We had recently completed editing Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam for HBO.

What a film to have edited!  What a film ot have on my resume!  Dear America was so powerful and truthful that it wowed audiences around the world, including 2 Emmy awards, a Sundance Film Festival Award, a Television Critics Association Award.  It became the first-ever documentary to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and ultimately registered by the US Congress list of greatest cinematic achievements ever (i need to look up what exactly that list is called, if you know, please email me so i can correct this) and a bunch of other honors.  Quite the hit. 

And so, along the way, HBO made a deal to let it be broadcast on NBC.

Except … it didn’t fit a broadcast time slot.

This was back in the day.  No streaming.  No internet. Cable was just beginning.  In terms of outlets for doc’s on TV, essentially there was only HBO on cable and the big 3 television broadcast networks,  and a bunch of who-cares? other outlets.

Back then, broadcast television, was ruled by the clock. Programs changed at the top of the hour, or the 30 minute middle point.  It was unquestioned and uniformly enforced without exception. Every single television program to fit within those 30, 60, 90, 120 minutes slots. 

And we film makers did so, with amazing precision.  Perfect 30,60,90 minutes shows, delivered the exact right length within 1/30th of a second. 

Except for cable, which really only meant HBO because the other cable companies were too scared to go against the dominant 30,60, 90 paradigm.  HBO, to their credit, didn’t care. They were on cable.  They were delivered on “wires” not broadcast thru the air, so they weren’t bound by the clock, or the federal communications system which ruled over the air waves of television.  It was a paradigm breakthru much to HBO’s credit.  They realized they could ignore the clock and … they wanted their shows to be good (or great if you could do that.)

It was not about length.

Wow.

Cool.

Until HBO sold Dear America to broadcast television, and suddenly it mattered again.

Of course, we had delivered the finished Dear America at the length that felt right and turns out … that happened to be 19 minutes short of two hours. 

Meaning  – not ready for broadcast.

Meaning – 19 minutes of problem for NBC.

But not for us!  We just said – no problem, we will fix it.

But first, we refused to add outtakes or pad out scenes to play longer. That would ruin it.  “Instead,” we said, “why not let us make another similar documentary, a short film, and that would fill out the time slot.”

NBC said okay.

They gave us 6 weeks and modest truckload of money and we went to work.

We edited on 3/4″ videotape and made this little short film.  No one really cared except for us.  HBO already got the money. NBC got the big doc and their time slot filled.  But we thought we had a duty to measure up, to make something that would really work.

We took all the film-maker wisdom we had learned making a doc based on letters from frontline soldiers in one war (ie Vietnam), and did the same through all the US wars since WW1 –  a good idea but even just describing it you can tell, it doesn’t sound easy.  And it wasn/t.  

It was a brutal 6 weeks and there was no time for false steps.

Nonetheless, 6 sleepless weeks later, we thought we really had gotten some where and prepared to go to the final on-line video edit – the was last step before completion – a state-of-the-art (at-the-time) very expensive and complicated final video edit session, where all the hundreds of different video pieces got put together in maximum quality on one last video master, the final single, perfectly-put-together reel of videotape.

It took most of 5 days.  It cost of over $500 an hour, back when that was real money. 

Then, when it was all together, on the last day, we sat back and hit “play” to watch what we had done. 

It was a transcendent moment. 

Come to find out, it really did work. 

Happily, I said that thing that people say when the edit goes really well, which is, “Hey, this is gonna get nominated for an Oscar.” 

The lead technician, John Crosley, a guy my age and a super skilled professional video engineer-creative-nerd guy just threw me a look.  It was a very skeptical look, almost a sneer, a very cynical, “yeah right, as if” glance.

But it didn’t slow me down one bit.  i just smiled back at him and later, months later, indulged myself in the pleasure of saying,  “I told you so” later that year bcause …

I had told him so.

That is exactly what happened:  Our little 6 week round-the-clock editing marathon had turned out to get nominated for an Academy Award.

… and John Crosley was as happy as i was about it.  In fact, he was extra special nice to me the rest of our careers.