I’ve been listening to William Friedkin read his 2013 memoir The Friedkin Connection on my daily commute and loving it so far. The first chapter, “Chicago,” details the making of his first film, a 1962 documentary called The People vs. Paul Crump. A chance meeting with a death row priest at a cocktail party leads Friedkin to make his documentary, despite having no real knowledge of how to make a film at all. (He even claims to have never have seen a documentary film at that point in his life.) From his memoir:
[Cinematographer Wilmer] Butler and I were editing the film each night as we got the dailies from the lab. Most of the time we worked at my apartment. My mother would make us lunch and dinner, and we’d work on weekends twelve or fifteen hours a day, with an old pair of rewinds and a 16 mm. viewer and splicer we had “liberated” from the WGN-TV newsroom. Splicing was done with glue, not clear cellophane tape, which came in several years later.
One evening, Ernie Lucas, a veteran TV director, happened to pass by on his way to pick up copy for the ten o’clock news. He was surprised to see us in a film editing bay in the newsroom, since we were involved exclusively with “live” telecasts. He expressed shock that we were editing our negative, and that we were not handling it carefully with white cotton gloves. “What are you guys doing?” he asked. We told him we were working on a short film for our own amusement. “But you’re cutting the negative; you’re not supposed to even touch it.”
“Why not?” We were confused.
Ernie was patient.
“Don’t you know that camera negative is never touched until you have a final edited work print?” he asked.
“What’s a work print?”
Ernie explained that a work print was made immediately after the negative was developed, and that it was this work print that you cut and recut, and only when you were finished was the negative conformed to the work print version. Neither did we know that the work print, negative, and 16 mm. sound track had to be edge-numbered simultaneously, so that picture and sound could be synchronized. Consecutive serial numbers were printed on the edges of these elements at intervals of a foot. Since we didn’t realize this, parts of our negative were scratched and torn, spliced and respliced, until we could belatedly apply edge-numbering. We had to “match” our synch-sound interviews by lip-reading, which took weeks, and we had no idea how to achieve a final print.
Biblioklept 