Gerald Bernard "Jerry" Greenberg (July 29, 1936 – December 22, 2017)[1] was an American film editor with more than 40 feature film credits. Greenberg received both the Academy Award for Best Film Editing and the BAFTA Award for Best Editing for the film The French Connection (1971). In the 1980s, he edited five films with director Brian De Palma.
Greenberg began his career as an assistant to Dede Allen on the film America America (1963), directed by Elia Kazan. Allen has been called "the most important film editor in the most explosive era of American film".[2] She helped develop the careers of several editors known as "Dede's boys", and Greenberg was the first.[3]
Greenberg was Allen's assistant again on Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which was directed by Arthur Penn. The editing of the ambush scene in this film in which Bonnie and Clyde are killed has been very influential, and Allen credited Greenberg with its actual "cutting".[4] [5] Greenberg was the associate editor for Alice's Restaurant (1969), again directed by Penn and edited by Allen. By that time Greenberg's independent editing career had commenced with Bye Bye Braverman (1968), which was directed by Sidney Lumet. Greenberg later co-edited Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976) with Allen and Stephen A. Rotter.
A native of New York, as a youth, Greenberg learned to edit music and began familiarizing himself with the moviola, splicers, synchronizers and recorders.[1] In 1960, he was offered an apprenticing job for Dede Allen on Elia Kazan’s America America (1963).[1] By 1967, when he and Allen were on Bonnie and Clyde, he was given the task of editing a couple of the shootout scenes, working closely with Allen and director Arthur Penn. He cut his first solo feature, Bye Bye Braverman, for director Sidney Lumet in 1968.[1]
Greenberg edited two films with director William Friedkin, The Boys in the Band (1970) and The French Connection (1971). The French Connection was a success at the box-office and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Friedkin attributed much of the film's success to its editing, writing "I can't say too much about the importance of editing. When I looked at the first rough cut of the chase, it was terrible. It didn't play. It was formless, in spite of the fact that I had a very careful shooting plan that I followed in detail. It became a matter of removing a shot here or adding a shot there, or changing the sequence of shots, or dropping one frame, or adding one or two frames. And here's where I had enormous help from Jerry Greenberg, the editor. As I look back on it now, the shooting was easy. The cutting and the mixing were enormously difficult. It was all enormously rewarding."[6]
The car chase sequence in The French Connection has been called "the finest example of montage editing since Battleship Potemkin (1925)";[7] this early film, directed and edited by Sergei Eisenstein, was seminal in the development of film editing.[8] Greenberg won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing and the BAFTA Award for Best Editing for the film. In 2012, The French Connection was selected as the tenth best edited film of all time in a listing compiled by the Motion Picture Editors Guild.[9]
Francis Ford Coppola produced, directed, and co-wrote Apocalypse Now, which was released in 1979. Filming had taken over a year in 1976 and 1977. Editing took place over two years prior to its release, and involved several editors; the supervising editor was Richard Marks, another of "Dede's boys".[10] Greenberg described his own role in an interview with Vincent LoBrutto.[11] The film is now remembered as one of the most important to have emerged from American involvement in the long Vietnam War that had ended in 1975. Writing in 1999, critic Roger Ebert said "Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover".[12] In the 2012 critics' poll conducted by the British Sight & Sound magazine, Apocalypse Now was rated the fourteenth best film ever made.[13] The editing of Apocalypse Now was rated third best of all films in the 2012 listing of the Motion Picture Editors Guild. With Marks, Walter Murch, and Lisa Fruchtman, Greenberg shared in the film's nominations for the Academy Award, the BAFTA Award, and the ACE Eddie.
With the film Dressed to Kill (1980), Greenberg began a 7-year collaboration with director Brian De Palma. Greenberg edited five films with De Palma, with the last being The Untouchables (1987). Greenberg's assistant editor on Dressed to Kill, Bill Pankow, worked on all these films, and was his co-editor for The Untouchables; Pankow subsequently became De Palma's principal editor.
The period of De Palma's collaboration with Greenberg has been described as follows: De Palma's "early lower-budget thrillers, although superbly manufactured, were too bloody and garish for the average taste and infuriated many critics. But De Palma began gaining respectability with Dressed to Kill (1980) and following several critical setbacks, reached the apex in the late 80s with such high-powered productions as The Untouchables (1987) and Casualties of War (1989). A superb technician, he was finally crafting material worthy of his bold, often dazzling, visual flair."[14]
Greenberg won the Oscar and the BAFTA awards for The French Connection (1971), and was nominated for the ACE Eddie. With his co-editors, he was nominated again for the Oscar, BAFTA, and Eddie for Apocalypse Now (1979). In the same year, he was nominated for the Oscar and BAFTA for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), which was the first of his two films with director Robert Benton.
Greenberg has been elected to membership in the American Cinema Editors,[15] and in 2015 that organization honored him with its Career Achievement Award.[16] Writing after the ceremony at which Greenberg received the Career Achievement Ward, Ross Lincoln and Erik Pedersen said, "if editing is the most important part of completing a film, he is one of the most quantifiably influential people in the past 40 years."[17] On the 2012 list of "best edited films of all time", Greenberg worked on three of the top ten: Bonnie and Clyde, The French Connection, and Apocalypse Now.
Greenberg died on December 22, 2017, at the age of 81
This filmography of feature films is based on the listing at the Internet Movie Database.
| Year | Film | Director | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1966 | The Steps | Leonard Hirschfield | ||
| 1968 | Bye Bye Braverman | Sidney Lumet | ||
| The Subject Was Roses | Ulu Grosbard | |||
| 1970 | The Boys in the Band | William Friedkin | First collaboration with William Friedkin | |
| 1971 | They Might Be Giants | Anthony Harvey | ||
| The French Connection | William Friedkin | Second collaboration with William Friedkin | ||
| 1972 | Come Back, Charleston Blue | Mark Warren | ||
| The Stoolie | ||||
| 1973 | Electra Glide in Blue | James William Guercio | ||
| 1974 | The Taking of Pelham One Two Three | Joseph Sargent | ||
| 1975 | The Happy Hooker | Nicholas Sgarro | ||
| 1976 | The Missouri Breaks | Arthur Penn | ||
| 1979 | Apocalypse Now | Francis Ford Coppola | ||
| Kramer vs. Kramer | Robert Benton | First collaboration with Robert Benton | ||
| 1980 | Dressed to Kill | Brian De Palma | First collaboration with Brian De Palma | |
| Heaven's Gate | Michael Cimino | |||
| 1982 | Still of the Night | Robert Benton | Second collaboration with Robert Benton | |
| 1983 | Scarface | Brian De Palma | Second collaboration with Brian De Palma | |
| 1984 | Body Double | Third collaboration with Brian De Palma | ||
| 1985 | Savage Dawn | Simon Nuchtern | ||
| 1986 | Wise Guys | Brian De Palma | Fourth collaboration with Brian De Palma | |
| No Mercy | Richard Pearce | |||
| 1987 | The Untouchables | Brian De Palma | Fifth collaboration with Brian De Palma | |
| 1988 | The Accused | Jonathan Kaplan | ||
| 1989 | Collision Course | Lewis Teague | ||
| Christmas Vacation | Jeremiah S. Chechik | |||
| 1990 | Awakenings | Penny Marshall | ||
| 1991 | For the Boys | Mark Rydell | ||
| 1992 | School Ties | Robert Mandel | ||
| 1998 | American History X | Tony Kaye | ||
| Reach the Rock | William Ryan | |||
| 1999 | Inspector Gadget | David Kellogg | ||
| 2000 | Duets | Bruce Paltrow | ||
| Get Carter | Stephen Kay | |||
| 2001 | Angel Eyes | Luis Mandoki | First collaboration with Luis Mandoki | |
| 2002 | Trapped | Second collaboration with Luis Mandoki | ||
| 2003 | Bringing Down the House | Adam Shankman | ||
| 2005 | Havoc | Barbara Kopple | ||
| 2006 | Invincible | Ericson Core | First collaboration with Ericson Core | |
| 2009 | The Answer Man | John Hindman | ||
| 2015 | Point Break | Ericson Core | Second collaboration with Ericson Core |
| Year | Film | Director | Role | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1969 | Alice's Restaurant | Arthur Penn | Associate film editor | |
| 1973 | The Seven-Ups | Philip D'Antoni | Supervising editor | |
| 1981 | Reds | Warren Beatty | Additional film editor | |
| 1998 | Gunshy | Jeff Celentano | Additional editor |
Direct-to-video films
Shorts
TV movies
| Year | Film | Director | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1976 | The Disappearance of Aimee | Anthony Harvey | |
| 2007 | The Bronx Is Burning | Jeremiah S. Chechik |
TV series
TV specials