Why The Name

Ralph Rosenblum- film editor

In his book 'When the shooting stops... the cutting begins', film editor Ralph Rosenblum recounts one of his first editorial endeavors. The director , William Friedkin ( French Connection, The Exorcist), had just finished filming the movie, 'The night they raided the Minsky's', and left immediately for Europe to film his next project. He left behind a  gigantic mess of film footage, and handed it over to Rosenblum to edit. On screening it, neither the producer Norman Lear, nor Rosenblum could see any hopes of a good movie, or even an average movie being made out of this rubble. Rosenblum called it 'disastrous', a senior VP, ' the worst first cut I've ever seen'. 

However, over the next years Rosenblum was able to put together through a lot of patient addition, subtraction and through more than a thousand cuts, a 100 minute picture that opened to decent reviews. 

When I read it, it felt funny that Rosenblum should open his book with his work on this film. It was by no means the best film that he edited ( Annie Hall was) . Chronologically also it was not his first movie. But it was his most challenging. And it is this recounting, that has resonated most with me. It inspired the name of this blog. Here is why. 

I work in the ICU. 

My work consists of treating patients with serious diseases, diseases that have gotten so far out of hand, that there is no way to visualize a healthy recovery back to normalcy. But even so, I and many others in my profession , perform this exercise in visualization on a daily basis. It is similar to the problem that Rosenblum faced when handed over the responsibility of treating the diseased footage. The ICU patient is my Minsky.  

Ralph Rosenblum trained as an editor. Although, I do not have the same education as him, I know that an editor subtracts adds and joins scenes together into a coherent movie. I try to apply editing principles to my work, by radically cutting out the extraneous, adding the essential ,and joining together multiple hours and days of such work, and pray.  Sometimes I succeed in achieving what Rosenblum achieved with the movie- an above average outcome.

We all have our own Minsky's handed down to us. Either a nature- made Minsky or a man- made Minsky, a Minsky is a Minsky. A lawyer gets a tough case that has been mangled by prior lawyers, an architect gets a challenging project drenched in red tape, a plumber gets called for a horribly clogged piping, or a teacher has a tough student. Give them the treatment that Rosenblum gave the OG Minsky- add, subtract, join, repeat.