(The following is a memoir of my first two years as an aspiring film editor in Los Angeles. It was written retrospectively in June 1993.)

After breakfast, I drive away from my girlfriend Sarah's house in Palo Alto, California as Sarah waves goodbye, both of us crying. It has been only a few days since we finished our drive clear across the country, a journey that began nine days before that with my parents waving goodbye as we pulled out of the driveway in Turnersville, New Jersey. Only a few days before that, Sarah and I graduated from Wesleyan University. This summer will be our first major separation from each other since the previous summer.

I take 101 south past San Jose to the Pacheco Pass, then cut across to Interstate Five. At lunch time, I pull over at a rest stop on the Five and sit at a park bench to eat a bag lunch which Sarah's mother packed for me. It is a hot day, and a yellowjacket falls into my half-full Pepsi. I am back on the road before long.

Late that afternoon, the Five leads into the Angeles National Forest, and a huge green freeway sign announces Los Angeles ahead--the city of all my dreams since childhood, the city where films get made. I begin to look for Route 101 North as the exits pass faster and the traffic gets heavier. After a good long while, I get off the freeway in Norwalk, pull into the parking lot of a car dealership, and consult a Triple-A map. I have overshot my junction by a good 20 miles. I sit for a few moments more, scanning the FM bands on the radio and programming the recall buttons when I hear something I like. Then, with my radio tuned to the frequencies of Los Angeles, I pull back out and backtrack up the freeway.

This time, I find the 101, get off at the Highland exit, drive straight past the Hollywood Bowl, and find myself minutes later at an apartment in West Hollywood, just south of Hollywood Boulevard. The apartment belongs to a woman who had graduated from Wesleyan two years earlier; she isn't home from work yet, but she has left me a key. I'll be staying in her spare bedroom until I find a job and get my own place.

I bring in my few belongings from the car, mostly just my clothes, my computer, and a few cassette tapes, and put them in the tiny bedroom. L.A. has its strange beauties for the Easterner: looking out the window of the living room, I have a view clear across the city to the mountains in the south, punctuated by the tops of unearthly tall palm trees in the foreground. But I hardly know a soul here, and I have never felt so alone.

Frequent phone calls to Sarah and to my parents help dull the edge of the loneliness a bit, and I am soon able to fall into a job-hunting routine. Every morning I walk to the 7-Eleven nearby on Sunset Boulevard and look at the want ads in the trade papers, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. If a position sounds interesting, I memorize the address and run home to write it down; only if there is too much information to memorize do I buy the paper. In either case, I send out a cover letter and résumé by mail or, if a fax number is printed, by fax from a local mailbox shop. This latter route is costly, but one can't afford to waste time while competing with an entire city of hungry wanna-bees like myself. My diligence doesn't help--I receive no responses.

Meanwhile, I have been pursuing other avenues. I set up informational interviews with some nauseatingly successful Wesleyan alumni, but none seem to have any solid advice about getting a job. I consult the library's elderly edition of the Hollywood Creative Directory and send my résumé cold to production companies I find listed there, even attempting to make some hand deliveries, but it proves an exercise in futility, particularly given the obsolesence of my information. I sign up with an employment agency specializing in the entertainment industry, and they get me an interview one giddy day at a large Beverly Hills literary and talent agency. Although my first interview with the agency's personnel department seems to go well, I am kept waiting at, and then sent home from, my second interview, which becomes indefinitely postponed.

Since I am interested in film editing, I also write letters to well-known editors asking for advice, and I send my résumé to productions listed in the trades, asking for work as an assistant editor or a production assistant. I receive no responses to these either.

Finally, around late July, I get a break. During a phone call to my parents, my father mentions that a friend's son is producing a film. I recognize the names of both the producer and the film: I had seen them listed in the trades and sent my résumé. My father gives me the producer's home phone number. What's to lose? I call and speak with the producer, mentioning that our fathers know each other and that I have sent my résumé and am looking for work. He promises to make sure the editor sees my résumé.

Before long, the editor actually calls and sets up an interview at her home a few days later. That night, in a panic, I drive to the Samuel French bookstore in Studio City--since the one just down the street on Sunset has closed for the evening--and buy a book on professional film editing, studying it as thoroughly as possible in the limited time before the interview.

At the interview, the editor immediately realizes that I am nowhere near qualified, considering my limited experience in an editing room (I had cut my own 16mm, 11-minute film at Wesleyan), but she offers to let me come into the editing room from time to time and help out for free. I am grateful even for that.

Meanwhile, the money off of which I've been living--graduation gifts plus subsidies from my parents--has nearly run out, and despairing of finding a paying film job anytime soon, I sign up with a reliable temporary service. Soon, I am working as a temp secretary at a construction firm in North Hollywood. That weekend, my parents encourage me to call the editing room, as the editor had suggested, and see if she wants me to come in. I do, and she does, and so that Saturday morning, I drive over the Cahuenga Pass into the Valley, walk into the suites of a post-production house, and set foot in my first professional editing room.

It is an awesome sight: tall racks filled with boxes of film are arrayed along the perimeter; an assistant editor's rewind bench is squeezed against one wall; and the middle of the room is occupied by "trim bins" with lengths of film hanging from them. Finally, against one wall is a large Kem flatbed editing table at which the editor sits, determinedly cutting away.

I do not wait long before making my first gaffe: fascinated by the images flashing by on the screen of the Kem, I look on over the editor's shoulder as she cuts. Her curt request for me to stop brings an embarrassed flush to my cheeks, and I carefully avert my eyes from then on.

Soon, an assistant editor takes me to my own room in the back, where I am shown how to splice 35mm film and how to "reconstitute the trims": that is, how to splice rejected pieces of film back precisely where they came from in the reels of unused footage and, where spaces have been left by lengths of film or soundtrack which are being used in the cut, to add in lengths of leader to hold the picture and sound reels in sync. I am thrilled to be working on a feature film, to be touching 35mm film, to be involved.

For the next month, I work my temp job at the construction firm during the week and go each weekend to the editing room to reconstitute trims. Shortly before my last day of work at the construction firm, the assistant editor phones me: could I work full-time on the film for a while? There would still be no pay, but I am promised an "apprentice editor" credit in the end crawl. I jump at the chance, and my parents agree to help support me.

Over the next three weeks, I work 6-day, 50-plus hour weeks in the editing room--a light schedule, actually, compared to my co-workers. The reconstituting work quickly becomes tedious, but since I am in a room by myself, I can at least listen to the radio while I work; I hear much of the first round of Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearings during this time. The work also brings other rewards: one Friday night I go to a dailies screening, and during the last week or so, I get to meet the film's young writer-director as he comes in to work with the editor. One day I even go to lunch with him (and the rest of the editing crew, of course).

Meanwhile, I have learned that Sarah, who wants to be a teacher and has sent résumés out all over Northern and Southern California, has landed a job in nearby Santa Monica. I locate and lease a relatively inexpensive one-bedroom apartment for us to share in West Los Angeles, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard and just east of Barrington Avenue--only a short bus ride away from Sarah's new job. As Sarah will be living at home for a few more weeks yet, I move in by myself on August 15th. My few possessions make the trip from West Hollywood to West L.A. in one car ride. The apartment is mostly bare, and, not yet owning a bed, I buy and sleep on a cheap air mattress which needs to be refilled almost nightly at the local gas station.

Also meanwhile, I have received a phone call from an assistant editor at a prolific low-budget studio in Venice, where I had earlier interviewed for an apprentice editor position but lost out to an old Wes classmate. Now a new film is starting, the classmate has put in a word on my behalf, and I am offered an apprenticeship. At the beginning of September, I leave the first film in order to take the job in Venice, where I will still receive no pay but will learn many more skills (and rack up another screen credit).

I buy a bed in advance of Sarah's arrival, purchasing a frame in the Valley and an inexpensive queen-size mattress and boxspring from a discount place on Wilshire Boulevard, near the L.A. County Museum of Art. These latter items are lashed to my car roof, and the sight of me singlehandedly removing them from the car and getting them into the apartment would surely have been very amusing, could I have seen it. Sarah's parents drive her down to L.A., along with some furniture and appliances, and help her move in. The bare apartment looks only slightly more filled than it had before, but with the addition of Sarah, it is now infinitely more pleasant to live in.

Additionally, my old friend James and his girlfriend Nova move from Chicago to Los Angeles, taking an apartment a mere eight blocks from ours. Los Angeles has suddenly become much more friendly.

I start work at the film studio in Venice. Before it was a studio, the site had been an old lumberyard, and it is still referred to as "the lumberyard" by veterans. In fact, rumor has it that the facility has been officially condemned by the authorities and is kept open only by generous payoffs.

The assistant editor, a patient young woman only a few years older than me, teaches me and Scott, the other apprentice, a number of useful skills: how to sync the dailies (that is, match all the raw film footage to its corresponding sound at nearly 1/96th of a second's accuracy), maintain paperwork, operate an edge-numbering machine, and other arcana. The most arcane, and least generally useful, skill I learn is how to operate the crotchety old 35mm interlock projector in the studio's tiny screening room, a device which may date back to the advent of magnetic film sound and which seems likely to blow up and kill the projectionist at any time. I become adept enough at running the ancient machine that the editor trusts me to project her edited footage for her, a job which--if botched--could result in the destruction of the edited film and the loss of the only record of her hard work.

Scott, the other apprentice, is my own age, and we get along well, quizzing each other on movie trivia as we work and sometimes going to lunch together. (I pack my lunch the rest of the time, or better yet, if the studio is shooting another film on the lot outside the cutting room, I pretend to be a production assistant and raid the crew's buffet table, feeling that as an unpaid employee I am entitled to something for my efforts.)

The film's editor, a small Italian-American woman who hails from my own native Philadelphia, occasionally brings one apprentice or the other into her room while she cuts and, while we help her manage the "trims" (the small, loose pieces of film which editing generates), she shows us exactly how she is transforming the raw footage into fluid, viewable cinema, answers our questions, and occasionally solicits our opinions and suggestions on her work. One morning she spends a good deal of time discussing with us an announcement just made by Magic Johnson that he has tested positive for HIV and is retiring from the Lakers.

The film is being shot in Bulgaria, and every week or so, Scott or I has to drive to LAX and pick up the footage from Customs. (The film is shipped in large, heavy metal cans whcih we are then encouraged by the assistant editor to take home with us. One goes home with me and becomes an excellent wastebasket.) Dealing with the footage back in the editing room is a treat--many times the camera crew has failed to hold the clapperboard in frame, or has allowed the sound of the clapper to be drowned out by loud noise, making the syncing of the footage particularly difficult. Furthermore, something like two thousand feet of MOS (soundless) footage of a helicopter chase is completely unslated, and a script supervisor is called in to sift through and identify the shots for the editor.

A couple of months into my tenure at "the lumberyard," the assistant editor is fired; the editor believes that she has a bad attitude. (To me, it merely seems that the assistant is unwilling to subordinate her entire life, instead of merely most of it, to the "show" in exchange for the $500 a week she is receiving.) A new assistant is brought on, in addition to two other studio employees who have been pitching in and helping with organizing the vast amount of poorly catalogued sound and picture.

Work proceeds on course until the shoot wraps in Bulgaria and the director returns, bearing gifts for the editing crew: small Soviet souvenir pins and some mysterious new footage. We discover that during the shoot, an "editor" in Bulgaria had been employed to weed out "bad" material from the footage being shipped Stateside, and that in fact, entire camera angles had been removed and never sent on to us. Scenes which the editor had finished and put aside will have to be recut in light of the newly-arrived footage.

By December, both Scott and I feel that we have learned all we can in Venice and that it is time to move on. A friend quickly helps Scott find a paid apprentice position, but without any other prospects, I stay on at the studio for a while longer, taking time every Tuesday morning to pick up the Reporter and send my résumé out. Nothing comes of them.

Finally, one Thursday morning in mid-December, we finish our remaining chores of reconstituting trims and labeling wild sound, and for the first time in four months, the editing room is quiet and there is nothing for me to do. At that point, even with no job prospects to speak of, I deicde that my work in Venice is finished and announce out loud that I will not return to the show after I go home that night. Later that same afternoon--with admirable timing--an assistant from another show marches through the editing room, announcing that he has the phone number of an editor who is looking for first and second assistants.

I call the editor. "What do you know how to do?" he asks, and I rattle off a list of the skills I've learned in Venice. "When can you start?" he asks. "Would you believe--tomorrow?" I reply. I come in for an interview the next day and for an orientation session on Saturday, and on Monday I report for my first day of work as the second assistant editor on a kickboxing film, at a rate of $250 per week.

The film, which has already been shooting for two weeks, is being produced by a well-known film and music company and is being edited in rented suites on the lot of Universal Studios. It is a series of firsts for me: my first deal memo (the Hollywood equivalent of a contract), my first paid job in the film world, and my first parking pass on a real studio lot (albeit at a very distant garage).

The show goes smoothly. Apart from some bumpiness early on, when the first assistant and I have to iron out the mess left by the original assistants (who apparently were not, to be charitable, extremely familiar with assistant work), there are no major crises involved with editing the picture. Further, the editor staunchly protects our weekends from job encroachment, a phenomenon I have not seen, and am not to see, repeated in any other editing room. We are even given a week off around Christmas, which I use to visit my family in New Jersey (truncating a longer visit which I had planned earlier).

For the first time, I learn about the intricacies of camera reports and script notes, paperwork which the Bulgarian crew had mercifully spared us, having had no use for the things. During the shoot, I sync the dailies (which are indeed daily, rather than weekly or so as on the Bulgarian picture); and after shooting ends, we spend much of our time reconstituting trims and preparing for screenings of first and intermediate cuts.

The assistants are given an opportunity to participate--a little bit--in the filmmaking process. The editor frequently calls us in to ask for suggestions and comments on edited footage. One day, the first assistant is even given a montage scene to edit, while I am allowed (under strict supervision) to cut in an insert shot in another scene. We both help to cut temporary music and sound effects for screenings.

After one screening, the editor and director call us in as they wrestle with how to establish a certain plot point which seems to elude our test audiences. I suggest adding a line during one scene. The next day, the director tells me, "We made space for your line to be ADR'ed" (that is, they have inserted a shot in which a certain actor's face is not visible; later, they will record the sound of the actor saying the new line and put it at that spot). I have written a line for a feature film! (For the record, the line as read in the film is, "I'm also a cop," distilled from my original suggestion, "The rest of the time I'm a cop.")

At one point, an additional editor is brought in for a few weeks to help finish the first, or "editor's," cut. In taking this job, the additional editor has abandoned a low-low-budget 16mm feature which she had started to edit. When she asks if anyone knows someone who might be interested in taking over, I immediately volunteer myself. Later, I go to her house to meet the film's director, bringing a video copy of my student film to demonstrate my editing ability. Both the director and the additional editor are suitably impressed by my work (surprising me, as I hadn't thought it was any great shakes), but nonetheless, I don't get the job. The director is encouraging, however, and I think for the first time that I might be able to pursue actual editing jobs, instead of just assistant work.

Encouraged by this new idea, I begin to answer ads in Drama-Logue, a primarily theater-oriented weekly which also runs ads seeking free or low-pay help on student and low-budget films. Through one such ad, I meet with Pat, a student at Cal State Northridge who has shot a 25-minute 16mm film but hasn't started cutting it yet. Pat and I get along well, and he agrees to let me cut his film.

Meanwhile, as assistant editors must always do, I begin to seek my next paying assistant job. My current job will end in March, and when it does, I should be ready to move on immediately to the next.

In March, the kickboxing film "locks" (the picture will no longer be edited, although the sound will). My job on the show ends, although the first assistant will stay on to oversee the "opticals" (the lab processes that produce fades, dissolves, and certain other effects). I have failed to find another assistant job, so after a brief jobless period, I take more temp work at a strange, regimented law firm in Santa Monica. In my off time, I occasionally make the 30-mile drive to Pat's house in Glendale to help sync up the large amount of footage he has shot.

One Wednesday night a few months later, Sarah and I go to a Dodgers game; leaving, we find that the city has erupted in riots over the verdicts in the trial of four L.A.P.D. officers, and we carefully drive home along an alternate route. We both go to our jobs the next day, hoping that the violence is over, but we both leave early after reports of continued rioting. Before I go, I hear the law-firm boss order the late shift to report that night, in defiance of a city-wide curfew, and I decide that he doesn't have enough regard for employee safety. I do not return to work the next day.

The next few days are tense, and Sarah and I spend much of our time holed up in our apartment with the doors locked and the shades drawn. As it turns out, the violence does not come within miles of our neighborhood, although I realize that the West Hollywood apartment where I used to stay is mere blocks away from the looting and burning on Hollywood Boulevard.

The city returns to something like normal, and soon after, I am hired as the temp secretary at the firm where Sarah's uncle works, which brokers waste paper. Meanwhile, Pat and I have finally synced all his footage, and Pat lines up editing space at Warner Hollywood Studios on Formosa Avenue and rents a flatbed Moviola. We start to meet there and cut his film for three to five hours at a time, two or three times a week (after work or on weekends). Going to the editing room is the joy I look forward to all day at work. The film, based on a true story, is about a Valley eighth-grader who is murdered by a classmate after seeming to show a gang affiliation.

Meanwhile, I have continued to send out my résumé to productions listed in the trades, and around June, an editor calls me: she is going to be editing a low-budget film and needs assistants. I leave work early one day to go to her house for an interview, and she decides to hire me as a second assistant. The film is scheduled to begin in early July, but is later pushed forward a few weeks.

I spend my last few weeks at the paper firm filling in for the export manager during his two-week vacation, then resuming my secretarial duties. Around this time, Pat and I more or less picture-lock his student film. Meanwhile, Sarah and I find a new apartment and, on August 1, we move seven blocks into a spacious second-floor apartment on a fairly quiet street, with some amenities our previous residence lacked: a dishwasher, a nice carpet, an air-conditioning unit, a balcony, and actual trees outside the bedroom window. We are assisted in the move by Pat, who owns a truck, and by other friends with cars. Happily, we now have enough possessions to warrant the extra help: we are up to two computers, a color TV, a VCR, a stereo, an old kitchen table (actually a card table) and chairs, two bookcases, and even a few battered couches (one donated by a colleague of Sarah's, the other a curbside salvage).

Immediately after our move, my new assistant editor job starts. The film's writer-director, who isn't much older than me if at all, is a former USC film student who has somehow found a few million dollars of financing for a 35mm feature. It quickly becomes apparent to both me and the editor that the first assistant editor has been misjudged--she is thoroughly unfamiliar with what is expected of her. Against my protests (and better judgment), and buoyed by a promise of patience and tutelage on the editor's part, I allow the editor to persuade me to switch positions with the first assistant, in defiance of a vow I had made to myself not to work as a first assistant until I felt good and ready.

Even as a second assistant, my colleague needs too much training, and by the end of the first week, she has been moved out of the editing room altogether and relegated to the position of production office assistant. The editor hires a new second assistant who is, as is almost immediately apparent, much better equipped than me to be a first. However, it is too late to switch positions again, and I struggle to get by in my new job.

The work hours are long; I am thrilled by the days when I can leave at eight p.m., eleven hours after coming in. Soon, however, the show becomes rocky, plagued by a variety of problems incurred by incomplete script notes, extensive problems with the film processing laboratory, and my own inexperience with efficiently managing even a normal workflow. The editor eventually loses patience with me, the atmosphere grows increasingly unpleasant, and I am hollered at regularly. Even the other assistant chides me--I am making her look bad.

Finally, at the beginning of October, using budgetary pressures as a pretext, the editor lets me go from the film just as the editor's cut is completed. I somehow manage to depart on good terms, even being promised a reference (as a second assistant, not as a first), although I have been thoroughly turned off of the idea of being an assistant. I am grateful for the release from tension--never before had a job tied my stomach in knots as this one had--but also disheartened by the entire experience and having my doubts about my own competence as an assistant. However, I have now amasssed enough paid days as an assistant (one hundred) to join the union. If my battered psyche will allow it, and should I be lucky enough to find one, I am eligible to look for union work. The question is, do I ever want to do this demanding work again?

Unsure that I still like the work, but reluctantly concluding that it is my best bet for making headway into the editing world (and attracted by the prospect of high union wages), I begin applying for apprentice positions on union shows, while still looking for actual editing work through Drama-Logue. There are no replies.

Meanwhile, mired in recession, California's economy cannot even dredge up a temp job for me, and I spend six long weeks almost thoroughly unemployed. My bank account sinks slowly toward ground zero, buoyed only slightly by a single Election Day's work gathering signatures for an L.A. city initiative, one I don't even agree with.

Finally, in late November, I am sent to a modeling agency in Hollywood to work as a temp secretary. After a few weeks, my employer insists on hiring me permanently, despite my protests that I could leave at any time when the next film job comes up. Anxious to secure a steady paycheck, I finally acquiesce but continue to send out my résumé every week.

One résumé sent in response to a Drama-Logue ad draws a response from a director about to shoot a feature film in Louisiana. I quickly obtain a video copy of Pat's workprint and bring it and my own student film to the director's house one night, the last house on a street high in the canyons of the Hollywood Hills. There I learn that my being called was a mistake: someone had apparently alighted on the brief "sound recordist" portion of my résumé (a chore I had performed on a few student films at Wesleyan); they aren't even looking for an editor yet. However, as long as I'm there, the director and producer will look at my reel.

Eager to show off the more experienced and smoother cutting evident in Pat's film, I run the first ten minutes before the director turns it off in boredom. I have learned a valuable lesson: that although my actual cuts may look better in Pat's film, my own student film has better pacing and thus "flows" better, making it a better showpiece. I resolve to place more confidence in my own film.

In December, I get a phone call from an assistant editor whom I had worked with on the kickboxing picture: he knows of a low-budget film which is looking for assistant editors to work for "deferred pay." ("Deferred pay" means that after all investors and vendors have been paid back, a portion of profits will go toward your salary. More simply and accurately, it usually means "nothing.") Deferred pay doesn't interest me, but the included offer of possibly being able to cut a scene or two does. Calling the film's young writer-director, I offer to come in for an hour or two each night after work--the editing room is handily located only a few blocks away from the agency. Grateful for any help, he accepts.

The film is low-budget, and the editor is a guy only a few years older than me, who happens to be a huge fan of the first feature film I had worked on (which has already achieved cult status). Most nights a week, I go to the editing room after work at the agency and do simple apprentice editor chores, dropping broad hints all the while about how much I would like to cut a scene.

One Tuesday night in January, I go to bed late and wake up early. On my three hours of sleep, I am able to function at work on Wednesday--barely. Getting a second wind around 5 p.m., I determine to go to the editing room after work despite my lack of sleep, since the film faces an important screening in two days. There, I am first given the exciting opportunity to cut in a few inserts, and then suddenly I am awarded the ultimate prize: I will be allowed to cut a scene.

I call Sarah to let her know that I will probably be home very late, then I get to work. First I take the uncut footage out to a nearby post-production house for edgecoding (after successfully talking down their overtime rate to something within our budget); then, on my return, I station myself at an upright Moviola and watch the footage over and over until I see how I want to cut it. Finally I begin making the cuts. It is my first time actually editing 35mm film, my first time editing on an old-style upright machine, and my first time editing even part of a feature-length film.

The scene should be simple to cut: it is a two-person dialogue scene which should run just under a minute, and I have only about 500 feet of film to work with (I will use less than a fifth of it). However, the erratic coverage and performances make for a difficult jigsaw puzzle. By 3:30 a.m., I have assembled a workable, if imperfect, cut of the scene, and the editor and I review it. We agree on a shortcoming or two, but I don't have the strength to fix them. I am home by 4:15 a.m. Over the last forty-five hours, I have had only three hours of sleep. I fall into bed.

I am next fully awake near noon. Frantic calls from work have gone unanswered--the bedroom phone's ringer has been turned off. Sheepishly, I finally arrive at work that afternoon, with a lame excuse about having been under the weather.

Meanwhile, things at work have begun to look more interesting. My boss has an interest in film as well, having previously worked as an attorney at a large bi-coastal agency. After dabbling with representing actors and writers, my boss decides to become a full-fledged film producer. Having already demonstrated some film acumen by reading and analyzing scripts submitted for a model/actress whom the agency represents, I help him read scripts. Excited by these events, I stop sending my résumé out and resolve to stay a while.

After setting up a complex deal on a questionable property which ends up going nowhere, my boss finds two scripts with potential and begins to shop them around. This process should be incredibly exciting to me, but I am becoming dismayed by my boss's increasingly short temper. After an outburst in early June (followed by an eerie calm), I become much more circumspect in dealing with him, and begin thinking yet again of looking for more work.

I am particularly galvanized by a call from yet another director, to whom I had apprently sent a résumé many months ago, who is looking for an editor for his feature film. It is always satisifying to me when my résumé generates any response other than a quick trip to the wastebasket, so even though we never end up meeting, I am encouraged by the call. In June I resume my practice of answering Drama-Logue ads.

But meanwhile, Sarah and I have become engaged. Given our plans to vacation with her family in August and to marry in January, my options for finding editing work are limited until after the honeymoon. Besides, Sarah is unable to continue her present job as a teaching assistant, since she must student-teach full-time in a public school during the coming school year, so her income will be limited and will need supplementing from my own if we are to maintain our current lifestyle.

So I will probably remain in my current position for as long as possible and take it as far as I can, while still looking for work as an editor if I can find it. I am still not sure what my place is, if any, in the big bad world of filmmaking, or what I would or could do for a career if I ultimately decide that film is not for me. My future remains an open book in which fate will, no doubt, continue to scrawl its share of whimsical notions from time to time as it has in the past, leaving blots and cross-outs, and maybe, when I'm lucky, a note about the occasional timely coincidence.

On June 18, 1993, I will have been living in Los Angeles for exactly two years.