“There’s no romantic story” behind his start in film editing, Richard Marks says. “I was running film cans around New York. People would order 600 prints of a commercial, and part of my job was to screen them and ship them out.
“It was grueling, and low pay.”
But that grind paid off in Hollywood, as Marks went on to snag multiple Oscar nominations for films including “Apocalypse Now” (1979) and “As Good as It Gets” (1997).
“In a field of hardworking people, Richie is a very hardworking editor,” says ACE president Alan Heim.
To him, one of Marks’ most iconic sequences is in “Broadcast News” (1987), when Joan Cusack’s character delivers a tape.
“She’s got to dive under people and jump over people,” Heim says. “It’s a chase scene, but it’s a comic chase scene. A couple of frames make a difference. It’s an incomparable piece of kinetic editing.”
For Marks, the chance to tinker with such details is part of the appeal of his craft. “The thing that attracted me to editing is the feeling that I can change things, hopefully for the better. You can’t do (that) in your own life. You don’t have that kind of control.”
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