The tension at work finally ends one Friday afternoon in June, when I am called into my boss's office and "let go." It is not a reflection on my job performance (indeed, my boss calls me some months later to offer me my job back, which I decline) but rather on their decreased workload. (No doubt I've been spotted writing letters and autobiographical notes at my desk during my prodigious downtime, drawing attention to the lack of sufficient work to keep me occupied.)

Coincidentally, my parents-in-laws are visiting at our apartment this particular Friday. I sit down to a beautiful Sabbath dinner and announce that I've been laid off, and my mother-in-law, with enviable grace, declares it "not an end but a beginning."

We are joined for dessert by Sarah's uncle and aunt, to whom I do not mention my having been laid off. Sarah's uncle, however, offhandedly drops notice that his office, at which I had temped a year ago, is looking for help again. "Funny," I perk up, "I happen to be free." On Monday, I return to the wastepaper brokerage as an assistant in the accounting department. It is not film work, but it is steady, and my good-natured employers are fully recognizant of my ambitions and that I may leave at any time. As it happens, my total tenure there is to last over two years.

I continue to send out resumes, but nothing comes of them. Around July, I get an unsolicited call from the editing room of an independently-financed, low-budget children's feature: their apprentice is leaving the show and has recommended me as a replacement. The pay offered is $500 per week. The wastepaper brokerage grants me a leave to take the job and return when it's over.

I begin working at Raleigh Studios, just across the street from Paramount on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. The film is being produced by an heiress who believes in family entertainment and vegetarianism. The director and editor are both Australians who have collaborated on a handful of other comedy features back at home.

The film is in a late stage of post-production, having already been shot and mostly edited. As I arrive, the film is going through recuts. The assistants are mostly kept busy keeping the trims in order, logging and sending each day's changes to the sound department (which has already begun its work editing the sound for each reel of the picture), ordering and cutting in optical effects, and preparing temp soundtracks and temp mixes for upcoming screenings. I have never been on the crew of a film at this late stage, so there is much for me to learn. Among the first items in my curriculum is how to make cappuccino, a favorite drink of the director and editor. Another is how to manage take-out orders for six or more people (always check that the order has been completely filled before you leave the restaurant, and don't forget condiments!). I also learn something about filling out change sheets (the paperwork that gets sent to the sound department) and duping change trims.

My cutting room skills, paltry though they are for a first assistant, are impressive in an apprentice, and the editing team seems to appreciate my work. They are also generous when splitting lunch checks, in appreciation of the fact that I'm earning the least of anyone there. (Lunches turn out to be a high point of the workday, since the team enjoys going to far-flung and interesting restaurants, and I discover new favorite Caribbean and dim sum spots.)

A few doors down the hall from our cutting rooms, an editor named Rob Kobrin is doing some additional work on a film already in release, entitled "Needful Things." Kobrin is an aficionado of a strange kind of editing system called the "Avid." Rather than editing film in the standard way, Kobrin has the film transferred to video, then converts the video into digital data and edits it on a computer. I am somewhat bewildered by the entire process.

After a month or so, my services on the children's film are no longer required, and I return to the wastepaper brokerage. Then, one of my old resumes finally pays off. A few months earlier, a "Drama-Logue" classified had led me to a meeting with a young black filmmaker who had shot a 16mm feature for $60,000. Although he had liked my reel, he had decided to hire an editor who was able to work longer hours for less money. Now, the filmmaker calls again: the old editor has left the show with some sound work still undone. Could I come and finish it off?

I drive to the filmmaker's apartment in the Valley and screen the film on a flatbed in his dining room. The film, almost two hours long, has no pacing to speak of: it has been severly overwritten and overshot, and the first editor has made no attempt to prune it. In my opinion, the film at this stage requires not sound work but a complete editorial overhaul, and I tell the filmmaker so. He gives me a videotape of the cut to study further at home, and I watch it and make detailed notes.

The following day I return with pages of suggestions geared toward making the story and the characters more understandable and consistent. The filmmaker agrees to let me recut the film, and we strike an agreement by which I will work mornings at the wastepaper brokerage and afternoons on the film; the filmmaker will pay me only a modest hourly wage to make up for my lost hours at the office. I am to earn my first full editing credit on a feature-length film.

I begin my split schedule. As with Pat's film, I am hardly able to wait for my office hours to end so that I can return to the editing room, and I enjoy myself thoroughly as I wade through the 110-minute film, adjusting, tweaking, and deleting. The filmmaker is pleased with the direction his film is taking, and so am I.

In December and January, I take a two-and-a-half-week vacation from both jobs. Sarah and I go to northern California, are married in Los Altos on January 2, 1994, and enjoy a blissful week-long honeymoon in Hawaii. Upon our return, I resume my split schedule. One Sunday shortly thereafter, I am dreading an assignment at the office, and I wish out loud that I somehow won't have to go in the next day. As it happens, my wish is granted.

Just after 4:30 a.m. on Monday, January 17, Sarah, I, and the rest of the Los Angeles metropolitan area are violently awakened by the Northridge earthquake, the strongest temblor to strike the area in most residents' memories. No furniture in our apartment falls over, but a good deal of glassware is shaken out of our kitchen cabinets to crash into the sink or onto the floor. After thirty seconds, the noise and shaking subsides, but the terror takes a little longer to creep away. Our power is out, of course, and we reach for a flashlight and battery-powered radios. We also call our relatives, none of whom have heard about the quake yet, to assure them that we are all right. I venture outside to see what damage has been done. As it happens, our block is in good shape, and our building looks fine--hardly even any surface cracks.

We also call our friends James and Nova, who live just across the street. All of their tall furniture has tipped over, spilling books and crushing stereo equipment, but they are fine. Nova, who is in a graduate English program in the area, has a number of other friends from her program in the neighborhood. One couple has a gas range, and we are invited over for breakfast. Around 7:30 or 8:00, we are all at Julian and Rebecca's apartment (one block from ours) along with some other grad students, sipping tea and eating simple breakfast food. Julian and Rebecca have sustained little damage and have already neatened up, so with morning sunlight streaming in through the windows, we are able to regain the illusion of normalcy.

Sarah, incredibly, is called into work (she is working full-time at a Santa Monica bookstore while waiting for a student teaching assignment to begin a few months later), where the staff finds blown-out windows, fallen ceiling tiles, tipped bookcases, and much of the inventory on the floor. While she is at work, the rest of our breakfast club travels to each others' apartments to help pick up fallen items and sweep up broken glass. As we walk around the neighborhood, we see that not every building has been as lucky as ours. Some have broken windows; others feature frightening-looking cracks in their exteriors. The morning and afternoon are filled with smaller and larger aftershocks of the quake, which unnerve us. By mid-afternoon, power has been restored to our neighborhood.

At the office the next day, I learn that many of my colleagues have been dramatically affected by the quake. One, a resident of the far-flung Santa Clarita Valley, now faces a 4-hour commute both to and from work, thanks to a traffic-clogged detour forced by the collapse of a section of the Five freeway. Sarah's uncle's family, in the San Fernando Valley, has lost its potable water supply. And the Hollywood apartment building of another woman, an aspiring actress, has been yellow-tagged: she and her boyfriend are permitted to move their possessions out, but they must find a new place to live.

The filmmaker's apartment building seems to represent the high end of not-quite-condemnable damage levels. Although the film and the flatbed are fine, his apartment is a wreck, and the building likewise: one stairway is off-limits, and the building is full of cracks and generally unsteady-looking. The filmmaker, who studied engineering in college, expresses his opinion that one more good shaker would level the building. This is not confidence-inspiring, and I am pleased when I finally finish my editing work there a few weeks later and bid that particular building adieu. (The filmmaker moves to the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles shortly thereafter.)

After my work on the film ends, I return full-time to the wastepaper brokerage and to my resume-sending routine. In March, I get another editing job: another Cal State Northridge undergraduate short. The film (like many since) has been heavily inspired in tone by the cult film on which I had apprenticed. Watching the uncut footage, I find that the production values are surprisingly high for a student film, particularly the cinematography, and that two of the four lead performances are particularly good. The script leaves much to be desired, however.

The students will not be paying me, of course, so I agree to come after work most weekdays and edit for a few hours before going home. I have a cut together within a month, and the student director asks for only a few changes before the picture locks. Looking at the final product, I am pleased: my previous films have served as good practice, and my cutting in this film looks better than anything else I've done, particularly in combination with the good cinematography. The film itself doesn't cohere very well, thanks to its weak script, but the final few minutes--a tense, dramatic confrontation between two of the characters as the other two look on--are a powerful editing showpiece.

Further editing work is not forthcoming for a long time. Sometime later, through a "Drama-Logue" ad, I interview with a noted film music composer who is privately shooting a series of instructional videos about music. I show him the clip from the last film, and he is quite impressed and agrees to let me cut for him. He gives me a brief crash course in off-line video editing, and I assemble a three-minute performance number from footage he has shot. He doesn't shoot again for a while, and when he does, he lets me know that he's found an editor with an Avid who will be cutting for him. It begins to occur to me that Avid is looking like a little more than a fad--it may be something I'll have to learn if I want my skills to stay current.

In the summer, I write a short script just for fun and, since I'm not doing anything better with my time, I apply for numerous grants to try to shoot it. I don't get any, but while budgeting, I contact an editorial equipment vendor who offers me a pair of free passes to an industry trade show: ShowBiz Expo, which is held each year over a September weekend at the Convention Center in downtown Los Angeles. My old Wesleyan classmate Jeremy and I attend the Expo one day, and there I receive my first close-up demonstration of digital, non-linear editing.

To my eye, the Lightworks system, based on the DOS platform, looks like the easiest and most intuitive to use. The Avid, based on the Macintosh operating system, looks devilishly complicated. I ask a salesman how long it takes to become familiar with it; "60 hours' practice and you'll own it," he assures me. Staring at the computer's keyboard, each key featuring a strange-looking symbol, I have a hard time believing him.

But what is clear is that non-linear editing is an enormous step forward in editing technology. It deprives the editor of the tactile sensations of film editing, but replaces it with tremendous power: the power to make a change almost as fast as it can be thought of, without having to fuss with splices, locate trims, or any such nonsense. I have formerly been a film purist (a snobbery born, to some degree, from fear of the new), but that day, I am convinced by what I see that non-linear systems will revolutionize film editing, and that I'd better learn how to use them.

By spring of 1995, Sarah and I have moved again, to an enormous 2-bedroom apartment only a block away from our previous place. However, I haven't touched film in almost a year, and I haven't edited anything whatsoever since the composer's 3-minute video piece. Each seemingly endless day at the wastepaper brokerage feels like slow death--the work environment is pleasant, but my failure to get editing assignments is a constant blow to my psyche. Office work is not what I want to be doing; it's not what I came to Los Angeles to do.

I get a brief respite when I'm contacted by a recent Wesleyan graduate. His Wes student film has been shown at Sundance and other major festivals, and he has written a feature script and gotten a successful producer attached. He has also shot some of the scenes roughly on Hi-8 video, and would like to cut them for use as a demo for the script.

I read his script--it's nothing short of fantastic. A simple story about a good-looking high-school baseball player in Hawaii who becomes the object of a homely native girl's crush, it incorporates realistic human nature and genuine emotion, a fascinating cultural clash, and a refreshing absence of movie formula. I help the graduate to line up a below-cost video offline equipment rental for a weekend and give him two solid days' work cutting together his video footage.

Around the same time, I finally get another film through "Drama-Logue." A man in his late thirties has written and shot his first film, a low-budget 16mm short about a group of friends, mostly gay, who learn that one of their number has tested HIV-positive. One of the filmmaker's crew members has already cut the film together, but the filmmaker believes it needs more work.

I go to his house in West Hollywood and watch the cut on videotape. The film is quite good and has been cut competently, but it could indeed stand further refinement. The filmmaker and I discuss possible changes to be made and agree upon an arrangement similar to the one I had on the feature I had cut: I will leave the office at lunchtime and spend the rest of the day cutting, in exchange for only the amount of pay I would be losing at the office.

The film's story is heartfelt and mostly well-written, the production values are good, and the performances range from "very good" to "trying admirably." I work on it for about three weeks, sitting at a flatbed in the parlor between the filmmaker's living room and kitchen. Again, the filmmaker is very pleased with my work, and again, I am also: the film's story has been streamlined, some cuts neatened, and the emotional impact of some scenes heightened by my re-cutting. When the job is finished, I once again return to the wastepaper brokerage... but this time, not for long.

In June, I get a call from Louie, another Wesleyan friend in town. Louie has become friendly with the staff of a small Hollywood company which shoots television programs and edits them on their two Avids, and they are looking for an aspiring editor to come work for them part-time as an assistant. Louie's not interested, but thinks I may be. I am. I call the company and speak with Glenna, the principal editor, who--solely on the strength of Louie's recommendation--invites me to come work for them.

I show up for my first day and have a talk with Richard, the head of the company--also the director, lead cameraman, and supervising editor of the company's shows. Richard surprises me by insisting on paying me for each hour I work--a pleasant change from my recent arrangements--and at a rate slightly higher than what I'm making at the wastepaper brokerage. He also tells me that I will get to edit at some point, and that his editors have gone on to successful editing careers in dramatic television. He also suggests that I spend time after hours becoming familiar with the Avid.

Once again, I arrange a split schedule at the wastepaper brokerage and, the following week, I start heading over to Hollywood every day at lunchtime.

The company's specialty is a kind of infomercial--long-form TV specials (as well as short commercials) designed to raise funds for charitable organizations, such as children's hospitals or Third-World relief organizations. The company also does occasional work producing "electronic press kits" for feature films: that is, "making-of" segments, interviews with stars and director, and the like.

I work as both an assistant editor and an office assistant: in the first capacity, I make dubs of videotapes and log shots; in the second, I answer phones, help schedule shoot dates, type letters and memos, do some light accounting, order supplies, and generally keep the office running properly.

And one Saturday morning shortly after I begin work there, I let myself in and begin to work my way through Avid's tutorial manual and videotape. For my first non-linear experience, I learn how to digitize and catalog some stock footage of a rainforest, then how to make simple cuts. During later sessions, I cut more practice footage--two dramatic scenes from a fictional Western. I am able, with great effort, to make the machine do what I'd like it to, but I am not yet proficient. But my experience is just in time for my first Avid duty--soon, Richard assigns me to help edit some sound effects for a nearly-completed show.

In August, Richard tells me he'd like to hire me full-time. We come to terms--I will stay a minimum of six months, during which time Richard will slowly begin moving me up to editor status. I give the news to the wastepaper brokerage, and at the beginning of September, I start working full-time as an assistant Avid editor and office assistant.

Over the next six months, I work on a variety of shows: an hour-long children's hospital telethon; re-cuts of previously-produced Third-World relief telethons; documentary segments for a well-known annual cable telethon featuring A-list comedians. Mostly I do my assistant work--digitizing, logging incoming tapes, running to and from tape-stock suppliers, vaults, and online houses--but occasionally I am permitted actually to edit a little. For the comedy telethon, I get to re-cut a segment from the previous year's show.

I also get to assemble a 10-minute video presentation for the office holiday party of a major corporate client. The video is to be comprised of various segments set in remote locations, shot (and sometimes already roughly edited) by the company's executives. The assignment sounds easy but actually takes me most of an afternoon--I cannot bring myself to let the imperfections of the pre-edited material go through my hands without making an effort to correct them. As I work, the video's "producer," an officer of the client company, comes by the editing room every hour or so, politely but distinctly becoming ever more impatient. Nonetheless, he professes to be pleased with the product when I do finish, some four hours after starting.

I also cut another short film. My Wesleyan friend Jeremy, and another Wes friend named Owen, shoot a 16mm, black-and-white, silent Western out in Monument Valley, and they ask me to edit it with them. After-hours and on weekends, we put together a 12-minute cut on the Avid and add old-fashioned title cards to carry the dialogue. It's fun, if not too difficult creatively (Jeremy and Owen's coverage is scanty but very well-planned, and for the most part goes together as they had storyboarded), and I rack up another editing credit, my first on Avid.

1995 has been a frustratingly slow year, but at least it is ending with me working full-time in an editing environment (albeit not the one I envisioned)--which is more than can be said of 1994. As I exchange holiday gifts with my workmates, I harbor high hopes that my new-found Avid experience and my current position will lead to bigger things in the new year.