To learn it, do it.

If you want to learn it, do it. This was among the best advice I ever got, as a kid.

Too bad I didn’t follow it.

It’s summer of 1978. I’m in Spoleto, Italy with my sister Michele and cousin Candida, who worked for the annual music festival. That’s a story in itself. She was the personal assistant to Gian Carlo Menotti, composer of Amahl and the Night Visitors and dozens of other operas. He won two Pulitzers. Here I was, a 16-year-old kid, rubbing shoulders with the hoi-polloi of classical music.

One morning, in Gian Carlo’s villa, I met Samuel Barber, attired in his bathrobe, as he was enjoying a mid-morning cocktail. Gian Carlo introduced us, then vanished, leaving the two of us alone. He could have easily ignored me, but he was cordial.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“No, sir, I do not,” came my pithy reply.

“Well, you should listen to my Adagio some time,” he replied.

“Yes, sir, I surely will.” Quite the rapier wit, had I. Nearly a decade passed before I figured out who he really was. Quite by accident—like most Americans, by way of the Oliver Stone film Platoon. Oh my God! I met the guy who wrote this music. In his bathrobe!

Candy had a friend called Cynthia, married to a sweet guy, a photographer called Apu. They were typical of my cousin’s friends, insanely interesting, refined, well-educated and smart New York/LA people who loved nothing more than to engage in meaningful conversation over cocktails. It was my initiation into adulthood. Back then, there was no minimum drinking age in Italy, you got served based on the discretion of the server. So I could join them, as an actual grownup. It was spectacular.

As middle-aged people are wont to do, their conversation invariably moved to what the kids were up to. If you’re old enough to remember the actor Herschel Bernardi, he was Cynthia’s ex. One of their children, Adam, was an aspiring film editor. That caught my attention. When I was 16, being a film editor was one of the several thousand things I really, really wanted to do when I grew up.

This was my in, the key that would open wide the gates to Hollywood.

I worked up the nerve to ask Cynthia if I might have Adam’s address so I could write to him. No email or cell phones in those days. I didn’t want to call, that would have been too forward. A letter was unobtrusive and non-threatening and would demand little from him, save throwing the dopey thing away. She could see my enthusiasm and kindly obliged.

I wrote soon after returning to the States, banging out a letter on my manual Smith-Corona. Typical 16-year-old stuff; gee-whiz, you’re a film editor, that’s so amazing and that’s what I want to do and how did you get started and that’s so cool and how can I get started?

Adam was barely an editor in 1978. This was before Ferris Bueller, Planes Trains and Automobiles, A League of Their Own and all the other real Hollywood movies he’d end up working on. He either had time on his hands or is just a genuinely nice guy, because he took the time to reply.

I was breathless opening the envelope. He’d filled two-thirds of a sheet of paper. But he could have saved himself some ink. His advice came down to one word: edit.

I don’t remember what he wrote exactly, but the gist was if you want to learn to edit, start editing.

My enthusiasm immediately deflated. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a class or a book or a recommendation for college, who knows what. I didn’t expect a tag line, “just do it.”

This was long before camcorders and home video, Toaster, iMovie, Final Cut and Premiere. To cut film, you had to cut film. Cutting actual film with an actual razor blade and gluing the cut bits together with actual glue.

Was he nuts? How could I pull this off? I didn’t even have a movie camera. Well, I did, but it was a piece of garbage, so chintzy that just being in the same room with it gave me a headache. The action blockbuster epics I produced on 8mm with the rest of the kids in the neighborhood were shot on my next door neighbor’s tough-as-nails wrinkle-finish wind-up Bell & Howell. The good camera was owned by someone else.

I had no camera, no projector, no viewer, no splicing block. And I could not imagine how many pizzas I’d need to flip to earn enough money to buy them.

But my biggest self-inflicted butthead roadblock was the fact that I didn’t know how to edit a movie. So, I asked my self, how in the hell could I do something I had no idea how to do?!

So I did what I nearly always did, gave up before I even started. I promptly scratched film editor off the career list. Way too difficult.

If I had been one of those kids destined for success, I would have made it happen. I could have coped with my lousy camera. I could have borrowed the neighbor’s Bell & Howell. I could have saved my pizza money. I could have worked extra hours. I could have gone to the library, trolled the flea markets, picked the brain of the local photo dealer, set a meeting with the college photography teacher. I could have done a hundred things to make it happen, but instead I just left the whole project on the shelf.

In hindsight, this may have been a blessing. Decades later, when I got into the advertising business, I’d occasionally spend an entire day or two in the editing suite, supervising some project or another. And I remember thinking, if I had to look at that little screen 10 hours a day every day for the rest of my life, I’d go completely out of my tree. I probably wasn’t cut out for it and Adam may have done me a big favor.

But I’ve been thinking of Adam’s letter a lot recently. We’ve launched a new business, based on a YouTube channel. (Shameless plug: please subscribe!) We have some capital, but not enough to hire an editor. That means I have to figure it out on my own. So staring at that little screen 10 hours a day every day and going out of my tree is about all I do, these days.

It’s mind-numbing. But I do like the challenge. I don’t love it, but I’m figuring it out. Guess how? By doing it. Adam was right. To learn it, do it. I mean, it’s not the kind of advice you’d give an aspiring brain surgeon, but it’s editing a movie, for Pete’s sake.

Like most people, left to my own devices, I wouldn’t want to work for anything. I don’t want a learning curve, I want a hack. Instant gratification.

But I’m old enough to know that such endeavors rarely bring value. Life is a learning curve. As I’ve told my own kids a hundred times; Relax. Yeah, you stink at it now. But anything you do is like pushups. The more you do, the better you get. So keep doing it.

Even film editing.

Thanks, Adam.

=S

Photo by Ivan Samkov from Pexels