A version of this story about film editors Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
When Michael Kahn says, “Oh, Steve’s always loved the film negative,” he knows what he’s talking about.
At the age of 92, Kahn has been editing Steven Spielberg’s films since 1977’s “Encounters of the Third Kind”: more than 30 films in 45 years, including Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical new “The Fabelmans,” in which the The old school art of film editing is portrayed in true detail and great love.
“He loves how it looks, how it feels and how it smells,” said Kahn, who cut the film with Sarah Broshar. “We were some of the last holdouts in Hollywood to (the transition to digital publishing). Steve is a stickler and using real film has always been part of the joy for him.” (For the record, “The Fabelmans” was shot digitally.)
Broshar, who has co-edited with Kahn since the 2017 Nixon-era drama “The Post,” described the sweet sense of recognition he felt while working on a sequence in which teenage filmmaker Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) butts, butts, and records celluloid strips in his bedroom. In the process, Sammy stumbles upon a secret involving his mother in his 8mm filming of a camping trip.
“What I love is that Sammy is bored and yawns while looking at the footage,” Broshar said. “Then he makes his discovery, and that really captures our work accurately. Sometimes we are just looking at the newspapers, but then we discover something in the images. And those discoveries, in our work, change everything.”
In another self-reflexive twist, Spielberg asked his editors to deliberately cut certain images in a careless manner. In this case, it was Sammy’s own cinematic recreation of a train wreck in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth,” made from toy models.
“Steven said, ‘Cut that one really bad, because it was the first movie I ever did,’” Broshar recalled. “But it’s fun because the footage comes together naturally. We tried to cut it a lot of different ways, but it wasn’t too hard to put together.”
Khan agreed. “The model train accident was one of the easier scenes to cut,” he said. “All the footage was there. Steve knew what he needed [in the footage]even when I was a child.”
Kahn has taken home Oscars for “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” His three wins mark an Academy record for film editing, tied with Scorsese’s editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. (Kahn and Schoonmaker are also tied for the most nominations, with eight.) But despite his vast experience, Kahn believes that “every film is a new experience,” so he and Broshar did not rewatch Spielberg’s work to infuse the montage with Spielbergian touches.
“Any reference to his previous work on this film comes from his cool head,” Kahn said. The editor smiled as he admitted, “Although when the kids on bikes turn the corner, it sure reminded me of ‘ET’” (By the way, that 1982 classic is one of the only Spielberg movies Kahn didn’t edit; he was too busy on “Poltergeist”, produced by Spielberg).
As with all Spielberg films, the editors began their work as soon as the cameras rolled. “We edited during the shoot,” Broshar said. “We have a trailer on the set right next to Steven’s, and we go in there with the footage and he walks in on his lunch break. It’s been a long time for us during production.”
Kahn said that Spielberg did not set any special rules for this film. “He just said, ‘Go to town, honey. Edit it right!’”
But after nearly half a century of collaboration, Kahn revealed that Spielberg did something in “The Fabelmans” that the publisher had never observed in their long history together.
“While we were still recording it, he would play the entire movie every day and sometimes twice a day. He just kept looking and looking,” Kahn recalled. “Making sure that if he took something out, it belonged, or if he kept something, it belonged.”
Kahn paused, then continued. “It took a lot of courage to make this movie, to show some of the problems in his family. And it is his life, it is his entire existence. We could feel how important it was for him to get it right.”
Read more of the issue below the line here.
