The Worker Bees….

My friends and I always like to sit at the end of the movie and watch the credits roll by. At first this was because we wanted to make sure there was no additional scene after the credits like in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Later it was because it was interesting to see what was needed for the movie, even if we couldn’t figure out what on earth a Key grip was or why they would need one. So one day I decided I was going to look up and find out what on earth these people did.

The Editor

The Movieola film editing machine "The Black Maria" 1940

The Editor is very important to the film. He’s one of the final craftsmen. After all the months of filming all the film is taken to him and he puts it together with the director’s input, making the final visual product. He weaves together the best of the takes and edits out any major mistakes made during filming like bloopers, bad lighting, underexposed negatives and messed up lines that don’t fit. He might also work with editing the sound, but usually the visual component. Basically he is what makes the acting look better then it was already.

There is a Motion Picture Editor’s Guild which you can find here: http://www.editorsguild.com/v2/index.aspx

Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Blvd."

Sabrina’s editor was Arthur P. Schmidt. He was born August 21, 1912 and lived till July 22, 1965 and worked on movies almost up until the year he died. He was nominated for two academy awards for his work on Sunset Blvd (1950), and Sayonara (1957).

Arthur P. Schmidt was also involved in the editing of Cinderfella (1962), Sunset Blvd (1950), and Monsieur Beaucaire (1946), Anne of Green Gables (1934), and in the associate producing of The Disorderly Orderly (1964) and The Nutty Professor (1963). For more of his filmography please visit his page on IMBD (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0772834/)

His son, Arthur Schmidt, also became a film editor, working on movies such as Forrest Gump (1994), Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) which both earned him an academy award in Film Editing.

The Cinematographer

The cinematographer is essentially a photographer. Only they capture rapid frames to get motion instead of a still frame of a regular camera. They are in charge of the cameramen, and lighting crew. They make sure the image the camera gets is the best possible by adjusting the lighting to fit the mood, location or actor and distance from the camera. They can choose the focus of the camera and whether a wide shot is needed or a close up to fit the scene. They are also in charge of selecting the film used, what filters are needed and other variables that are traditional to any kind of photography. Originally the director was all three, director, cinematographer and camera operator. Now however, they are three different positions though all are important to the others. The Cinematographer leads the cameramen and works with the director to make sure that not only is the technical information correct, but the artistic quality is maintained to the directors and sometimes the writer’s visions of the project.

Charles Lang

To find out more about Cinematography you can go to Cinematography.com (http://www.cinematography.com) which has a forum and FAQ list and the American Society of Cinematographers official site (http://www.theasc.com/). There is also the wikipedia article on cinematography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematography). However, Wikipedia is a reader-edited production and therefore should only be used as a starting place for researching cinematography.

For Sabrina, the cinematographer was Charles Lang, Jr. He was born Charles Bryant Lang on March 27, 1902 in Bluff Utah. He started his career as a lab assistant at Paramount studios and after working as an apprentice he was given the assignment of The Night Patrol in 1926. He worked for Paramount till 1952, when he became a freelance Cinematographer and worked for several different studios. He became one of the most nominated and award wining cinematographers in Academy history with 18 nominations and one award, which he won for Farewell to Arms (1933). He was nominated for his work on Sabrina but he did not win an award. He also did an appearance on “The Ford Theater” as an actor.

Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper in A Farewell to Arms".

Lang had a long career in cinematography and was able to work in both black in white and in color. His career ranged from 1926 to 1972, almost 50 years. He has over 100 movies to his credit and in 1991 he received the Lifetime Achievement award from the Society of American Cinematographers.

His family became a part of Hollywood as his daughter Judy became an actress on various television shows and his granddaughter Katherine Kelly Lang is well known as Brook Logan Forester on Bold and the Beautiful, a soap opera appearing on CBS. His grandsons Jeremy and Julian Snider have also appeared on Bold and the Beautiful.

He died on April 3, 1998 of pneumonia.

Charles B. Lang, Jr has also done the following films: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Ace in the Hole (1951), Some Like it Hot (1959), The Magnificent Seven (1960), Something’s Gotta Give (1962), Father Goose (1964), How to Commit Marriage (1969), 40 Carrots (1970), and many others. For more of his filmography please visit his page on IMBD (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0485702/ )

The Costume Director/Designer

The costume designer is exactly what the title suggests. They design the costumes. This is particularly important on period pieces when the clothes have to be accurate to the time the film is based in. Some more recent films have the Costume director choose from the available clothes and alter them to fit the movie if it is a non-time specific film. This happens more often in television where the creation of a unique costume would take more time then was available.

There is a Costume Designer Guild (http://www.costumedesignersguild.com/), which gives a history of the organization as well as what they believe a designer to be.

Hubert de Givenchy at his last show before retirement

In the case of Sabrina, there were two costume directors. They were Hubert de Givenchy who designed specifically for Audrey Hepburn and Edith Head, who was one of the most famous costume designers of the period. In the credits, only Edith is credited with the designs despite the fact that almost all of Hepburn’s costumes and gowns were created by Givenchy.

Hubert de Givenchy was born on February 21, 1927 in Beauvais France. He studied at the ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris before studying personally under and with other designers such as Jacques Fath, Robert Piguet and Christian Dior. He opened his own fashion house in 1952. Givenchy is well known as a designer for actress Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy as well as many of the other women in the Kennedy family. He designed gowns for several of Hepburn’s movies including Sabrina. Givenchy retired in 1995, and his company is now owned by Moet Hennessy-Louis Vuitton (LVMH) which bought the company in 1988. This company also owns Christian Dior’s fashion lines. His fashion house is now run by Julien Macdonald. For more of his filmography please visit his page on IMBD (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0321436/)

Edith Head

Edith Head is one of the most famous costume designers, even earning herself a cartoon character by the name of Edna Mode.

Edith was born Edith Claire Posener in San Bernardino, California on October 28, 1897. She went by her stepfather’s name of Spare until her marriage to Charles Head on July 25, 1923. However the couple later divorced in 1938. She maintained her last name of Head even after her second marriage to Wiard Ihnen in 1949. That marriage lasted till his death on June 22, 1979. She never remarried after his death. She herself died on October 24, 1981 of Bone Marrow Disease. She is interned at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale California.

During the 1920s, Edith was teaching French and art at the Hollywood School for Girls after receiving her masters in the language from Stanford University.

"All About Eve"

Edith was the costume designer for over 400 films. She is the most honored women in the Academy’s history and has 35 nominations and 8 wins making her the most honored costume director. She won for her costumes in The Heiress (1950), Samson and Delilah (1951), All about Eve (1951), A Place in the Sun (1952), Roman Holiday (1954), Sabrina (1955), The Facts of Life (1961), and The Sting (1974). She was able to win more then one award in 1951 because at that time awards were given separately for black and white and Color. She was later honored with the naming of the Paramount Costume Design building after her and by the addition of her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Edith has been an influence for things other then fashion. In 2001, They Might Be Giants released an album called “Mink Car” which contained the song “She Thinks She’s Edith Head”. Also in 2004, an animated movie called The Incredibles was released with a character widely believed to be based on Edith known as Edna E. Mode. Edna designed the superhero costumes for all the characters. However I couldn’t find a conformation of this from the director or writer of the movie.

For more of her filmography please visit her page on IMBD (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0372128/)