In September, I am cheating.
I did not actually watch The Right Stuff in the month of September.
You would know this. You would know I'm in Europe. You would know that even a crazy loon like me would not try to figure out how to shoehorn a 3 hour and 12 minute movie into his European holiday.
All I really said, though, was that I was writing about The Right Stuff -- The Write Stuff? -- in September, not that I'm technically beholden to watching the movie in that month.
Well, I'm cheating a bit there too. As I type this it is August 21st, the night before I leave on my trip. But I'm only getting it started. In fact, I'll write the rest when I have time.
Hello. It's now September 28th, and I "have time" as I look out at the waves from the deck of my Air BnB in Crete. Unfortunately, now my memory of The Right Stuff is a bit faulty. I guess that was always the problem with this idea.
But!
I do have notes, in two different places -- one in an email, one in a notebook, representing two different venues in my house where this long movie got watched -- so I will do my best to cobble together a cogent analysis of the movie, both as a movie and as an excercise in editing.
For starters let me say that I loved The Right Stuff. I have to admit, I sort of thought it would feel like homework. And I think I got that based on my impression of it at the time it came out.
When The Right Stuff first hit theaters in 1983, I loved outer space -- but not the kind of outer space I imagined was being depicted here. Nineteen eighty-three was also the year Return of the Jedi was released. I wanted science fiction, not science. (Cue the argument about whether Star Wars movies should be considered science fiction or fantasy.) If any big movie involving astronauts had been released around that same time -- say, Apollo 13 -- my reaction likely would have been equally indifferent. I just wasn't ready for it.
Over the years, my stance on The Right Stuff should have changed, and I'm sure did change, passively. But once you are beyond the initial period of a movie's greatest relevance -- which for most movies is the window of its release, but in this case also would have included the times it was playing regularly on cable -- you need a real reason to fire it up and prioritize a viewing. I did not have that with The Right Stuff, and I'm sure the fact that the running time exceeded three hours did not help. This even though I knew the movie was beloved among some people my age.
The first thing that made it not feel like homework is that The Right Stuff is, in a very real sense, a comedy. I would never have guessed this, but I was laughing throughout. A total contrast to what I was expecting, which was a bunch of shots of humorless, overly earnest mean squinting into the sky, with triumphant music playing in the background. There's very little of that. There are a lot more jokes than there is that.
What kind of jokes?
Well here is where my memory gets a little fuzzy. A lot has happened to me since I saw The Right Stuff.
But in my notes I wrote "Shepard pee montage." And by that I am pretty sure I'm talking about a sequence in which the Alan Shepard character (played by Scott Glenn) has to walk around a hospital without peeing on himself due to having a catheter inserted in his urethra. This is way funnier than it needed to be and there are other characters having a laugh at his expense. I can't remember the reason he needs to be moved around within the hospital, but it all looks very uncomfortable and showcases the less glamorous -- far less glamorous -- side of training to be an astronaut.
But then I wonder if the "Shepard pee montage" was not something else. Because in my other set of notes, I have written "catheter scene." So it may be that Glenn's character is doing something else funny related to peeing, and then other characters (Ed Harris maybe?) are the butts of the jokes in the "catheter scene." Suffice it to say, it was all funny.
Then in my notes I also have "Shearer/Goldblum comic relief," which is that Harry Shearer and Jeff Goldblum do show up in very small and funny comic relief roles. And then I don't actually remember what this was, but it sounds very funny: "Dueling singing in masturbation scene." That this movie should even contain a scene where the astronauts have to produce samples of their semen tells you how little this movie felt like homework.
My final note about the comedy: "Even the launches are comedy." But I don't at this point know what I was referring to there.
But you're here to learn about my take on the editing.
Although everything -- and I mean everything -- about Philip Kaufman's film is constructed at the highest caliber, I do remember having some difficulty pinpointing why its editing was revered enough to win an Oscar for it.
And here I must note something funny, the first such occurrence in this nine-month-old series: The editing was not just completed by one man.
In fact, a team of five editors -- Glenn Farr, Lisa Fruchtman, Tom Rolf, Stephen A. Rotter and Douglas Stewart -- were the nominees and ultimate winners of this award. I have to imagine that is strange not just for a film nominated for best picture, but for any movie.
When it comes to editing, I feel like I've learned that you want consistency in approach in order for the movie to hang together. I imagine that is very hard to do with five editors. (Also, nice to note that one of them is a woman, making her the first such honoree in this series. One of the best known names in editing, Thelma Schoonmaker, is a woman, so it's nice to see some diversity in gender representation, even if we're not actually watching one of Schoonmaker's films in this series.)
Even in a film I've watched for this series that might have had reason to have multiple editors -- How the West Was Won, which had three directors -- the editing was all completey by Harold Kress, and at the time I attributed the film's continuity as a single whole to his steady hand.
Somehow, this quintet had the right stuff -- sorry about that -- to give this film the same sense of a single approach and a single vision, enough to earn the gold statue. (And sorry, because there are five people, I'm not going to delve into their individual histories in the film industry.)
I've seen a number of films in this series where I thought the editing just got swept up in the general fervor for a movie that went on to win best picture. That was not the case with The Right Stuff -- which was actually a box office bomb, earning much of its following on video, while remaining a critical hit. But the movie did win four Oscars altogether, the others being for Bill Conti's score and for sound and sound effects editing. I feel like editing is a natural in a film that includes planes rocketing through the air as pilots (like Sam Shepard's Chuck Yeager) try to break the sound barrier.
And there was some great stuff involving the physical portrayal of flying fast that might certainly earn a film an editing Oscar. My notes about these specific things are the following:
"Plane flight cut to explosion on the ground"
"First SB (sound barrier) test - different sounds also edited together"
"Ship engine into tunnel"
If I remember correctly, that last at least was an example of cutting on form, an editing technique that I always seem to notice and appreciate.
But as an overarching comment about this film, I was enjoying it too much to continue scratching down notes and otherwise interrupting the flow of my experience. For sure, the experience was interrupted for other reasons -- it's hard to watch a movie more than three hours long without that being the case -- but what I mean is that this film was just doing its job of entertaining me with good acting, great writing, lively pacing and solid craftsmanship. It defied my attempts to extract parts of it to look at under a micrsocope, because with good filmmaking, all the elements should be working in concert to transport you where it wants to take you -- which, with The Right Stuff, is into the stratosphere, both literally and metaphorically.
The editing was likely the secret weapon that helped bring that all together.
In October I'll be back in Melbourne, and the next scheduled movie is a revisit of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, which I've seen only once.
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