Wonder Boys was edited by the “grande dame” of editing, Dede Allen, best known for her groundbreaking editing of Bonnie and Clyde. In that film she used jump cuts to elongate a moment and rapid cutting to create incredibly kinetic action scenes. She won several Academy Awards for editing, her most recent in 2000 for Wonder Boys, directed by Curtis Hanson, with Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, Robert Downey Jr., and Tobey McGuire. It also happens to be the first film that Allen edited on the Avid.
Wonder Boys seems an unlikely candidate for the Academy Award for Editing. It doesn’t have great action scenes or an epic structure. It’s a dramatic, sometimes screwball, comedy, about an English professor (Grady Tripp, played by Douglas) who has lost his personal and professional bearings, and spends the film getting into a series of mishaps on his way to self-understanding. I’ll discuss two dialog scenes, both on Track 5 of the DVD. The first is between Grady and his gifted, troubled student James (McGuire); the second is with his lover, College Dean Sara Gaskell (McDormand). In both, the pacing of dialog and editing make the scenes come alive. Also, a few techniques are used to slightly disorient the viewer, not meant to overwhelm the viewer, but to provide a low-key zing appropriate for a non-action film.
This first scene is actually a string of a couple of mini-scenes. James has just shot a dog that attacked Grady in his lover, Sara’s, house (itself a comic mimicking of Hitchcock’s editing style). We cut to James and Grady in a car. But audio precedes picture in this transition: we hear James says, in voice-over, “Professor Grady,” while the picture remains in the house, on the wounded Grady taking the gun from his student. It’s a nice ironic touch, this mismatch of the word “professor” with Grady’s undignified demeanor in this scene.
In the car, a fairly straightforward shot reverse-shot structure is used. But notice how the shots are cut precisely at the end of a line of dialog, without a frame to spare. Unlike many screwball comedies, however, the line readings themselves are not hurried. The rhythm of the scene comes from the sharp edits at the end of a line in counterpoint with the more measured pace of the dialog. (The comic punch line, “I have tenure,” is the payoff of the scene – Grady’s shorthand explanation of why he, not James, should take the blame for killing the dog.) This is a 30-second gem of pacing.
The scene continues as Grady and James get out of the car to put the dead dog in the trunk. They have another brief encounter: James is inducted by his teacher into the pleasures of Codeine with a whiskey chaser. This key comic moment – James becoming Grady’s “disciple” – is elongated by including lots of reaction shots. Further, in the central action, James “hurls” the Codeine tablet and whiskey, which hit Grady’s jacket. The film gets this action in two shots. Look carefully and you see that the cut on movement is not a perfect continuity cut. Instead, there’s a slight overlap of the action, stretching time. It’s the audio that carries us across the cut, making it appear as a seamless event. The technique used here, and elsewhere in the film, of introducing a bit of discontinuity by breaking up a single action into several pieces, creates a sense of energy and urgency to the characters’ plights.
We’ll skip the next scene in an auditorium on campus, where a successful, but exceedingly pompous writer (Rip Torn) is giving a speech about how to make it as a writer (by the way, we enter the scene in another nice ironic audio-first transition). Grady almost faints and goes out into the corridor, where he actually does faint, and wakes as Sara stands over him. (Watch for the XHA shot of Grady as he faints, another off-beat unexpected shot, with a symbolically-loaded Madonna-and-child statue in the foreground.)
The ensuing 3-minute dialog scene between Grady and Sara is a key moment in the film. Each has news to tell the other (Sara that she’s pregnant, and Grady that he shot her dog). Lots of silence is built into this scene. It’s the scene of maximum misunderstanding – and maximum vulnerability – between the two characters.
The editing (and shooting) choice is strange, and I think can only be understood in the context of the dramatic content of the scene. The camera constantly crosses the 180-degree line, primarily during the shot reverse-shot conversation between the two lovers.
The most jarring instance is the series of three shots it takes Grady to stand up, each cut crossing the axis, again stretching a moment, this time to emphasize Grady’s helplessness.
We may not notice this break from convention on a casual viewing of the film, but it undoubtedly has an effect on us. It throws us off balance, subtly recreating in us the disorienting feelings experienced by the characters. This pattern of shots also encourages us to see the two characters as doubling each other. The literally replace each other on the same side of the screen, accentuating the fact that they’re both working through very personal problems (for Grady, it’s not just that he “shot” her dog, but that he’s falling apart).
And how do we know that this violation of the axis isn’t simply a mistake? First, Hanson and Allen know better. But more important, this is not the only time this violation is made. It’s also done early in the film, at the first moment of anxiety for Grady: he meets his editor, Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.), who immediately asks how his book is coming along (it isn’t). As Grady dissembles uncomfortably, the shot reverse-shot construction defies the 180-degree axis.
The moral of the story for editors: You can enrich a film by using all kinds of story-telling techniques – including ones that might seem more at home in other genres – to build drama and character.
Wonder Boys stills courtesy of Paramount Pictures.