That's cool, George! I totally missed that during the airing. I'm glad Crabapple made it, too. They were the other thanks I submitted. They gave me about 50 discs of radio shows at a reduced rate because they love Johnny. Of course, not one second of these marvelous shows was left in the doc, but I certainly had a wonderful time listening to them.
The good that I've taken away from this film is a deep appreciation of J.M.'s talent, getting to see a lot of amazing, rare films (I especially loved KING OF JAZZ and the old "soundies") discovering artists I wasn't that familiar with (Jack Teagarden, Paramount's stable of actors, etc.) and best of all, Brandon. He was recommended to me by the original producer. He was out of a job and working as a doorman at a club and asked her if he could be a P.A. I figured I could use him as an assistant since he'd done some editing. He turned out to be a fantastic editor so I started giving him some of the new performances to cut and he did a great job. So I gave him self-contained stores to cut, like the Capitol records sequence, which was my link to WWII. (Margaret Whiting told a great story about how they were able to start the company even though there was a shortage of shellac during the war.) Johnny was at the height of his popularity during WWII due to his great Armed Forces radio broadcasts and his own shows.
But WWII wasn't even addressed. There was no linear storytelling, it was random bites and chronology all over the place, kind of like someone had taken what we'd cut and put it in a blender, thrown it against a wall and you see a few chunks of recognizable stuff.
I promoted Brandon to associate editor after seeing what he could do, and finagled him a pay raise. But after I left, I was so grateful to Brandon for hanging in there. (He would have jump ship if he'd had somewhere to jump!) Even though he had to execute the "creative decisions" from on high, he did his best to make it the best he could. And even though he had never shepherded a beast like this through online, he was able to accomplish it without too much coaching from me. I insisted on sharing my editor's card with him out of gratitude, and I am going to be bringing him on to my current project until I'm done with THE CLOSER. He's the first editor I've known that made me feel comfortable doing that!
