We started shooting Luthier* in January 2025. The next shoot was July 2025. We need one more trip to wrap up production.
So with the film 2/3 in the can, why, you might rightly ask, has is taken almost a year and half for me to edit a clip? And why now?
That second question is easier to answer. The fine folks at the New York Foundation for the Arts, who sponsor Luthier (and who sponsored A Life’s Work and Tango Octogenario) asked me to put something together so they could promote it on social media. This was all the impetus I needed to get me back in the editing chair.
Why did it take so long? The stuff of life needed handling, and some other gigs came along, and I’ve been helping my wife get her business off the ground. This is all true. But perhaps the most weighty reason is the film is still in production and I’ve been waiting to wrap up shooting to begin seriously editing. True, with A Life’s Work, I was editing in between shoots. But that film felt like an essay that I had outlined and knew where it was going (mostly) and what to expect. Also, because it was 90 minutes, I was motivated to edit along the way. But this film feels different. Maybe because it will be around 10 minutes long, maybe that has unconsciously convinced me to wait until all the pieces of the puzzle were laid out and turned right side up to begin. It would be manageable. I’d have less than 15 hours of footage (as opposed to 100+ hours for ALW). Or maybe I didn’t want to lock myself into making sequences that I couldn’t see being edited any other way, to the film’s detriment.
Who can say? I know, I should be able to say, but honestly, I have no good reasons and no good excuses to have waited this long.
So, below is a clip from Luthier. This is not the clip I provided for NYFA’s social media channels. For one thing, I had to orient that one vertically for social media. I dislike doing this but it is a necessary evil (more on that in a future post, maybe). I also had to make it under one-minute so the algorithm gods wouldn’t immediately dismiss it. The clip below is 1 minute and 17 seconds. I think those 17 seconds make a huge difference.
These two things made me kind of feel like a big time movie director who, at the mercy of producers and corporations, was forced to cut down a four-hour, Cinemascope epic to a 48 minute, pan and scan version for television.
Like I said, kind of.
*I’m pretty sure the title will change, but for now, for logistical reasons, I’m using Luthier.
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