For Lost Planet's Charlie Johnston, Power is Nothing Without Control
The quiet and low-key editor, whose praises are sung by a chorus of agency clients, chalks up his success to the joys of working for Hank Corwin.
For Charlie Johnston, Power is Nothing Without Control
The quiet and low-key Lost Planet editor, whose praises are
sung by a chorus of agency clients, chalks up his success
to the joys of working for Hank Corwin.
By Anthony Vagnoni
What have Lost Planet Editor Charlie Johnston and former Olympic track and field champion Carl Lewis got in common? They both know the difference between power and control.
Lewis showed it off in all those appearances he made in the 1990s as the star of a bevy of European print and TV ads for Pirelli. In the spots, he was seen racing across oceans and leaping over skyscrapers, running barefoot with creepy tire treads on the soles of his feet. The slogan said it all: "Power is nothing without control."
For Johnston, the phrase has a somewhat different meaning, as it gets to the heart of what he loves about his craft. As an editor, he's the guy in the dark room, sifting through hours of footage, sometimes with a director or an agency team by his side, often with just an assistant or all alone. In the process, he's faced with what all editors have: the ability to take a director's work and shape it in his or her own way. And that has a tremendous appeal to him.
"There's a tremendous amount of power in the edit room," says the 39-year old Chicago native. He remembers joking with a director once – it was Anna Gabriel, who shot Peter Gabriel's 2003 video "Growing Up," which Johnston edited – "you may have all the power, but I have all the control."
To Johnston, directors may rule the set, but control over what the final product looks like resides in the edit suite, where everything comes together. "We editors sit in a room and no one pays any attention to us, but whatever it is we're working on literally comes to life in the edit. To be able to do that is what I'm passionate about."
He discovered this passion in a purely roundabout way. A Chicago native, he went to college in Minnesota and landed a job on a made-for-cable movie shoot in Texas thanks to a school friend. That eventually led to a job in Los Angeles working for Director Oliver Stone's development company, which was where he met Lost Planet founder and Editor Hank Corwin, who was cutting the director's 1995 historical drama "Nixon." When Stone was getting geared up for his next film, "U Turn," Johnston called Corwin and asked if he could work under him as an apprentice. He landed the gig, which was where he got his first taste of the intoxicating power of editorial. After that, he was hooked.
Today his work represents a broad range of styles, categories and techniques. His Google Chrome "Speed Test" spots, produced for BBH in New York and produced by 1st Ave Machine, demonstrate his ability to drive concepts via editing and sound design. Another recent notable project is his "Barrel Tree" holiday spot for Arnold Worldwide and Jack Daniels; told in a documentary style, Johnston says it was the result of a great collaboration with the director, Jeff Preiss of Epoch.
He made the leap from assisting to editing in 2002 while working with Corwin on a campaign to launch the Cingular wireless brand from BBDO. Entirely on his own, he took some footage of director Sam Bayer's brother dancing around on the set and cut it to a recording of Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf." The agency loved it, he recalls, and decided to run it on air.
Freelance producer Peter Feldman, who was most recently on staff at BBDO, New York, first met Johnston around this time. "He was seriously buttoned up, as every assistant needs to be - it's one of the hardest, most under-recognized gigs out there - but so relaxed and friendly, too," Feldman recalls. "And I knew to keep an eye on him, because the 'Hank Corwin Institute of Higher Editorial Learning' had already been established. Hank has been a teacher, mentor and sponsor of a generation of great editors, and he and his company have developed so much talent. Charlie was part of that educational process that Hank created."
What makes Johnston a good editor, in Feldman's view, is the mix of qualities he possesses. "There's taste, for sure, but he also puts out a vibe that's inviting and conducive to collaboration. He has infinite patience, along with a great attitude and he works very hard. And he's extremely tolerant. Agency people can be incredibly inconsiderate in an edit room - someone, i.e. the editor, is trying to concentrate on something difficult, and we're generally too loud, distracting and self-involved to notice that we're often not helping. Charlie rolls with all of this effortlessly, and still has his ears and mind wide open when we shout out things out for him to try."
Initially based in Lost Planet's L.A. office, Johnston moved to New York in 2003, when he saw an opportunity to grow as an editor that he felt he wouldn't get in California. He's one of a number of assistants who've come up through the ranks there, a fact he says helps make the place special and breeds a distinctive form of camaraderie among its editor corps. And of course, it helps that you're working under a talent like Corwin himself, who's no less taken with Johnston than Johnston's taken with him.
"Charlie listens," Corwin says. "As an editor, it's a stellar quality. He takes everything in, and comes up with an amazing synthesis. He's a great editor without the neurotic baggage. Sometimes I'll look at his work and be stunned. How can he be such a good and seemingly normal guy, and come up with that kind of depth in his work?"
The two share a few things worth pointing out. One is their work ethic, both of which are legend. They also were both pre-med students at one point in their lives, and both lost interest in medicine but found themselves captivated by, of all things, organic chemistry. The explanation is telling.
"We were drawn to it because it's a riddle, it's a mystery," says Johnston. "It demands real problem-solving, not just punching numbers into computers and getting an answer. The experience is visceral." That search for the solution is what drives him as an editor, he adds. "I come to work each day knowing I'm going to find an answer for whatever problem I'm working on," he says. "I know it's out there - it might be a perfect piece of music, or that perfect shot, or a piece of sound design that I create."
He's driven not only to solve the puzzle, but to wow those watching from the stands with his ease and speed at doing so, too - think Carl Lewis racing across the finish line. "Part of it is a competitive thing," he admits. "I want to knock the agency's socks off, and have them abandon what they were expecting and embrace what I've done. It's like with Hank - he's at his best when he's defying expectations and giving the agency something that they weren't looking for."
Johnston's first major break as an editor came in 2003, the same year he moved from L.A. to New York, when a Michel Gondry music video assignment kind of fell into his lap. Titled "The Hardest Button to Button" for The White Stripes, it's a dizzying clip that consists of Jack and Meg White seen in a variety of jump-cut scenes shot on the streets in and around New York City. In each shot, the pair appears in multiple, stutter-stepped images, often arranged side by side in tight formation like dominoes ready to be toppled.
The clip was something of a disaster, recalls Johnston, as it just wasn't coming together in post production. Gondry is a notoriously experimental filmmaker, not afraid of taking risks, often salvaging (if not enhancing) what he's shot once he gets into the edit room. The problem was that he just couldn't get the puzzle pieces to fit together on this project, Johnston says. He was about to bring in his brother Olivier to edit it when he was introduced to Johnston.
Let's let Gondry tell the story from here. "I was putting together this video and had worn out my editor, who nearly overdosed on aspirin," the director recounts. "It was a fairly simple idea, but all the effects were done in cutting the footage, beat by beat, and placing them in a reversed order. Also, the band was playing forward and all that in synch. My editor was getting more and more nervous and afraid to ask me again what I had explained to him 150 times already. There was obviously a communication problem, and a bit of personal incompatibility.
"Then came Charlie Johnson. He didn't talk much, but he immediately un-entangled the situation. His brain was working like mine, so my blurry, mumbled explanations made sense to him, as they did to me. It became an easy job. Charlie is a natural and unafraid of my chaos. He became a precious collaborator to me, and we did many projects together." Gondry's final thought, offered in an almost offhand way, sums it up: "It's very comforting to work with someone that makes you feel you're not crazy."
What was it about the two that clicked? "I have no idea," Johnston says. "It's like Michel says, you had to get into the right rhythm for the idea of the video to work. I just understood what he was going for, and I think he felt safe. I didn't have much to say about it, I just did it the way he wanted it done."
The video marked the beginning of a number of projects Johnston and Gondry did together; indeed, for much of the next year the pair worked together consistently, Johnston recalls, cutting both videos and commercials as well as longer-format projects for Gondry's DVD releases. The experience was great for Johnston, given the reliance that Gondry has on the post production process to make his ideas work. "Michel invents things in the edit room," Johnston says. "He knows what he shot, but he also knows that once he starts to edit it, he's going to create something different, something better."
Johnston's own ability to make things better in the edit is not lost on his agency clients. "Smart editors are always good editors, and that description fits Charlie," says Steve Peck, an ACD at BBH who worked with him on the Google Chrome spots. "He's a master of his craft who really understands the medium, and you can tell from the range of work he's done, whether it's been commercials or his music video work with Gondry. He's got a great sense of rhythm, whether you're talking about it in a visual sense or with his use of sound. He's also really collaborative, and is always willing to try things out. He's never convinced that there's only one way to do something. It was great to have someone like him to work with on this campaign, especially for a client like Google, which puts a lot of emphasis on experimentation, collaboration and sharing."
Brad Powell is a freelance agency producer who's worked with Johnston on a variety of campaigns out of agencies such as The Martin Agency, Hill Holliday and BBDO in Atlanta. "The most amazing thing about Charlie is that, when you introduce him to people, you're totally confident that they're going to love working with him," Powell says. "He's so good and so talented and so easy to work with."
Powell has gotten great feedback from people to whom he's recommended Johnston, and "you love to hear that," he adds. "It just confirms your opinion of him. He's super versatile; a great storyteller who's also great with fashion and with highly stylized content. He's also great at knowing just what your project needs, and he's often headed there before you've even asked him for something."
As with most editors working at the top of their game, Johnston often plays a big part in determining the final look and feel of a project. "It's a completely decisive role," Feldman observes, "and when it comes to Charlie, he's one of those guys who has no agenda other than presenting what he feels are the best takes, the best edit, the best music and mix and creative approach - which can at times be very different than what you originally conceived - along with doing what the agency wants and needs. We trust great editors to know what's best, so Charlie often gets deferred to about all aspects of the cut, the music and even the eventual look."
Johnston lives in New Jersey with his young family; he's got three kids, all under the age of 10. He admits that his career has flourished at a price, and that it's put a strain on his family and social life. "You have to abandon a lot of friendships to do this kind of work, and you spend lots of time not seeing the sun," he says. "It's part of the job, and it's kind of sad, but the work makes up for it. Every day brings something new and rewarding."
Lost Planet is the only place he's ever worked as an editor, and he feels strongly about the company. "There are lots of places where assistants never get the chance to move up and become editors, but not here. Hank doesn't steal talent, he doesn't recruit. He grows editors. Everyone here started at the bottom, and it's made it like a family for us, because we all came up the same way and we're all headed in the same direction.
"It's also like a military academy," Johnston continues. "If you don't have the same level of focus and drive, you get weeded out pretty quickly. We all have that, because we all love editing, and we've all learned from Hank." What were the lessons? He sums them up in three truisms: "Never settle," says Johnston. "Nothing should be easy. And music and sound, music and sound, music and sound."
Johnston says he's not really interested in doing anything other than what he's doing now. Could he see himself taking the next step to start directing? He's not sure, but knows that he doesn't really have that bug. And for his clients, that's probably a good thing.
"Directors you work with whether you like them or not," Feldman sums up. "Editors you work with because you like them, because of the feeling of trust and confidence you have in them and the level of collaboration you get from them. You really have to feel that, and Charlie makes it easy to feel that way. His is a welcoming, generous spirit."
Johnston says Corwin likes to tease his guys about outlasting them as an editor. "He tells us he's going to still be cutting when we're either dead or retired," he laughs. "And that's probably true. I can't see Hank ever quitting. I'm not sure if that's for me, but then I can't really see myself leaving, either. I'd just miss it too much."
Published 11, January, 2012
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