Monday and Tuesday of this week Betty and I spent a lot of time with our film editor, John Nutt. We viewed over five hours of interviews and messed around with particular cuts of music for the various sections; the beginning, the ambushes and battles, the incoming, the aftermath, the end of the movie.
We (meaning Betty, Mark Spear, Brian Crowdson, and Jesse Hassler) originally videod over twenty hours of interviews which I transcribed (a real chore for a poor typist such as I). Then I extracted five-plus hours of interview segments that seem relevant to the vector of this movie. We gave it all to John and now it’s in his software and Vavoom, away we go.
Betty and he and I talked about movies and music and the theory of story, the theory of film and films that employed various techniques we had seen and like and thought might fit into Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor.
John is a Vietnam veteran and has some “ghosts,” as he calls them, that the film is bringing to the fore. When he talks to me about this movie his blue eyes are like vivid azure fire agates that burn holes in my skin when he looks at me. He’s articulate and intellectual, emotional, and funny. And he is excited, as are Betty and I. John says we have a movie.
Next step is to cut the film down to less than two and one-half hours and work on some of the non-visual aspects of the film.
Time to get to work.