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It follows through, but is not true
As quoted in Nigel Andrews on Jaws: A Bloomsbury Movie Guide (1999), Verna Fields once told Steven Spielberg, "If clouds don't match or the water isn't exactly the same colour, people won't notice if you keep the rhythm . . . If you look carefully, you will see blue sky in one segment of a scene, cloudy sky in another; choppy seas in one scene, glassy in another." I have not had an opportunity to rewatch the movie since reading the book, but I believe her, not only because she won an Oscar for her editing of Jaws (1975), but because I just ran across an example of such an invisible mismatch in the wild while I was looking for Elisha Cook Jr.'s missing thumb.
Not to exaggerate, Elisha Cook Jr. was only missing half of his left thumb. As he told the story in a 1984 interview for Cinéma cinémas (1982–91), it got sliced off during a stunt on the set of John Ford's Submarine Patrol (1938), when the water-weight of a storm scene thundered the flailing actor right into a guy wire: "And so Mr. Ford came up to me, he said, 'Gee, that was a hell of a shot, Cookie.' I said, 'Yeah, it sure was, Mr. Ford, I just cut my thumb off,' and he passed out." He never hid it; he didn't need to. He was so expressive with props and gestures that I had been admiring his hands for years without noticing, long-fingered and nervous and what he did with them—turning over a cigarette lighter like a problem, drumming his second thoughts against his teeth—was patently more interesting than the number of his fingernails. I kept forgetting to see if it was visible in his movies even after I knew. When I finally remembered two-thirds of the way through rewatching Robert Wise's Born to Kill (1947), what I found instead was two different takes in the same scene.
I know that film is a whole lot of time out of joint pasted over with pattern recognition and the persistence of vision, but it's still instructive to spot an unintended seam. Cook is snowing Esther Howard, his foot in her door and his hat held over his heart like a Bible salesman before he turns on the preposterous charm that she doesn't trust for a second and so delights in: "Well, I'm not going to do much, so I won't need much. A C-note should make me very happy." The camera favors his performance first, then her callout of it, which gives him the chance to protest his crook's honesty, and between shots his hands jump from delicately fingering the brim of his fedora to folded businesslike across it, too completely for them to have come to rest of their own accord. The dialogue is uninterrupted and so is the actors' rapport, it's just the glitch of blocking that gives away that the reverse shot wasn't just another camera but another take. It slid past me the first time I saw the scene, while I was busy absorbing all kinds of other emotional, narrative, acting details; I caught it only because I was tracking Cook's hands more than his jaunty air or his teasing voice, the confidential flirt of his brows as he leans in for the ingenuous confession, "Through underworld connections, like it says in the newspapers. I'm a bad boy." Different rhythms than the ones which Fields was describing, but just as key to pulling an audience through the continuity of the story rather than the snags of the chopped-up instants which construct it on the screen. Even watching for the discrepancies, they disappear like blind spots the second a good line or a better expression comes along. Howard with her arms skeptically akimbo isn't quite as the camera left her, either, but her redoubtable, contiguous world-weariness means the disposition of her hands took me even longer to clock than her scene partner's. The other part of the illusion is how much you care about hair that was windblown in an exterior shot and re-tousled for the rear projection, a skip in the white noise of the room or the stages of the knotting of a tie, artifacts of the other kind of time in which the production was embedded, whose traces inside or outside the cutting room always remain. No style is invisible, only familiar. I have seen odd cuts go by in scenes before and only sometimes do I find out they marked a retake. But I missed the change of skies the first time I saw Jaws, even without the excuse of New England weather, and Elisha Cook Jr.'s hands make me wonder what other seamless gaps I don't see. He does a wonderful bit with his wristwatch as Mart Waterman, absently pleating the cuff of his shirt as he calculates the time; it's even better than his mime of just having been stabbed in the shin with a hatpin mid-murder. This note brought to you by my underworld backers at Patreon.
Not to exaggerate, Elisha Cook Jr. was only missing half of his left thumb. As he told the story in a 1984 interview for Cinéma cinémas (1982–91), it got sliced off during a stunt on the set of John Ford's Submarine Patrol (1938), when the water-weight of a storm scene thundered the flailing actor right into a guy wire: "And so Mr. Ford came up to me, he said, 'Gee, that was a hell of a shot, Cookie.' I said, 'Yeah, it sure was, Mr. Ford, I just cut my thumb off,' and he passed out." He never hid it; he didn't need to. He was so expressive with props and gestures that I had been admiring his hands for years without noticing, long-fingered and nervous and what he did with them—turning over a cigarette lighter like a problem, drumming his second thoughts against his teeth—was patently more interesting than the number of his fingernails. I kept forgetting to see if it was visible in his movies even after I knew. When I finally remembered two-thirds of the way through rewatching Robert Wise's Born to Kill (1947), what I found instead was two different takes in the same scene.
I know that film is a whole lot of time out of joint pasted over with pattern recognition and the persistence of vision, but it's still instructive to spot an unintended seam. Cook is snowing Esther Howard, his foot in her door and his hat held over his heart like a Bible salesman before he turns on the preposterous charm that she doesn't trust for a second and so delights in: "Well, I'm not going to do much, so I won't need much. A C-note should make me very happy." The camera favors his performance first, then her callout of it, which gives him the chance to protest his crook's honesty, and between shots his hands jump from delicately fingering the brim of his fedora to folded businesslike across it, too completely for them to have come to rest of their own accord. The dialogue is uninterrupted and so is the actors' rapport, it's just the glitch of blocking that gives away that the reverse shot wasn't just another camera but another take. It slid past me the first time I saw the scene, while I was busy absorbing all kinds of other emotional, narrative, acting details; I caught it only because I was tracking Cook's hands more than his jaunty air or his teasing voice, the confidential flirt of his brows as he leans in for the ingenuous confession, "Through underworld connections, like it says in the newspapers. I'm a bad boy." Different rhythms than the ones which Fields was describing, but just as key to pulling an audience through the continuity of the story rather than the snags of the chopped-up instants which construct it on the screen. Even watching for the discrepancies, they disappear like blind spots the second a good line or a better expression comes along. Howard with her arms skeptically akimbo isn't quite as the camera left her, either, but her redoubtable, contiguous world-weariness means the disposition of her hands took me even longer to clock than her scene partner's. The other part of the illusion is how much you care about hair that was windblown in an exterior shot and re-tousled for the rear projection, a skip in the white noise of the room or the stages of the knotting of a tie, artifacts of the other kind of time in which the production was embedded, whose traces inside or outside the cutting room always remain. No style is invisible, only familiar. I have seen odd cuts go by in scenes before and only sometimes do I find out they marked a retake. But I missed the change of skies the first time I saw Jaws, even without the excuse of New England weather, and Elisha Cook Jr.'s hands make me wonder what other seamless gaps I don't see. He does a wonderful bit with his wristwatch as Mart Waterman, absently pleating the cuff of his shirt as he calculates the time; it's even better than his mime of just having been stabbed in the shin with a hatpin mid-murder. This note brought to you by my underworld backers at Patreon.
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This reminds me of finding out that James Doohan/Scotty on Star Trek is missing a finger. All those years of watching it as a kid and young adult, and I never noticed and still tend to forget. (Though they may have worked harder to conceal it, given the time period and the nature of the show.) Anyway, as someone who works around a minor physical disability myself, although not that sort, I have always had a low-key fascination both with the movements that people do to work around something like that, and how unnoticeable it often is with no concealment at all simply because we don't tend to count fingers when someone is moving normally.
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Okay, Wikipedia didn't mention the hand double.
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I don't think I knew that! (
Anyway, as someone who works around a minor physical disability myself, although not that sort, I have always had a low-key fascination both with the movements that people do to work around something like that, and how unnoticeable it often is with no concealment at all simply because we don't tend to count fingers when someone is moving normally.
Or because it's normal for them. I always remember that Bill Nighy has Dupuytren's contracture because he's the reason I learned about the condition (one of my parents was later diagnosed with it) and it is visible, but it's so much a part of his physical language that it jumps out only if I see him so early in his career that none of his fingers are affected.
If you don't mind my asking, and I should be clear that I am not asking for specifics, is your minor physical disability something that other people do notice, or just something you're mindful of working around?
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If you don't mind my asking, is your minor physical disability something that other people do notice, or just something you're mindful of working around?
I don't mind saying what it is. I have a rare bone disorder, fibrous dysplasia, which means that some of my bones (in my case the entire left femur and part of my hip; it can affect any part of the body, but my presentation is among the most common) produce something that isn't bone, but more of a matrix of scar-like tissue and bone that can't support body weight. As a child and teenager, when my body was still growing, it was considerably disabling and I couldn't walk without aids like braces and crutches, but as an adult, that femur and hip are stabilized with metal rods and it's barely noticeable most of the time. However, my left leg is about 3/4" shorter than my other leg and suffers frequent bone fractures when I move suddenly. So I limp. But people typically don't notice until they do, and someone says, "Did you hurt your ankle?" or something of that nature. (Not a bad question! Perfectly natural! I don't mind explaining.) I think the motion of the rest of my body carries it unless I'm especially tired or in pain, in which case my limp, which I expect is always present because of the discrepancy between my leg lengths, and which I can feel when I move, suddenly becomes too noticeable to ignore.
But that's why I'm fascinated by other people's moving-around-a-physical-disability embodiment. I know that I'm doing it but I'm completely incapable of seeing *how* I'm doing it unless I really focus on, for example, the way I stand with my body as straight as it gets and one heel barely resting on the floor; it's just entirely natural to how I move. I am interested in other people's ways of moving around that kind of thing not because they might work for me (I'm completely happy with mine; I have no complaints) but because I find the diversity of bodies doing what needs doing, around a wide variety of physical variations, incredibly interesting. For most people it is, genuinely, not so much hiding it as simply learning how to act around it, which frequently constitutes hiding it because most people only see the result and not the actions that produce it, and I find this interesting both conceptually and physically.
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That makes sense to me. Human variation is inherently interesting and I haven't necessarily seen people discussing this particular branch of it in detail. (I would not have assumed you were looking for tips! I am interested by the ways in which other people think, which doesn't mean I think there's something wrong with the way I do it.)
Thank you for the explanation. I wasn't sure if it was something you were comfortable talking about in the abstract but did not want to broadcast in medical detail to the open internet.
For most people it is, genuinely, not so much hiding it as simply learning how to act around it, which frequently constitutes hiding it because most people only see the result and not the actions that produce it, and I find this interesting both conceptually and physically.
That wraps around to the idea of what's normal for a person. If Elisha Cook Jr. holds a glass differently with his left hand than with his right and it is a comfortable and habitual movement for him, what I see is a guy holding a glass.
[edit] Crashing back into this thread because I was suddenly reminded while watching a completely different movie: if you are interested in studying how people move around disabilities, you may want to pay attention to Herbert Marshall, a romantic leading man of the 1930's who transitioned into character roles in the '40's and was missing a leg on account of World War I. He didn't hide it in the sense that it was occasionally mentioned in the press and he worked with injured and disabled veterans during World War II, but he played able-bodied characters and is seen in long shots, in motion, throughout his career. He was frequently cast as a gentleman, but could be equally convincing as a hot mess. (In Trouble in Paradise (1932), he's just hot.)
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I've seen Film, but didn't know to look at Keaton's hands!
What I'm picking up here is that fingers are really disposable.
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I knew a guy who had sliced off the top part of his thumb...
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I think it's fair to be alarmed by deepfakes: people have been manipulating tapes and photographs as long as the technologies have existed, but it's a sea-change to be able to fabricate a moving image from whole cloth and have it be indistinguishable from unedited news, especially since we have enough problems with ordinary disinformation already. But filmmaking is a definitionally weird art form. You put a whole lot of real time together and you get something that never happened. It comes built-in haunted.
There was never a seamless story; it was always a mosaic. (I know there are exceptions, movies and reportage that don't involve takes or cuts, but as a rule.)
Editing is one of the elements of filmmaking I find most interesting and in some ways know the least about, because the underlying mechanisms make intuitive sense to me and I am not sure I have any creative instinct for the techniques; I have never, for example, wanted to learn how to vid. There are so many ways in which I am not audiovisually oriented, except I am interested by movies.
I knew a guy who had sliced off the top part of his thumb...
On a Hollywood set or just cutting himself a bagel?
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On a Hollywood set or just cutting himself a bagel? --I believe he did it on some sort of factory-type equipment, but he also was quite young when it happened. I knew him when he was a teenager (I was an adult; he lived in the neighborhood), and it had already been that way for a long time.
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I've seen Born To Kill several times and never noticed this! (It airs frequently on KCOP-3.) I will watch for it next time.
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Same. I wish they had worked together more. I keep imagining where he would have turned up in Ford's later movies.
I've seen Born To Kill several times and never noticed this! (It airs frequently on KCOP-3.) I will watch for it next time.
It was fascinating to me how much harder it was to hold the two shots in contrast in my mind while they were part of a living scene as opposed to still frames side by side. The narrative kept papering over the discontinuity.