A cutting room at RKO, the early forties: a young man in shirtsleeves running footage back and forth over a bench, finding the frame where a shot has finished its work. That was Robert Wise on Citizen Kane, and the Academy nominated him for the editing of it. An editor learns something no amount of talk teaches you, which is where the audience's eye has already gone before the film gets there. He carried it for the rest of his life.
He went from the bench to the chair by way of modest pictures made fast and cheap, which is where I've always thought the good ones are trained. The Val Lewton films at RKO, with their shadows doing the work of sets that didn't exist. The Set-Up, a fight picture that runs more or less in real time. The Day the Earth Stood Still. None of them cost the earth, and the crews on them were making something out of very little.
Then the big ones, which people remember him for and rightly: West Side Story in 1961, shot partly on Manhattan streets that were coming down anyway, and The Sound of Music in 1965, and The Sand Pebbles after that. He died on this day in 2005, four days past his ninety-first birthday, having been born in 1914. From a splice block to a soundstage, and he never stopped watching where the eye went.
Constance, those Manhattan numbers were danced to playback — the music cut in the studio and carried out to the street, with Saul Chaplin riding herd on it as associate producer and Johnny Green, Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal doing the scoring. Every snap you hear was made in a room, then brought outside to meet the traffic.
He also made The Andromeda Strain in 1971, Constance, and the lab procedure in it is unusually well behaved for a thriller — descending levels of containment, the sterilisation stages, airlocks treated as slow and dull rather than dramatic. Anyone who has gowned up recognises the boredom, which is exactly the point.