The Rise and Rise of the Editor

Written by Lee Schneider

One person, one idea. That’s the Auteur Theory, which refers to a film director being the solo heart and soul of a movie. A little thing called non-linear editing blew all that up. Lightworks, Avid and now Final Cut Pro are insider names to most media consumers, but if you think these technologies are a small aspect of the media that is placed before you, well, you’d be wrong. These technologies are game changers. Why? Technology drives culture. In the 1970s, VHS became the vehicle of choice for pornography. In a wonderful assignation of tech-meets-flesh, the old men who masturbated under blankets in sleazy theaters were replaced by people masturbating at home. VHS, propelled on a surging sea of porno, became a dominant way to deliver movies, leading to the decline of Western civilization and Richard Simmons’ exercise videos, though not necessarily in that order.

Can you feel the burn? It’s not your fast-twitch muscle fibers that are on fire. It’s the immolation of pop culture, consuming itself almost as fast as it can be produced.

Final Cut Pro and Avid and television are an especially combustible mix. These non-linear systems have made post-production cheaper but they’ve also dumbed it down. Anybody can edit now and it’s way faster than it used to be. Clients can order changes and expect them overnight. Multiple editors can work on the same project at the same time, even in different cities.

Reality television has been shaped by non-linear editing far more than it’s been shaped by our appetite for cheating-spouse drama or seeing if people can lose weight if they are yelled at enough. Hours of footage can be digitized and then tossed at legions of editors who shape the story. Yes, that’s right. It’s really the editors who are shaping the story, not the directors who shot the footage or the executive producers who are spending the budget. Editors, sometimes working with story editors, are running things.

This is a good thing, I think, because editors see more footage than anybody and are in the best position to judge it. Further, this editorial or curatorial function has spread like a virus across all media. Look at the Huffington Post. The Queen of the Aggregators has risen to royal status by curating the news. It started out by being a master editor and gatherer of content. So many other laudable sites, like Boing Boing, Treehugger, Mashable and TechCrunch do a little reporting on their own, but they are editors at heart. Less hunting, more gathering. Mostly they curating and assembling content in their digital workshops.

Thanks to my friend H.A. Arnarson for giving me the idea to write about this. Recently, he’s been an editor-supervising producer on a show called “1000 Ways to Die.” We first met ten years ago when I hired him to edit a documentary I was executive producing about Arnold Schwarzenegger. The production was floundering a little bit and I as executive producer was doing my job, spending the budget in quiet desperation as we hunted for the cut. Then H.A. came along and made it work with his editorial vision.

The editor is the new auteur.

It Works Because You Say So

My doctor gave me six months to live. But when I couldn’t pay the bill he gave me six months more.
-Walter Matthau, actor

You go to a doctor. The doctor gives you a pill. You get better. Then you find out the doctor gave you a sugar pill and you got better anyway.

You might have gotten better without bothering to go to the doctor at all. Or it could be the Placebo Effect. This has some folks in the UK pretty ticked off.

On January 30, a group called 10:23 is protesting an English drug store chain’s decision to sell homeopathic remedies. Boing Boing carried the story that 300 unbelievers across the UK are each planning to swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills. It’s a mass “overdose” intended to show that the homeopathic remedies are nothing but sugar pills and fake medicine. The event should be interesting, particularly if any of the protesters go into a sugar-induced coma.

Homeopathy is based on three central ideas: First, the Law of Similars: whatever causes your symptoms can also cure them. If you can’t sleep, try caffeine. Second, the Law of Infinitesimals. When you dilute a cure in water, it gets stronger. Third, the Law of Succussion, which states that each time you dilute your cure in water you are to tap the bottle to “potentize” it. Homeopaths believe this allows the water to retain the memory or vibration of the cure.

If you believe in homeopathy, this information is unbearably exciting. If you don’t, it sounds like superstitious nonsense and “magik” from 1796, which is when homeopathy was invented by one Samuel Hahnemann.

What if it’s not about what’s in the pills at all? What if their potency is predicated upon the intent of the user, the mystique surrounding the pills, or the package they came in? In 1955, an anesthesiologist named Henry Knowles Beecher said that a drug or doctor’s success is due to the patient’s expectation of a desired outcome. His research suggested that more than 30 percent of the time, patients felt better when they believed the treatment was going to make them feel better. Subsequent researchers say Beecher’s research was flawed, but there’s no denying that when people in white coats and medical degrees on the wall say reassuring words, people feel better. It also works when the people are wearing feathers and a loin cloth if that’s the cultural norm of what a healer looks like.

Expectations are powerful: Reference a puzzling study from the 1920s. A research team wanted to know if making factory lighting brighter would improve worker productivity. It did. But then worker productivity also improved when researchers made the lighting dimmer. The secret? The workers came to expect that any change would make them more productive, no matter whether they could see or were working in the dark.

We’re still in the dark regarding the Placebo Effect. It might prove to be the real mechanism for understanding healing energy based on intention and belief. It might be a vestige of old superstition and “magik.” It certainly reveals a lot about how people heal.

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