Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell

trattoria on the corner. With some help from the phrase book I was able to buy some rolls and espresso. Then I spread out my map on the table and started trying to figure out where I was.
    It turned out to be Trastevere, the Via del Moro, not far from the river and not far at all from the Ponte Sisto. I saw that it was, as Mimmo had said, a reasonable walk to the QED studio. Well, Trastevere was a good place for me to be, I thought. It might be nice to be on the far side of the river if things at QED were as peculiar as they seemed at first glance.
    I paid for my breakfast and left the trattoria. The street outside was narrow and cobbled, with low stucco buildings close on either side. I wandered around a bend or two and then I reached the river. A barge was moored to the west bank where I came out, with a cabin on it. The barge flew small Italian flags. A clothesline ran from the cabin to the mooring post, and a woman was hanging out laundry. I stopped in the middle of the Ponte Sisto and smoked a cigarette, watching her. It was a sunny day, but not yet hot.
    On the far side of the river I walked around the north end of the Farnese Palace and then got slightly lost in the tangle of streets behind it. But soon enough I found the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the area’s main drag, from which it was hard to miss the Piazza Navona. From there I had landmarks, and it was reassuring to discover that I could find my way from the piazza to QED without referring to the map.
    It was a slightly more structured scene at QED than it had been the day before. The doll-like woman and the frizzy-headed man were no longer in evidence. Mimmo and Dario, who turned out to be the dandy one, were waiting for me, and both seemed eager to please. Dario and I apologized to each other at some length, with Mimmo translating. I managed a couple of politenesses in Italian at this juncture, which seemed to please everyone. Then Dario spoke at even greater length about his aesthetic for the film, et cetera. I think Mimmo edited this heavily in his translation, but it was tiresome all the same. I dozed through it, keeping what I hoped was an expression of interest fixed on my face. Finally Dario finished, inspected his ultrathin fashionite wristwatch, and took off, no doubt to eat a four-hour Roman lunch somewhere.
    Mimmo and I looked at each other across that butcher-block table where we’d been sitting.
    “You seem like a sane person,” I said. “What do you want out of your life in this world?”
    “I want to make film,” Mimmo said.
    “You want to learn to edit?”
    “Yes, very much.”
    “Good. I can teach you to edit. You will learn how to edit. All I want is for you to do what I ask you to do.”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “So. Can you find me a screwdriver?”
    And Mimmo, with the cooperative spirit which he would consistently display for the next several weeks, did in fact find me a screwdriver. I put the plug back on the Steenbeck. And then we could get to work.
    It turned out, not much to my surprise, that we couldn’t get a work print processed until the next week. Mimmo, bless him, handled the details of that. I spent one day fooling around with mag stock after the film went out. I was thinking of logging it, but that was hopeless, pointless rather. The original crew had made a merry mess of everything. There were no slates on the sound, though part of it had been recorded with a cable connection to the camera, so there were bloops I could sync up to when the film came back from the lab. On the other hand, a roughly equal part had been recorded with crystal, and for those segments there weren’t even any bloops.
    Now I knew why they needed an editor who spoke English. I was going to have to sync up half the rushes by lip reading.
    Then there was the problem of the sound picture ratio. There was about ten times as much of the one as the other, or so it seemed to me from a glance at the film before it went out. I asked Mimmo to take up this