By Jon Silberg, April 23, 2008
From 1957 to 1966, the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles was a hub of the modern art movement on the West Coast. The space and the eclectic group of artists who showed their abstract paintings, collages and "assemblages" of old car parts and pieces of bent plastic never quite found the international renown of their New York counterparts, but, in retrospect, they clearly did have a lasting impact on the art world. The documentary The Cool School, directed by Morgan Neville, combines elements of the gallery founders' rise and acrimonious fall and also touches on the artists, their work and their difficulty finding appreciation in the conservative movie colony that was mid-century Los Angeles.
A significant challenge for editors Dylan Robertson and Chris Perkel was to take the expansive subject matter and boil it down to a feature-length documentary. "Morgan knew the story, broadly speaking," says Robertson, "but we didn't start from a script and there were so many characters and tangents to keep track of. There is the story of the gallery, of the owners, of the artists, of the Los Angeles art scene and of Los Angeles itself."
The project came together slowly as Neville and Robertson worked on other shows for Neville's Tremolo Productions. The director searched out any footage he could find relating to the artists of this period and interviewed as many of the relevant players as he could find—including Curator Walter Hopps, who died just days afterward, and co-owner Irving Blum, whom many in the film say made the gallery too commercial for its own good. He spoke with a number of the original artists, bringing together a group that hadn't been in the same room in over a decade, and he spoke with regular Ferus patrons, including actors Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell.
The interviews were shot with a Panasonic DVX100 in Mini DV format, frequently by Robertson and Perkel, who later turned the interview images into black and white. "We had about 60 interviews," Robertson explains, "and there was a lot of color in them. We wanted to focus on the art, so Morgan said, 'Strip the color out of the interviews so that when the audience sees a painting or a sculpture, they're going to really look at it.' And there was also a practical reason: We shot inside art galleries a lot. Those are places where the walls are lit and the center, where your subject is, is dark. In color, that was really distracting, but in black and white, not so much."
After the material was brought together, the editing was done in Apple Final Cut Pro 5.1.3. They each worked on a separate workstation and really had no need to be networked to media on any kind of a server. "We had a low-budget 'server' idea," Perkel explains. "We would digitize full tapes onto a drive instead of just selects. Then we would copy that drive and rename it exactly the same so that you could connect either drive to either computer and open up a project. There's no need to re-link [media to lists]. It's all right there. A couple of $400 hard drives was our server array."
"I think we've reached a threshold recently where that's really a sensible way to work," says Robertson. "We used to only digitize selects, and then that media would only exist on the one drive. But that was when a 250-gig hard drive was really big. We were able to get everything we shot and all the archival material at the original DV resolution on a terabyte."
Having the interviews, archival footage and still images all together, the editors note, can prove very helpful when just one cutaway or a word, even a syllable, of audio is the difference between a scene working and not. "Morgan is very good about getting transcriptions of everything," he says. "That is also very important. Even when we'd only digitize selects, we'd inevitably have to go back and digitize something we didn't think we'd need. Sometimes you need something as simple as a clean 'the' to turn a sentence fragment into a sentence."
Just as they sometimes found effective uses for bits and pieces they'd never expected to use, there were also examples of an opposite phenomenon: something that they'd hoped could serve as the movie's spine turned out to be less effective than expected. The production organized a lunch meeting with many of the original artists from the Ferus period, who hadn't been all together for at least 14 years. Some had issues with others, and some had just left Los Angeles and found other towns, even other countries, to live in. Robertson, Perkel and a third operator all showed up with DVX100s to cover the event. The meeting had the potential to provide a treasure trove of current drama and anecdotes of the past.
The lunch was pleasant, devoid of significant drama, and the participants didn't have to tell long, drawn-out versions of anecdotes from the past. They knew all the stories. They'd lived them. It is an effective scene to help wrap up the story, and this is how it was used, but the editors realized even on the day that it wasn't going to be the framing device they'd hoped for. "I think when you're making a documentary, there's a temptation to think, 'We'll get everyone together in a room talking about the good times and it will be fascinating,'" Robertson observes. "But usually what I've found is that kind of approach won't give you an overarching sense about anything. Someone will go, 'That time was great,' and another one will say, 'Yeah. It was.' And so it might work as a single scene, but it doesn't really help you structure the overall film."
Cutting the scene also left the team a bit frustrated with their Final Cut system as it proved next to impossible to do the equivalent of Avid's Group Clip function, in which multiple-camera coverage of the same event can appear onscreen together and be edited in the style of switching a live broadcast. "We really had problems synching it up," Perkel recalls. "We had three cameras and each had two audio channels, and it might have been our system, but it really was difficult to make that function work."
The editors credit Los Angeles-based SG Arts for creating the transition graphics that help give the film a unified feel. They took QuickTime files into Adobe After Effects and built a rough, collage-like style into the project. "Morgan had this idea that the early part of the film, about the gallery's earliest days, should look rough and gritty," says Robertson, "and then as Irving Blum becomes more influential, that goes away and it gets slicker. From that idea, SG Arts added all kinds of flashes and double exposures and dirt and grain and dust to the early part, and then that goes away and things look more polished. They really did a great job with that."
The editors are proud to have been able to help tell the story of these artists in this period. They note that there was really much more story to tell than they had time or footage for. "We had a lot of great stories that didn't make it," Perkel says. "We could have made a six-part miniseries, but there just was not enough B-roll to go around."
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