Zodiac (spoilers)

First Thing We Do, We Kill All The Editors

Since Titanic (1997) it seems like the Final Cut Pro Principle (FCPP) has trapped us all. This is the principle that Final Cut Pro has turned all directors into editors. (NOTE: I know that Titanic and many other films weren’t edited on Final Cut, they had their own editors separate from the directors; I’m just naming the disease after the software. Disclaimer: I’m also skilled in FCP.)

Peter Jackson is a prime supporter of the FCPP. The Rings trilogy was very long, not intolerable by my standards but too long for some people. The success of those movies allowed him to indulge himself in King Kong. There’s a great two-hour movie trapped in those three and a half hours. I was bored out of my mind.

David Fincher’s new movie on the Zodiac killer, titled, appropriately enough, Zodiac, suffers from addiction to the FCPP. It’s a beautiful first draft of a film, unfortunately they stopped after the first cut, so it’s about an hour longer than it needs to be.

There’s a lot to like about this movie. The recreation of the sixties and seventies was very good, except I’m tired of people letting Jake Gyllenhaal act his way out of a gray wig. The murder scenes are edgy and well-cut and staged. But that all falls apart by the time we get to the end because it feels like decades went by in real time before we get to the end of the film.

Historically, the Zodiac represented the first media circus over a serial killer. The murders happened just as America was fighting against itself, turning against Vietnam and the country was losing its innocence. The fact that the killer wasn’t caught could have been a great statement on the fear and confusion of the early seventies as the nation tried to remake her identity. Unfortunately Fincher made that movie the first part of his film, never finished it, and then straight off made a second film that was about failing to catch the killer. He stuck them together and got Zodiac.

However, Hollywood has embraced the auteur theory and warped it. Originally the auteur theory, developed in the French cinema magazine Cahiers du Cinema, was a theory that American directors created art despite the huge restrictions in censorship, budget, and committee filmmaking placed upon them. But that theory has been twisted into the wunderkind of the multi-hyphenate. Directors like Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarentino, David Fincher and many others edit the film after writing, directing, and sometimes lensing it as well. Yes, Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall edited Zodiac; but Fincher’s fingers are all over it.

This isn’t good for several reasons. Writers and directors are the worst people to edit their own films because they fall in love with their work and have trouble cutting it. Certainly they should be intimately involved with their work; they shouldn’t just hand it over and come back when it’s done. But by supplanting or dominating the editor in the editing room, or by hanging around the editing room, the director loses perspective. What seems like art and poetry to the director becomes tedious to the audience. Films like Zodiac take me out of the movie as I try to take over editing the movie, deleting or shortening (or sometimes lengthening) scenes to overcome the shortcomings in the picture.

Good editing, my wife always says, shouldn’t be noticed. (She’s a professional editor.) It’s for this reason that editing is least sexy to the mass audience. Tools like AVID, Apple’s Final Cut and Adobe Premiere, which are easy to use and deceivingly simplify the editing workflow, are great tools. (I’m never going back to tape to tape, that’s for sure.) Because they are so ubiquitous, especially in Hollywood, many people have decided editors are no longer needed. That’s like saying because Microsoft Word is so powerful, we don’t need any more writers. Editing is an art form, and good editors are worth their weight in gold.

For instance, while Fincher tightly edited the scenes where Zodiac attacked his victims, other scenes felt like they just stopped and ended, much the way my high school students edit their first movies. In a scene that could have been shortened or cut completely, Inspector David Toschi steps out of a movie theatre, thoroughly frustrated by his on-screen portrayal by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. Robert Graysmith, a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist, talks to him about the Zodiac killer. Toschi walks off. Graysmith’s wife (Chloe Sevingy) comes up, her mouth opens, and she says…nothing. The scene fades to black before she speaks. (I could write about the fact that out of five women actors with more than one line, two are murdered, one is kidnapped, one screams when she opens yet another Zodiac letter, and Graysmith’s wife plays the traditional women’s role (“Won’t you think about the children?”) which says to me that in San Francisco, only the men worried seriously and constructively about the Zodiac killer.)

After the Zodiac killer disappears and stops writing to the newspapers, Graysmith starts researching the killings until it’s obsession. Someone sounding like the Zodiac keeps calling his house. His long-suffering wife gives up and leaves him. He meets strange people for information and pumps the now-disgraced Toschi for help. And my eyelids slowly closed...

So when I’m bored I get taken out of the picture. The numerous computer-generated sequences were so obvious; they lacked the “chaos” of real life, so instead of being engrossed in the film, I was noticing how fake the computer-generated San Francisco looks. The live-action scenes were very convincing in their portrayal of the Bay area in the seventies, but those CG scenes really made me think I was watching a video game about taxicabs or something.

The thing about the old studio system’s utter fascism over its employees meant that somebody sat on the wunderkinds and didn’t let them go crazy. In this brave new world of filmmaking where style is more important over substance, it’s more important for box office that the director has cachet among film lovers. So the director is given too much power, they stretch out their self-important projects, and the audience is stuck for three and an half hours. I’m not advocating a return to the studio system, but somebody, please, reign in the wunderkinds and make them hand over editing and shorten their movies to what the story needs, not what they think is lovely and amazing onscreen.