On the heels of the world premiere at SXSW, the official premiere of The Last Movie Stars on HBO Max debuted to rave reviews from critics and television fanatics worldwide. The documentary is a six-part series that transports viewers back to the days of old Hollywood to experience the talent and romance of Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. Director Ethan Hawke took on the project after being approached by one of Joanne and Paul’s children, who revealed that Paul had begun working on a memoir with over a hundred interviews, before setting them all aflame with gasoline.
By a stroke of luck, transcripts of the interviews remained and are dictated by actors, including George Clooney, Laura Linney, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Brooks Ashmanskas. The series wonderfully depicts Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman’s intertwined story of epic love and diverging careers during a historic era of Hollywood.
We chatted with the editor, Barry Poltermann, about his career, creative influences, and experience editing The Last Movie Stars in Premiere Pro as well as sharing footage using Frame.io. Poltermann emphasizes how the mutual respect and trust between he and Hawke helped to facilitate an imaginative storytelling process in post-production.
How and where did you first learn to edit?
I bought a super-8 camera and projector when I was about 12, and shortly thereafter realized — hey wait — I can edit these little movies I am doing too! So, I saved up and bought a little plastic editor (mostly with money from my grandmother) and started chopping and splicing with super-8 perforated editing strips. This was around 1980.
How do you begin a project and set up your workspace?
I mostly cut documentaries, so I usually begin with string outs of the material bucketed by “archival,” “interviews,” and “verite.” Then, I work with assistants to ‘boil down’ the material (depending upon length) into something manageable. For instance, 200 hours of verité’ (a genre of film, television, and radio programs emphasizing realism and naturalism) might boil down to 20 hours, by watching over and over and deleting more extraneous, repetitive, or uninteresting material on each pass. Then, I watch this ‘boiled down’ material and determine what elements are most driving the narrative — is it interviews, verité, or archival? Whichever it is, that’s when I start to sling rough cuts or radio cuts together, scene by scene, looking for connections as I go. I typically start out by building the material chronologically, because it's easier to find later when the actual story work begins.
This is the important part. Until the story work is in full swing, I purposely keep edits super sloppy, kind of like when you build furniture from IKEA and they say don’t tighten the bolts until everything is roughly assembled. I save the ‘good’ editing until after the story is starting to emerge and I have a good sense of how the pieces might be fitting together.
Tell us about a favorite scene or moment from this project and why it stands out to you.
There are so many, but I think the scene where we explore Joanne’s childhood using clips from The Sound and the Fury. We had been playing with and pushing the notion of using their movie clips to bring their story to life, but when we cut that together I remember thinking, “Wow, this is kind of amazing and beautiful.” I don’t know if I’d ever seen anything quite like it. The next day, when I posted it for Ethan, he basically said, “That’s it, that’s the film we are making. Commit to that, more of that!” There was a point later when he watched the scene of Jackie (Paul’s first wife) meeting Joanne and called me after seeing the edit and said, “It’s like they made that movie so we could make our movie!” I will always remember that quote, it was in my head over and over as we continued.
Like in the Winning section where Paul and Joanne are on the phone, having an awkward conversation, and Joanne hangs up on him. It was so intimate and perfect, I played it without any VO or commentary. Just played the scene. Let it be long and thought, “Will this work? Playing a scene culled from a movie like this as though it’s actually the movie we’re making? Will it seem compelling or just weird or confusing? Or boring? It’s not boring when you see it in Winning, so maybe it won’t be boring if we do the right story work prior to making you sink into the drama of the moment.”
It even felt kind of lazy to me, almost too easy just to use the scene as it was, and I didn’t know of any documentaries I could study that had done something like this, so I wasn’t sure. I just trusted Ethan, who has an amazing eye for what works and what doesn’t. He compared these moments to a great rock and roll documentary where you take the time to watch them play a song: “I want to see their performances the way Scorsese would let you watch Dylan perform a song. Don’t be afraid to live in it, this isn’t a DVD extra.”
What were some specific post-production challenges you faced on either project? How did you go about solving them?
The vast amount of movie material of Joanne that was unavailable to the edit team and was of low quality. The scene in the movie when we have to buy a copy of The Stripper actually happened, because we couldn’t find a decent copy. So, one of my assistants found a copy on eBay, bought it and screen grabbed the process in order for us to make it a “story point”. It seemed to say a lot about what happened to Joanne and the way her work has been treated. And the made-for-TV movies are super hard to find. I took out an old NTSC TV from storage and rephotographed those made-for-TV movies off of YouTube rips in order to make it look more “of the time” and sort of lost in the past and (hopefully) mask (a bit) how horrible our copies looked.