Ralph Rosenblum

Ralph Rosenblum (October 13, 1925 – September 6, 1995) was an American film editor who worked extensively with the directors Sidney Lumet and Woody Allen. He won the 1977 BAFTA Award for Best Editing for his work on Annie Hall, and published an influential memoir When the Shooting Stops, the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor's Story.

Biography

Towards the end of the World War II in 1945, Rosenblum worked as a filmmaking apprentice in the U. S. Office of War Information; among his mentors there were Sidney Meyers and Helen van Dongen. Following the war he became van Dongen's assistant while she was editing Robert Flaherty's film Louisiana Story (1948). Much of Rosenblum's work in the 1950s and early 1960s was in television; he worked on shows such as The Search, Omnibus, The Guy Lombardo Show, and The Patty Duke Show. With Sid Katz and Gene Milford, he formed a company, MKR Films, that provided editorial services for television shows, spots, and corporate films.

In the 1960s, Rosenblum edited four films directed by Sidney Lumet, starting with Long Day's Journey into Night (1962). These films, which were all serious dramas, were very important to Rosenblum's career; as John Gallagher has noted,

Dede Allen

Dorothea Carothers "Dede" Allen (December 3, 1923 - April 17, 2010) was an American film editor, well-known "film editing doctor" to the major American movie studios, and one of cinema's all-time celebrated 'auteur' film editors.

Allen is known for having edited classic films such as The Hustler (1961), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Reds (1982). She had an extended collaboration (1967–1976) with director Arthur Penn, and over the years had worked with other distinguished directors including Sidney Lumet, Robert Wise, Elia Kazan, and George Roy Hill. She was a member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Early life

Allen was born in Cleveland, Ohio; her mother was an actress and her father worked for Union Carbide. She enrolled at Scripps College in Claremont, California.

Career

Allen worked her way up as a production runner, as a sound librarian and then as an assistant film editor at Columbia Pictures. She edited commercial and industrial films before becoming a full-fledged feature film editor. It took sixteen years working in the American film industry before Dede Allen edited her first important feature film, Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). She worked closely with and was mentored by film director Robert Wise, who had also been a film editor himself (most notably having cut Orson Welles' Citizen Kane). Wise encouraged Dede Allen to be brave and experiment with her editing.

Woody Allen

Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, December 1, 1935) is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker and playwright, whose career spans more than five decades.

He worked as a comedy writer in the 1950s, writing jokes and scripts for television and publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen began performing as a stand-up comedian, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comedian, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he maintains is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.

By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into dramatic material influenced by European art cinema during the 1970s, and alternating between comedies and dramas to the present. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late 1970s. Allen often stars in his films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. Some best-known of his over 40 films are Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), although he considers Stardust Memories (1980), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Match Point (2005) to be his best films. Critic Roger Ebert described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema."