When I went through film school, I learned that there were three ways that a story was told for every movie. The first was through the writing process. A writer took their thoughts, put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, and hammered out a script that told a story. The second was through the direction. A director took what they read from the script, got the parts together, and filmed the story with their own touch. Unless the director and writer were the same person, some changes were going to be made along the way to the overall vision. Finally, there was the editing. Some things that were filmed would be left on the cutting room floor. Not every shot or every scene would make it into the film. In most cases, that is.
I want to focus on the third way that a story is told in a movie. Editing has become an essential part of the filmmaking process. Back when motion pictures were first taking off as a form of entertainment, editing wasn’t always key. The camera was mostly stationary. The shots were similar to one another, with the main difference being the horizontal angle as the camera focused on a different character. It took a few years for directors and cinematographers to figure out the power of individual shots. High angles, low angles, movement, zooms… All of these techniques would evolve as the years went by, leading to more compelling storytelling.
Editing would grow, thanks to the varied shots. Putting together a movie was no longer about cutting from one character to another so audiences could follow the dialogue and action. Editors were getting a variety of shots that provided different emotions. They needed to carefully thread them together to convey what the director wanted to get across, in the best way possible. If a director wanted the audience to feel like they were in the middle of a fight, getting tossed around as much as the characters, an editor would need to cut from shot to shot a little quicker. If they wanted audiences to feel creeped out, maybe one shot would be lingered on a little more than others while off-screen dialogue was spoken. L-cuts and J-cuts became more common (where sound from one shot overlapped the visuals of another). Most importantly, editing could be used to adjust the pacing of a movie.
As the years went on, cinematography and editing would each refine their techniques and experiment with new ones. There were numerous ways to tell stories. Many of the refined techniques were good and allowed for great storytelling success. Sometimes, however, the people telling the story would fumble. The director wouldn’t have a clear vision of their story, rushing into a project without doing the groundwork. Or the editor would cut in a way that was detrimental to the pacing. Nobody is perfect. Storytellers aren’t perfect, either.
I don’t have time to get into the entire history of editing. Instead, I want to focus on a 1997 movie called Hollywood Safari, which suffered from many storytelling issues. A lot of it came down to the editing, but I’ll also touch upon one thing that didn’t. Here’s the basic story. Troy Johnson (David Leisure) was a Hollywood animal trainer. While on route to a movie set, his mountain lion got loose. The police captured it when they were hunting for a mountain lion that attacked a local boy, and planned to put it down. Troy’s kids, Josh (Ted Jan Roberts) and Peter (Ryan J. O’Neill), headed out into the Hollywood Hills with a tranquilizer gun to try and find the mountain lion that was really behind the attack.
Hollywood Safari was a movie that dealt with animals through most of its runtime. This meant that things didn’t go exactly as planned while filming. Even the most well-trained Hollywood animals can be unpredictable at times. The cameraman might be predicting the animal to move one way, when it doesn’t. Or they might predict the animal to stay still and it runs off screen. Part of the editor’s job is to find the shots where this sort of wrong prediction doesn’t occur and put those into the movie. Unless the emotion conveyed in that specific shot said otherwise. Cutting for emotion is very important and can help people overlook things like continuity errors or bad shots.
The editor for Hollywood Safari didn’t seem to think about that when compiling the footage into a compelling movie. The unpredictability of animals was shown frequently, especially when it came to the family dog. Josh and Peter were joined by the dog when they went out to find the mountain lion. The dog picked up a scent and they followed. At one point, the camera was on the dog as it barked in a certain direction. The camera panned over without the dog moving forward. My assumption is that the cameraman thought the dog was going to move, since it did a sort of stutter-step. But then it stayed in the spot it was standing. Yet the camera moved. You would think that they would want to redo the shot, maybe without the jerky camera movement that followed nothing. Somehow this shot ended up in the final edit.
As for the rest of the animal footage, a lot of it was highly unnecessary. It felt like filler to get Hollywood Safari up to feature length. Many times, the animal footage didn’t add anything to the movie. It was superfluous. There were no added stakes. There were no character beats. The story wasn’t driven forward. They were simply there to show trained animals doing trained animal things. The scene I keep going back to was the one where Peter, I think, was getting the tranquilizer gun for the mountain lion hunt. There was a monkey in the house that took one of the tranquilizer darts and began playing with it. It took about five seconds for Peter to get it back. All he had to do was ask for it and the monkey handed it over. Five seconds of monkey antics that added nothing to the movie. It could have easily been removed from the movie without changing anything. There were a few scenes that felt like that.
The weirdest part of Hollywood Safari wasn’t that these things were left in the movie. That was weird, sure, and they could have easily been removed or substituted for other shots without changing the trajectory of the story. Removing them would have actually cleaned up the pacing. But the strangest thing was that they were included in the movie while other important scenes were left out entirely. I’m about to spoil the ending of Hollywood Safari, so if you’re interested in going into a late 90s family movie you’ve probably never heard of without any idea of what the ending will be, you should probably skip ahead.
Hollywood Safari involved an acting sheriff named Rogers (John Savage) who was out for revenge after a mountain lion attacked the son of one of his friends. Josh and Peter were out searching for the mountain lion because Rogers was pushing to kill their mountain lion. Their mom was fighting in the jail, getting herself locked up in the process, because Rogers wanted to kill their mountain lion. When the animal control guys said they would put the family’s mountain lion down on Monday because they didn’t have time to get a new bottle of poison before their shift was over on Friday, Rogers basically held them hostage and forced them into it that day. He was the villain of Hollywood Safari.
The problem with his story arc was that there was no scene showing his defeat. When the Johnson family showed up with the mountain lion that really attacked the boy, Rogers was nowhere to be found. Everyone arrived at the jail in time to stop the animal control people from putting down the Johnsons’ mountain lion. There was a deputy that helped them bring the mountain lion in. He asked where Rogers was. Someone informed him that Rogers went outside to tell everyone they were putting down the Johnsons’ mountain lion. The deputy went to spoil his fun. But that was never shown. Either there wasn’t a scene filmed to show Rogers’s reaction to finding out about the mountain lion, or it was cut from the final edit. That scene was missing, whatever the reason.
To make matters even worse, there was nothing to show what happened to Rogers after disobeying direct orders from the real sheriff. The sheriff had been there for the original hunt and had stopped Rogers from killing the mountain lion. He then had to go on vacation and left Rogers in charge, saying that a decision on the mountain lion was not to be made until he returned. Rogers immediately disobeyed the order and planned to put the mountain lion down. The sheriff wasn’t in the rest of the movie. It would have been nice to see the deputy confront Rogers in front of the media or have some sort of punishment from the sheriff because of his disobedience. Without either, it felt like Hollywood Safari was incomplete.
The point of editing is to make sure the story of a movie is told in the most emotional and compelling way. An editor should find the best shots that convey what the director wanted to convey. They should remove any superfluous material that doesn’t add to the story or the character development. An audience can tell when there’s stuff in a movie that doesn’t belong there, and it’s an editor’s job to reduce that feeling as much as possible. The editor for Hollywood Safari didn’t do their job to the best of their abilities, making the movie feel needlessly longer than it should have.
Editing is only one of the three ways that a story can be told through movies. The writer came up with the story and put it onto pages for people to read. The director used that written work and got it filmed so people could watch it. Then the editor came in and put the pieces together to tell the most engaging story possible. Three different stages of storytelling where the story changed each time. Each stage as important as the last to what the final product would be. And the final movie is only as strong as the weakest link.
Now let’s toss some notes in here and get out of this place:
- Nils Allen Stewart made a third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Hollywood Safari. Their other appearances were in Cop and ½ (week 340) and The Scorpion King (week 380).
- J.C. Brandy was in Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (week 48) and Hollywood Safari.
- Hollywood Safari was the second time John Savage was in Sunday “Bad” Movies, with the first being Bermuda Tentacles (week 96).
- Don Wilson popped up in both Hollywood Safari and The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power (week 380).
- Finally, David Leisure returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Hollywood Safari, after first appearing in 3 Strikes (week 459).
- Have you seen Hollywood Safari? What did you think of it? What are some of the editing things that bother you most in movies? Share your thoughts in the comments or find me on Twitter.
- You can use Twitter or the comments to suggest movies I should be checking out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’m always up for suggestions because I don’t know every movie ever.
- Pop on over to Instagram to check out Sunday “Bad” Movies for more bad movie fun.
- And now we’re into a big week. It’s a franchise week coming up, which means I’m going to be checking out at least two movies. I’ll actually be checking out three movies, finishing off a series I started a long time ago. It’s time for me to finish off the Sharknado series with Sharknado: The 4th Awakens, Sharknado 5: Global Swarming, and The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time. I’ll see you soon for a post about those movies.
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