5th Annual Prime Cuts Panel

This weekend I went to the excellent 5th Annual Prime Cuts panel at the historic Aero Theatre in beautiful Santa Monica.  The esteemed panel was made up of this year's Emmy nominated editors, including several nonfiction editors, moderated by venerable Executive Producer Shawn Ryan (creator of The Shield).  I was pleasantly surprised by his enthusiasm and one question in particular which he posed to Mike Bolanowski.

SR:  "20 or 30 years ago, TV was looked down upon in relation to film.  And you know a lot of shows in the last ten, fifteen years have kind of changed that perception.  Now [the] reality [television genre] feels a little bit like the thing that gets looked down upon in comparison to some of the other genres, and yet it's extraordinarily popular as a genre.  As someone working on the inside of it, in your mind, does it deserve to be considered as an artistic form with some of these other genres on tv?  And do you see that perception hardening or changing?

MB:  "It's always been a perception that I don't understand.  To do a show like The Amazing Race or a show like Survivor, the higher-end reality shows I would call them, you have to have a tremendous tool set to do it well.  The problem with reality is there's so much of it and it's really sort of gone down the slant.  It's really about making money in a lot of senses and it's become throwaway or just so built on sensationalism that you've gotta pick and choose what you're gonna work on or you're gonna find yourself being miserable, at least in my opinion.

"Do I feel 'less than' as a reality editor?  Not at all.  I feel like I can cut anything, any day of the week.  And I feel reality--a show like The Amazing Race is probably the hardest show to cut on television.  Comparatively, I've worked on a lot of other shows; they're difficult but, you know, the thing about a show like ours is, yeah, it's a game and there's an elimination each week or there's whatever, there's parts of the game, but it's not in a studio, it's never shot the same way.  When you sit down to start an episode, you have no idea what you're getting, you don't know how it was shot, they don't know how--I mean, they plan it as they go.  So, it's a real challenge.  So I don't think that--to answer your question, some of the reality, yeah, it's pretty on the low end, I would call it, you know, but--

SR:  "I didn't mean to be prejorative, by the way!  I'm asking your opinion and you gave a great answer."

MB:  "No, no!"

SR:  "It sounds like you consider it to be a great training ground either to do more and better reality or to do some of these other genres."

MB:  "Yeah.  I mean, I've seen a lot of great scripted editors fail tremendously on a show like The Amazing Race, because it is a different sort of a thing, you know?  So to me, here's the thing about editing, I always think editing is editing.  If you can do it, like you get it, it's all storytelling.  It's really just what genre you end up doing.  When I moved out to LA it was like, 'Oh, you better pick what you want to do because if you're gonna be a drama editor, you can only cut drama and how dare you think that you can cut comedy?' or 'you have to do scripted or only reality.'  The lines, with technology, have blurred.  You still run into the whole idea of executives at networks or executives on different shows being like, 'Oh, that guy's never cut this or that, so he clearly couldn't do it,' but I think that's a big misnomer.  I think that many reality editors would make great scripted editors, and vice versa.  But I do think--I know a lot of scripted editors and feature editors, very, very successful ones, and they've said to me, 'That show, I wouldn't want any part of that because it just seems overwhelming at times.'  So, you know, that's sort of my answer on that."

SR: "That's a great answer."

I agree that was a great answer, I was happy that the subject was brought up because there is definitely an unfair stigma towards reality television as being somehow less valid than scripted.  Personally, I would actually take it further and say that reality television is definitely an editor's medium and we can go places creatively that scripted editors could never dream of.  Largely because we have a lot more control over the material.  And given the amount of footage we start with and the timetables we operate on, with no scripts to guide, often no logs or transcripts even, I believe that reality editors are faster, better critical and creative problem solvers than any other genre.