http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/cteq/wild_bunch/ |quote=Stylistically, Akira Kurosawa’s ''The Seven Samurai'' (1954) and Arthur Penn’s ''[[The Left Handed Gun]]'' (1958) influenced Peckinpah. But he extended those influences in more creative and dynamic ways.}}
*{{cite web |url=http://www.dga.org/Craft/VisualHistory/Interviews/Robert-Benton.aspx |title=Robert Benton interviews}} Directed The Late Show; Altman produced.
*{{cite web |url=http://www.dga.org/Craft/VisualHistory/Interviews/Robert-Benton.aspx |title=Robert Benton interviews}} Directed The Late Show; Altman produced.
*Dennis Hill (editor of Altman's Nashville) was Lombardo's assistant for six years. ''The Nashville Chronicles''.
*Dennis Hill (editor of Altman's Nashville) was Lombardo's assistant for six years. ''The Nashville Chronicles''.
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<ref name=Eagan>{{cite book |title=America's film legacy: the authoritative guide to the landmark movies in the National Film Registry |last=Eagan |first=Daniel |year=2010 |publisher=Continuum International Publishing Group |isbn=9780826429773 |page=648 |quote=The ''Wild Bunch'' had 3,642 edits, more than five times the Hollywood average for a feature. ... Montage this dense hadn't been attempted since Sergei Eisenstein back in the 1920s. Lombardo persuaded Peckinpah to film the major shootouts with up to six cameras, some operating at different speeds. ... By overwhelming viewers, Peckinpah hoped to disarm their normal defenses - "it's only a movie" - and immerse them in the experience of violence and death. Exactly why he wanted to expose mainstream audiences to such relentless violence was never clear. |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=deq3xI8OmCkC&pg=PA648}}</ref>
<ref name=Eagan>{{cite book |title=America's film legacy: the authoritative guide to the landmark movies in the National Film Registry |last=Eagan |first=Daniel |year=2010 |publisher=Continuum International Publishing Group |isbn=9780826429773 |page=648 |quote=The ''Wild Bunch'' had 3,642 edits, more than five times the Hollywood average for a feature. ... Montage this dense hadn't been attempted since Sergei Eisenstein back in the 1920s. Lombardo persuaded Peckinpah to film the major shootouts with up to six cameras, some operating at different speeds. ... By overwhelming viewers, Peckinpah hoped to disarm their normal defenses - "it's only a movie" - and immerse them in the experience of violence and death. Exactly why he wanted to expose mainstream audiences to such relentless violence was never clear. |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=deq3xI8OmCkC&pg=PA648}}</ref>
<ref name=Ebert>{{cite web |last=Ebert |first=Roger |title=McCabe & Mrs. Miller |date=November 14, 1999 |url=http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19991114/REVIEWS08/911140301/1023 |publisher=Chicago Sun Times}}</ref>
<ref name=Ebert>{{cite web |last=Ebert |first=Roger |title=McCabe & Mrs. Miller |date=November 14, 1999 |url=http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19991114/REVIEWS08/911140301/1023 |publisher=Chicago Sun Times}}</ref>
<ref name=EdgarHunt>{{cite book |title=The Language of Film |first1=Robert |last1=Edgar-Hunt |first2=John |last2=Marland |first3=Steven |last3=Rawle |year=2010 |publisher=AVA Publishing |isbn=9782940411276 |page=http://books.google.com/books?id=Z3xoxZUYY80C&pg=PT82 |page=80}}</ref>
<ref name=imdb>{{imdb name|0518470|Lou Lombardo}} Accessed 2011-12-21.</ref>
<ref name=imdb>{{imdb name|0518470|Lou Lombardo}} Accessed 2011-12-21.</ref>
<ref name=Lobrutto>{{cite book |last=Lobrutto |first=Vincent |title=Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing |location=New York |publisher=Praeger |year=1991 |pages=125-133 |isbn=}}</ref>
<ref name=Lobrutto>{{cite book |last=Lobrutto |first=Vincent |title=Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing |location=New York |publisher=Praeger |year=1991 |pages=125-133 |isbn=}}</ref>
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<ref name=sfgate>{{cite news |last=Stack |first=Peter |title=FILM REVIEW -- Peckinpah's 'Wild' Western |work=The San Francisco Chronicle |date=August 18, 1995 |url=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1995/08/18/DD1139.DTL}}</ref>
<ref name=sfgate>{{cite news |last=Stack |first=Peter |title=FILM REVIEW -- Peckinpah's 'Wild' Western |work=The San Francisco Chronicle |date=August 18, 1995 |url=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1995/08/18/DD1139.DTL}}</ref>
<ref name=Simmons>{{cite book |first=Garner |last=Simmons |title=Peckinpah, A Portrait in Montage |publisher=University of Texas Press |year = 1982 |page=127 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=sPFstxHbWDQC&pg=PA127 |isbn=0292764936}}</ref>
<ref name=Simmons>{{cite book |first=Garner |last=Simmons |title=Peckinpah, A Portrait in Montage |publisher=University of Texas Press |year = 1982 |page=127 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=sPFstxHbWDQC&pg=PA127 |isbn=0292764936}}</ref>
<ref name=Sragow>{{cite news |title=`Wild Bunch' is western writ large |last=Sragow |first=Michael |work=The Baltimore Sun |date=February 14, 2003 |url=http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2003-02-14/features/0302140119_1_wild-bunch-peckinpah-quiet-american }}</ref>
<ref name=Weddle>{{cite book |first=David |last=Weddle |authorlink=David Weddle |title=If They Move...Kill 'Em! : The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah |quote=Lombardo's intercutting of slow and fast motion in one continuous sequence had at last provided the key. Peckinpah now knew how he would integrate slow motion into the action sequences. He would film the major shootouts with six cameras, all operating at variable frame rates - 24 frames per second, 30 frames per second, 60 frames per second, 90 frames per second, 120 frames per second - so that then when cut together the action would constantly be shifting from slow to fast to slower still to fast again, giving time within the sequences a strange elastic quality. Later, Lombardo would further alter the speed of the shots with an optical printer, speeding them up or slowing them down so that just the right rhythms could be achieved. |publisher=Grove Press |year = 1994 |page=334 |isbn=0802115462 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=C6J17sT7qHYC&pg=PA334}}</ref>
<ref name=Weddle>{{cite book |first=David |last=Weddle |authorlink=David Weddle |title=If They Move...Kill 'Em! : The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah |quote=Lombardo's intercutting of slow and fast motion in one continuous sequence had at last provided the key. Peckinpah now knew how he would integrate slow motion into the action sequences. He would film the major shootouts with six cameras, all operating at variable frame rates - 24 frames per second, 30 frames per second, 60 frames per second, 90 frames per second, 120 frames per second - so that then when cut together the action would constantly be shifting from slow to fast to slower still to fast again, giving time within the sequences a strange elastic quality. Later, Lombardo would further alter the speed of the shots with an optical printer, speeding them up or slowing them down so that just the right rhythms could be achieved. |publisher=Grove Press |year = 1994 |page=334 |isbn=0802115462 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=C6J17sT7qHYC&pg=PA334}}</ref>
⚫
<ref name=Williams>{{cite journal |title=The Wild Bunch |last=Williams |first=Tony |work=Senses of Cinema |issue=39 |year=2006 |url=http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/cteq/wild_bunch/ |quote=Stylistically, Akira Kurosawa’s ''The Seven Samurai'' (1954) and Arthur Penn’s ''[[The Left Handed Gun]]'' (1958) influenced Peckinpah. But he extended those influences in more creative and dynamic ways.}}</ref>
}}
}}

Revision as of 04:53, 28 January 2012

Easchiff/draft2
Born
Louis Joseph Lombardo

(1932-02-15)February 15, 1932
Missouri
Died(2002-05-08)May 8, 2002
Woodland Hills, California
Occupationfilmmaker

Lou Lombardo (1932-2002) was an American filmmaker with credits on more than twenty-five feature films. Noted mainly for his work as a film and television editor, Lombardo also worked as a cameraman, a director, and as a producer. In his obituary, Stephen Prince wrote, "Lou Lombardo's seminal contribution to the history of editing is his work on The Wild Bunch (1969), directed by Sam Peckinpah. The complex montages of violence that Lombardo created for that film influenced generations of filmmakers and established the modern cinematic textbook for editing violent gun battles."[1] Lombardo's career was intertwined with that of director Robert Altman for more than thirty years, and Lombardo edited McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and several other of Altman's films in the 1970s. Towards the end of his career Lombardo edited Moonstruck (1987) and two other films directed by Norman Jewison. While his editing is now considered "revolutionary" and "brilliant", Lombardo was never nominated for editing awards during his career.[2][3][4]

DYKhook

...that Lou Lombardo's film editing has been called "revolutionary", "seminal", and "brilliant", but was never nominated for editing awards?

Early career

Lombardo's career began in Kansas City, where he was Robert Altman's cameraman working on training films and "industrials" for the Calvin Company. Altman ultimately became a prominent feature film director. Lombardo and Altman both relocated to Los Angeles in 1956, where Lombardo was employed as a cameraman by Republic Pictures. Lombardo's goal had been to become a director. He decided that this was an unpromising career direction, and he became an apprentice editor at Revue Studios, at about half the salary he'd received as an assistant cameraman. As was common at that time for studio editors, an editing apprenticeship lasted eight years, during which Lombardo's work was uncredited. At the end of this apprenticeship, Robert Altman used Lombardo to edit a pilot program for television. This led to Lombardo's becoming an editor for the television program Felony Squad, which ran from 1966-1970.[5]

The Wild Bunch and the Peckinpah collaboration

The first feature film that Lombardo edited was The Wild Bunch (1969), which was directed by Sam Peckinpah.[6] It is a western noted for its violence, which was unusual in its time, and for its innovative and effective storytelling, camerawork, and editing. The film has proven to be profoundly influential long after its 1969 release, and was entered into the National Film Registry in 1999.[7] In 1995 Peter Stack wrote, "It's astonishing how harrowing The Wild Bunch is, more than 25 years after it blasted its way onto the big screen to become maybe the best shoot-'em-up ever made, the one that turned meanness into a haunting pictorial poetry and summed up the corruption of guilt, old age and death in the American fantasy of the Old West."[8] Stephen Prince wrote in 1999 that, "The Wild Bunch is an epic work, and it has had an epic impact on American cinema" and noted Martin Scorsese's description of the film as "savage poetry".[9] Paul Seydor has described the film as "one of the great masterpieces of world cinema", and then further notes that "Any discussion of The Wild Bunch implicitly acknowledges the editing by Lou Lombardo and Robert Wolfe, so integral is it to the style, meaning, and effect of the film. Still, one should at least observe that the art and craft of film editing know no higher peaks than The Wild Bunch, and very, very few that are anywhere near its summit."[10]

Connection to The Felony Squad

Lombardo became acquainted with Peckinpah when he moonlighted as a cameraman when Peckinpah was directing the television program Noon Wine (1966). Ultimately this connection led to Lombardo's joining Peckinpah to make The Wild Bunch; Peckinpah was particularly interested in the editing techniques that Lombardo had devised while editing Felony Squad. Lombardo described the crucial scene from the television show in a later interview with Vincent Lobrutto, "Joe Don Baker came out and was being shot by all these police. I printed every frame three times and created slow motion. I intercut him being shot, falling, this guy shooting, that guy running, Baker falling. Sam and Phil Feldman, the producer, saw it and said, 'You've got the job - and, as a matter of fact, we'll use that kind of thing.'"[5] The episode of Felony Squad was "My Mommy Got Lost."[11][12] At that time, slow motion cameras were not commonly used for television work. Lombardo used the laborious trick of stretching time by repeating the individual frames of film two or three times, which required that there be a film splice at every frame. There are typically 24 frames of film exposed each second by standard motion picture cameras, so after tripling Lombardo had 72 frames per second. Intercutting involves the splicing of sections of film from different cameras, or from different "takes" of the same scene.

Montage in The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch is bookended by two gun battles, one near the beginning of the film and one near its end. The gun battles are virtuosic demonstrations of the possibilities of film storytelling. Lombardo worked with Peckinpah both to design the camerawork for The Wild Bunch and to edit the film. As many as six cameras were filming simultaneously from different locations; the cameras were operating at various film rates from 24 to 120 frames per second. He and Peckinpah then edited the massive length of film footage for six months in Mexico, where the film had been shot. Stephen Prince writes, "The editing is audacious and visionary, as the montages bend space and elongate time in a manner whose scope and ferocity was unprecedented in American cinema."[1] In his biography of Peckinpah, Daniel Weddle wrote of the effect: "the action would constantly be shifting from slow to fast to slower still to fast again, giving time within the sequences a strange elastic quality".[11] In his 2011 assessment, Daniel Eagan wrote, "The Wild Bunch had 3,642 edits, more than five times the Hollywood average for a feature. ... Montage this dense hadn't been attempted since Sergei Eisenstein back in the 1920s."[13]

Origins and legacy

The immediate inspiration for the gunbattle montage in The Wild Bunch was likely the 1967 film, Bonnie and Clyde, which Peckinpah apparently screened a few days before filming began.[14] Bonnie and Clyde, which was directed by Arthur Penn and edited by Dede Allen, has a famed scene at its ending showing the killings of Bonnie and Clyde by state police.[15] The scene mixes slow and accelerated motion and several cameras, which were aspects of The Wild Bunch. Still earlier these techniques had been employed in Akira Kurosawa's films, and in particular in Seven Samurai (1954). Kurosawa generally both directed and edited his films. Stephen Prince has written, "The kinetic attributes of Kurosawa's style, then, entered deeply into international cinema. In terms of the representation of violence, they influenced Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah and, from there, Hong Kong director John Woo, as well as virtually everybody since. Every filmmaker who uses slow motion, montage, and multiple cameras to stylize violence in the ways that Kurosawa had demonstrated in Seven Samurai owes him a great debt."[14] But Tony Williams notes that The Wild Bunch "extended those influences in more creative and dynamic ways",[16] and Michael Sragow argued that "Peckinpah did it right in The Wild Bunch. He produced an American movie that equals or surpasses the best of Kurosawa. Scorsese tries to match it in Gangs of New York - and doesn't come close. The Wild Bunch is the Götterdämmerung of Westerns."[17]

The Matrix's "eye-catching violence upgrades the 'bullet ballets' of director Sam Peckinpah and the martial arts movies of Bruce Lee."[18]

Recently, Gabrielle Murray summarized how The Wild Bunch affected filmmaking: "Peckinpah, with the help of the brilliant editor Louis Lombardo and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, developed a stylistic approach that through the use of slow-motion, multi-camera filming and montage editing, seemed to make the violence more intense and visceral."[19] While these influences were very important, the gunbattle montage in The Wild Bunch ...HOW IS IT DIFFERENT?...[20] Paul Monaco wrote, "Lombardo pushed the revolution in Hollywood editing further than anyone else, and The Wild Bunch was established at the end of the 1960s as the epitome for fast-paced editing in a narrative film."[2]

The Ballad of Cable Hogue

Lombardo edited Peckinpah's next film, The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970). The film itself has not had an impact comparable to that of The Wild Bunch; Prince writes that in this film Lombardo and Peckinpah "experimented less successfully with edits combining normal speed and accelerated action."[1] The Ballad of Cable Hogue was their last collaboration; Peckinpah approached Lombardo about editing Straw Dogs, but Lombardo had already contracted to edit Brewster McCloud with Robert Altman.[21]

Five films with Robert Altman

Lombardo had worked as a cameraman with director Robert Altman in Kansas City, and the two men both moved to Hollywood in 1956. In the 1970s, Lombardo edited five films directed by Altman, commencing with Brewster McCloud (1970) and concluding with California Split (1974) just four years later.

Of the five films with Altman, the most influential is likely McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). The film was selected for the US National Film Registry in 2010. The film has been called an "anti-western"; McCabe establishes a successful brothel in a mining town, with the essential assistance of its madam, Mrs. Miller. In 1999, Roger Ebert wrote, "Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)."[22] Walter Chaw has written, "The father of contemplative American classics like Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, like The Wild Bunch, packs every bit the wallop of relevance and currency that it did over three decades ago. No hint of hyperbole, they are two of the best films ever made."[23]

As he had done for Peckinpah on The Wild Bunch, Lombardo acted as a second unit director for additional film footage. Altman and Lombardo spent nine months editing the film in North Vancouver, close to the location of the filming itself.[24] The editing of the film has apparently never been singled out for critical attention, with the exception of the innovative style of sound editing. In his textbook on film production, Bruce Mamer uses the film to exemplify the blending of dialogue from many speakers, "Robert Altman was famous for using this style of layered dialogue cutting. The frontier barroom scene that opens his McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Louis Lombardo, editor) has snippets of conversations underlying the foreground action."[25] Roger Crittenden wrote, "the questions Altman asked about the function of sound encouraged a radical approach to the use of dialogue and indeed other sound, both in and beyond the frame. Lou Lombardo must have played a major part in making the ideas work."[26] Stephen Prince chose a related theme in summarizing Lombardo's collaboration with Altman: "Though his work for Altman was less trendsetting than that for Peckinpah, the partnership with Altman lasted much longer, and Lombardo found the perfect visual rhythms for Altman's wandering and diffuse audio style."[1]

After California Split (1974), Altman wanted Lombardo to edit his next film Nashville (1975). Lombardo declined because he had turned to directing and producing. Altman chose Sidney Levin to edit, who was then succeeded by Lombardo's assistant editor on several films, Dennis M. Hill.[27] In 1977, Lombardo edited The Late Show, which was produced by Altman but directed by Robert Benton. The Late Show is a film noir detective story; Pauline Kael wrote at the time, "The Late Show never lets up; the editing is by Lou Lombardo (who has often worked with Robert Altman) and Peter Appleton, and I can't think of a thriller from the forties that is as tight as this, or has such sustained tension."[28]

Producing and directing

From 1975-1985 Lombardo worked as a producer and director as well as an editor. Lombardo's debut as a director was Russian Roulette (1975). The film is an espionage thriller that starred George Segal. A review in New York Magazine was unfavorable; "Lou Lombardo directs uninspiredly from a far from inspiring script co-authored by Tom Ardies, the original author of the novel."[29] The film was released for home video in 1986, and has recently been reviewed more favorably.[30]

Lombardo both produced and edited The Black Bird (1975), which was a humorous sequel to the film noir classic The Maltese Falcon; the film also starred George Segal, and was poorly reviewed upon its release.[31]

Lombardo co-produced Cheech & Chong's first film, Up in Smoke (1978), which is now known as the "classic stoner comedy".[32] The film enjoyed great box office success. Lombardo is also credited as the supervising editor on the film.

About 1981 Lombardo directed P. K. and the Kid, which starred a very young Molly Ringwald. The film was not released until early 1987, when Ringwald had become well-known; it nonetheless attracted little attention.[33]

Return to editing and the Norman Jewison collaboration

In 1986 Lombardo returned to editing with the fairly inconsequential Stewardess School. The film was produced by Phil Feldman, who had produced The Wild Bunch about 15 years earlier. Lombardo's next film was Moonstruck (1987), which was being directed and produced by Norman Jewison. Moonstruck was extemely successful at the box office, garnered three Academy Awards and three additional nominations, and has been well-regarded by many critics.[34][35] Stephen Prince has written, "Another brilliant editor of late-sixties American cinema, Lou Lombardo (who edited The Wild Bunch (1969) to seminal effect) worked sporadically in the eighties and mainly on low-key films (Moonstruck, In Country (1989)) where his editing choices showed the intelligence and subtlety that rarely wins Oscars. The wonderful comic effectiveness and timing of Moonstruck, for example, depends as much on Lombardo's editing as on John Patrick Shanley's script or the performances by Cher, Nicolas Cage, and the rest of the cast."[3] Lombardo worked on another half-dozen films through 1991; his last film was another of Jewison's productions, Other People's Money (1991).

Final cuts

Lombardo's son, Tony Lombardo, also became a film editor.[36] Lombardo was interviewed at length about his career by Vincent Lobrutto in 1991.[5] In that same year, he suffered a stroke that left him comatose until his death in 2002.[1]

Unincorporated quotes, etc.

  • "Robert Benton interviews". Directed The Late Show; Altman produced.
  • Dennis Hill (editor of Altman's Nashville) was Lombardo's assistant for six years. The Nashville Chronicles.

Filmography

Tabulate with role in the notes field?

This listing is based on the Internet Movie Database.[4] The director for each film is indicated in parenthesis.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Prince, Stephen. "Lou Lombardo b. 15 February 1932, d. 8 May 2002". filmreference.com.
  2. ^ a b Monaco, Paul (2010). A History of American Movies: A Film-by-film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema. Scarecrow Press. p. 191. ISBN 9780810874343. Lombardo broke one of the few rules of editing that had survived Dede Allen's editing work on Bonnie and Clyde by cutting directly into slow motion shots, and he also set a record for the number of separate shots in a feature film at 3624. Lombardo pushed the revolution in Hollywood editing further than anyone else, and The Wild Bunch was established at the end of the 1960s as the epitome for fast-aced editing in a narrative film.
  3. ^ a b Prince, Stephen (2002). A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow 1980-1989 (Volume 10 of History of the American cinema). University of California Press. p. 196. ISBN 9780520232662. Another brilliant editor of late-sixties American cinema, Lou Lombardo (who edited The Wild Bunch (1969) to seminal effect) worked sporadically in the eighties and mainly on low-key films (Moonstruck, In Country (1989)) where his editing choices showed the intelligence and subtlety that rarely wins Oscars. The wonderful comic effectiveness and timing of Moonstruck, for example, depends as much on Lombardo's editing as on John Patrick Shanley's script or the performances by Cher, Nicolas Cage, and the rest of the cast.
  4. ^ a b Lou Lombardo at IMDb Accessed 2011-12-21.
  5. ^ a b c Lobrutto, Vincent (1991). Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing. New York: Praeger. pp. 125–133.
  6. ^ Lombardo told Vincent Lobrutto that The Wild Bunch was his first feature film editing job. At present, Lombardo's filmography at the Internet Movie DataBase lists The Name of the Game is Kill (1969) as his first credit.
  7. ^ "Films Selected to the National Film Registry". Library of Congress. November 16, 1999.
  8. ^ Stack, Peter (August 18, 1995). "FILM REVIEW -- Peckinpah's 'Wild' Western". The San Francisco Chronicle.
  9. ^ Prince, Stephen (1999). "Introduction: Sam Peckinpah, Savage Poet of American Cinema". Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Cambridge University Press. p. 2. ISBN 9780521586061.
  10. ^ Seydor, Paul (1997). Peckinpah: The Western Films. A Reconsideration. University of Illinois Press. p. 190. The slow-motion intercuts with their hypnotic allure distance us from the action by aestheticizing it, thus intensifying aesthetic feeling as such but ameliorating any vicarious experience we might have of the physical sensations the action produces…. Peckinpah developed a technique that tends to divorce feeling from sensation (which is what makes his art so seductive, hence disturbing) and that enables him to strike exactly the right balance between an emotional, indeed an almost palpably physical proximity to the violence and an aesthetic distance from it. Also: "Any discussion of The Wild Bunch implicitly acknowledges the editing by Lou Lombardo and Robert Wolfe, so integral is it to the style, meaning, and effect of the film. Still, one should at least observe that the art and craft of film editing know no higher peaks than The Wild Bunch, and very, very few that are anywhere near its summit." (p. 195). Robert Wolfe was the associate editor of The Wild Bunch.
  11. ^ a b Weddle, David (1994). If They Move...Kill 'Em! : The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah. Grove Press. p. 334. ISBN 0802115462. Lombardo's intercutting of slow and fast motion in one continuous sequence had at last provided the key. Peckinpah now knew how he would integrate slow motion into the action sequences. He would film the major shootouts with six cameras, all operating at variable frame rates - 24 frames per second, 30 frames per second, 60 frames per second, 90 frames per second, 120 frames per second - so that then when cut together the action would constantly be shifting from slow to fast to slower still to fast again, giving time within the sequences a strange elastic quality. Later, Lombardo would further alter the speed of the shots with an optical printer, speeding them up or slowing them down so that just the right rhythms could be achieved.
  12. ^ "FELONY SQUAD - 1967 Howard Duff".
  13. ^ Eagan, Daniel (2010). America's film legacy: the authoritative guide to the landmark movies in the National Film Registry. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 648. ISBN 9780826429773. The Wild Bunch had 3,642 edits, more than five times the Hollywood average for a feature. ... Montage this dense hadn't been attempted since Sergei Eisenstein back in the 1920s. Lombardo persuaded Peckinpah to film the major shootouts with up to six cameras, some operating at different speeds. ... By overwhelming viewers, Peckinpah hoped to disarm their normal defenses - "it's only a movie" - and immerse them in the experience of violence and death. Exactly why he wanted to expose mainstream audiences to such relentless violence was never clear.
  14. ^ a b Prince, Stephen (1999). The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (Second Edition). Princeton University Press. p. 350. ISBN 9780691010465. Although he denied that Penn's film had any influence on him, Peckinpah's archived papers contain a letter from Warner Bros. to the production manager of The Wild Bunch confirming shipment of a print of Bonnie and Clyde to Peckinpah's Mexico location the weekend of March 23-24 prior to the start of principal cinematography on March 24. Peckinpah evidently wished to study Penn's design in order to surpass it. That Peckinpah felt the force of Kurosawa's lineage upon his own work is evident in his remark to Film Quarterlys Ernest Callenbach that he wanted to make Westerns like Kurosawa made Westerns.
  15. ^ Monaco, Paul (2003). The sixties, 1960-1969 Volume 8 of History of the American cinema. University of California Press. p. 90. ISBN 9780520238046. Several of the movie's scenes are remarkable and memorable because of the editing. For example, the killing of Bonne and Clyde at the end of the film, when they are ambushed by the police, is polished artisty. Without the extraordinarily careful layering of the visuals and the sound, Allen's fast cutting could easily have resulted in a confused and jumbled scne.
  16. ^ Williams, Tony (2006). "The Wild Bunch". Senses of Cinema (39). Stylistically, Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (1954) and Arthur Penn's The Left Handed Gun (1958) influenced Peckinpah. But he extended those influences in more creative and dynamic ways.
  17. ^ Sragow, Michael (February 14, 2003). "`Wild Bunch' is western writ large". The Baltimore Sun.
  18. ^ Edgar-Hunt, Robert; Marland, John; Rawle, Steven (2010). The Language of Film. AVA Publishing. p. 80. ISBN 9782940411276.
  19. ^ Murray, Gabrielle (May–June 2002). "Sam Peckinpah". Senses of Cinema (20).{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
  20. ^ Prince, Stephen (1998). Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies. University of Texas Press. ISBN 9780292765825.
  21. ^ Simmons, Garner (1982). Peckinpah, A Portrait in Montage. University of Texas Press. p. 127. ISBN 0292764936.
  22. ^ Ebert, Roger (November 14, 1999). "McCabe & Mrs. Miller". Chicago Sun Times.
  23. ^ Chaw, Walter. "TCM Greatest Films Classic Collection - Western Adventures". Film Freak Central. The father of contemplative American classics like Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, like The Wild Bunch, packs every bit the wallop of relevance and currency that it did over three decades ago. No hint of hyperbole, they are two of the best films ever made.
  24. ^ Plecki, Gerard (1985). Robert Altman. Twayne. p. 41. ISBN 9780805793031. No online acess.
  25. ^ Mamer, Bruce (2008). Film Production Technique: Creating the Accomplished Image (Fifth Edition). Cengage Learning. p. 393. ISBN 9780495411161. Interruptions and blending of dialogue...Robert Altman was famous for using this style of layered dialogue cutting. The frontier barroom scene that opens his McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Louis Lombardo, editor) has snippets of conversations underlying the foreground action.
  26. ^ Crittenden, Roger (1995). Film and Video Editing: Second Edition. Psychology Press. p. 160. ISBN 9781857130119.
  27. ^ Stuart, Jan (2003). The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece. Hal Leonard Corporation. p. 275. ISBN 9780879109813.
  28. ^ Kael, Pauline (February 7, 1977). "The Current Cinema: The Late Show". The New Yorker. p. 110. Subscription required for online access.
  29. ^ Simon, John (August 18, 1975). "The Critical Condition". New York Magazine: 65.
  30. ^ Hodgson, Mark A. (June 23, 2009). "Russian Roulette (1975) - not on DVD". Black Hole Reviews. Retrieved 2012-01-14. Director Lou Lombardo indulges the cast to throw in improvised dialogue to add to the realistic feel. The best example is a scene where Segal tries to get an old lady to remember a really important message. The worst is his throwaway line to a traumatised Raines in the middle of a car chase, "How do you feel, killing a man?". Sometimes his comedy touch makes the film a little lighter than the subject deserves.
  31. ^ Kael, Pauline (1991). "The Black Bird". 5001 Nights at the Movies. MacMillan. p. 76. ISBN 9780805013672. a dumb comedy, with an insecure tone and some good ideas mixed with some terrible ones.
  32. ^ Levy, Emanuel, "Up in Smoke (1978)", emanuellevy.com
  33. ^ Weisberg, Sam (October 11, 2011). "P.K. and the Kid (1987)". Hidden Films.
  34. ^ Citron, Marcia J. (2010). "An "honest contrivance": opera and desire in Moonstruck". When Opera Meets Film. Cambridge University Press. p. 173.
  35. ^ Ebert, Roger (June 22, 2003). "Moonstruck". Chicago Sun-Times.
  36. ^ Tony Lombardo at IMDb
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/?diff=473633768

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