Honoree Tina Hirsch, ACE

March 30, 2020

1st Qtr, 2020

Tina Hirsch, ACE, has forged a career that defies all expectations – even her own. She effortlessly weaved through action, documentary, comedy and sci-fi like few others. With a strong work ethic and a natural storytelling talent, she unwittingly influenced a new generation of filmmakers and certainly women in her field when she became the first female President of American Cinema Editors in 2000. “My parents were not in the industry at all. But I would watch television with my mother and, every once in a while, during the crawl at the end where they have the writers, she would say, ‘Oh, I used to know him,’” Hirsch relates. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the people I know now end up in the credits.’ One day, my mother came home from lunch with a friend and said that this friend’s daughter had just gotten a job as a freelance film editor. I didn’t know what it was but I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”

Bettina Kugel Hirsch grew up in New York and, at the time, was unaware that any kind of filmmaking was going on there. She admits, “I was a little naive at the time. I didn’t know how to get a job. I found out later that people were walking around with their resumes. That’s why I think life is magic. If I had made plans, I don’t know where I’d be today. It’s just not the thing to do as far as I’m concerned. You just keep saying yes to opportunities and that’s it.” She did, however, meet some people and benefited from being at the right place, at the right time, with the right determination. “One of the people I met was an assistant editor who worked at a place that cut trailers,” she explains. “I went to the owner of the business and asked, ‘Would it be okay if I came and helped some editors?’ He said, ‘Well, I’m sorry I just laid off five people. I’m not hiring.’ I said I would work for nothing.

There wasn’t such a thing as an intern in those days. Apprentices existed in L.A., but that really didn’t exist in New York. I finally did talk him into letting me work there for free. I started working with people who have remained colleagues and friends later in life.” One of these individuals was her eventual brother-inlaw Paul Hirsch, ACE.

Serendipity knocked again for Hirsch, but this time it was right down the hall. She remembers, “I heard there was someone from California in the back cutting room doing something different, and I said to the guy I was helping out, ‘I think I’m gonna go learn from him. I think they know more about what I want to know.’ And it was true. It was Bud Smith, ACE. He had an assistant who was in New York for the first time.

I asked her, ‘Is it okay if I watch you? I’d like to learn how to do this.’ One day, she said she wanted to go shopping during the day and I did her job while she was out. That’s how I learned.” It was shortly after this that Hirsch really began to examine her craft, interestingly enough as she dabbled in another.

In the late ‘60s, Hirsch had a very brief yet indelible dalliance with acting. She had bit parts in two movies: Greetings and Hi, Mom! Not only were both pictures directed by Brian De Palma and produced by her then husband Charles Hirsch, she actually got to put herself in the frame and see herself from the point of view of an editor, an actor and a viewer. “On Greetings, I played the role of Tina, the photographer’s assistant, which is who I was at the time,” she recounts. “I was looking at this face, these eyes. The most important things are in the eyes. I could see myself acting this part and listening to someone and being very concerned, asking questions, and finding out information. I was so surprised. How did I know to do that? I knew as an editor that’s what I would look for in the footage to tell the story.”

Little did Hirsch know, she was about to take a call that would change the course of her career and take her across the country. She recalls, “I got a phone call one day. A woman wanted to interview me for a job as an assistant editor. I went in and was interviewed by Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE. ‘We’re doing this movie about the Woodstock Film Festival. Would you be interested?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She asked, ‘Would you rather do the music or the documentary?’ I replied, ‘Well, I missed going to the festival and I was so disappointed about that. The idea of being able to see more than any human being who was actually there would see – because there were cameramen all over the place – I’d much rather do the documentary.’ She said, ‘Well, that’s what I’m doing. You’ll be my assistant.’ It was great!

It wasn’t something people do every day. We were making up stuff. Everything had to be coded in those days because it was people in the exteriors. Nobody had any documentary experience except for a few of the cameramen. Most of the editorial staff were brand new. My job was to make sure everything was in sync. It was very hard to synchronize this stuff because people didn’t walk around with time code slates.

That didn’t exist in those days. Fortunately, my grandfather taught me how to lip-read when I was little and it helped me put things in sync. I did a lot of work in New York where I was lip syncing stuff. That was my reputation. I was really good at that.” The massive documentary about the music event of that generation was edited in Los Angeles. Hirsch lived out there for about four months. When she left, she knew she’d be back.

Her second film as lead editor, Macon County Line, would catapult her into the world of B-movie nirvana. “Somebody who worked on Macon County Line recommended me to Roger Corman,” she remembers. “That’s how I got Big Bad Mama. Soon after, Paul BarteI called and asked me to do Death Race 2000, which he was directing.” Hirsch was now firmly in the Corman camp. The 1970s would see Hirsch’s career in the fast lane, quite literally. If Macon County Line started it, Death Race 2000 solidified it. Hirsch became the go-to editor for Corman’s car  chase/road picture subgenre that also included Eat My Dust! and The Driver, plus some non-Corman fare like Just Me and You and More American Graffiti. It wasn’t until the ‘80s that her career pivoted from B pictures to mainstream movies. Heartbeeps and Airplane II: The Sequel introduced Hirsch to out-and-out comedy. “Roger Corman once told me, ‘You’re funny.’ I thought, ‘What’s he talking about? I don’t know how to tell jokes.’ I realized when someone says you have a wonderful sense of humor that just means you’re laughing at the right places.”

That sense of humor coupled with her work on tense action oriented dramas fueled the trio of movies she made with director Joe Dante. Gremlins, Explorers, and Twilight Zone: The Movie required an adept hand at handling horror and science fiction with light comedic moments while maintaining an adventurous spirit. After these successes, Hirsch’s natural ambition kicked in and she sought to direct her first movie. Munchies is a horror-comedy starring Harvey Korman and, in a supporting role, her old friend Paul Bartel.

The movie heavily vibes off the Gremlins mythos and gave editor James A. Stewart, ACE, one of his first lead editor credits. “It was very rare to have women editors in those days,” Hirsch says, speaking about the cutting rooms of the late ‘80s. “You have to be very patient in a cutting room and supportive of the director. They’re the ones out there being criticized and raved about by the audience and the critics and the trades. They’re very vulnerable. The idea of having a woman in the cutting room is very supportive.”

The ‘90s would only see Hirsch’s career climb even higher with the digital revolution in editing and a new focus/challenge – television. Hirsch still found time to squeeze in a blockbuster like Dante’s Peak, but it was the flurry of TV work where she realized drama was where her heart truly lay. “I ended with drama, which to me was the most interesting,” admits Hirsch. “When editing was switching over to digital, I was ready for it to happen. I couldn’t type to save my life so, as the rest of my life has gone, I said I’d work for nothing if someone would show me how to work these new devices. During those days most editors preferred Lightworks because it felt like film, but Avid had all these tricks that would save a lot of time. Avid worked closely with L.A. film editors.” As editing evolved so too did every other facet of filmmaking from cameras and lighting, to sound and special effects.

Tom Clancy’s OP Center proved to be a productive sandbox for Hirsch and her colleagues to play in. Hirsch explains, “A friend of mine who worked with me on OP Center discovered this new attachment that you put on the camera to do a swish pan. That was his idea. He would use it to film scenes with people around a table having overlapping conversations. I didn’t like the swish pans. They made it slower, not faster. He wanted to make it speedier. What I ended up doing was cutting the tracks and using the picture against it so that you thought people were talking over one another.”

She would earn her first Eddie nomination for her work on the TV miniseries. She would carry this technique to her work on The West Wing. “I thought the pilot of The West Wing was fabulous.  Very talky. I didn’t understand a word, but it is fabulous,” she laughs. “You can’t understand what he’s saying unless you had a script with you. Since I had already learned how to edit people with overlapping dialogue I had been there before and knew how to do it. I added overlapping tracks so that it always had that rhythm. I would overlap three frames.”

This time Hirsch won the Eddie for Best Edited One-Hour Series for Television and garnered her first Emmy® nomination. In 2003, Hirsch added professor to her long resume as an adjunct professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.  “I hate to say this because I have taught editing, but I’m glad I didn’t know the rules,” she admits. “I didn’t go to school for editing. I just did what felt right to me. If it feels right, it’s right.  That’s what I teach my students. You can’t give someone a little paint and a brush and tell them if they follow these rules they will have a beautiful painting. I don’t feel that’s true.”

Before her formal experience as a professor, she was already teaching in the editing room. “I tried to involve my assistant editors as much as I could. Wait until you see the feeling in the room. If the director really wants your opinion, they’ll ask you. If they don’t ask, don’t say it. You shouldn’t tell people they’re doing the wrong thing unless they ask you.” One of the assistants she remembers quite fondly is Nancy Hurley, who happens to be one of the first Assistant members of ACE. “She types 60 words a minute!” exclaims Hirsch. “Anytime I had notes, she took them down. I would always compare my notes to hers to make sure I had everything. She’s gone on to great success on many shows since The West Wing.”

In 2005, Hirsch earned another pair of Eddie and Emmy nominations for her work on Back When We Were Grownups for Hallmark. Shortly thereafter, she and her second husband Karl Epstein begin traveling more and working on passion projects. Their adventures took them from the Dominican Republic to Vietnam. “That’s how Karl and I started making a movie together. We took a volunteer trip to Vietnam giving glasses to the people who live in the rural countryside. He shot [the documentary] and I cut it. We screened it for our 25th wedding anniversary.”

The documentary Four Decades Later chronicles 14 humanitarians including Hirsch and Epstein providing free eye care to people in remote villages. They are now working on another potential documentary about a Haitian waiter they met on holiday in the Dominican Republic who had become an essential fixture of their recurring vacations to the island. “I think my life has been a wonderful story,” exclaims Hirsch. “Editors are the best people on this planet and I am so happy to be part of that family.”

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