AADL Talks To: Jay Cassidy, Award-Winning Hollywood Film Editor and Former Photographer for the Michigan Daily

Tue, 08/13/2024 - 11:21am

When: May 6, 2024

In this episode, AADL Talks To Jay Cassidy. Jay is a Hollywood film editor known for his work on dozens of feature films, including Into the Wild, Silver Linings Playbook, and A Star Is Born. He's won several awards, including an Academy Award for Best Documentary Editing for the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth. Jay came to the University of Michigan in 1967 and was a photographer and editor for the University's newspaper, The Michigan Daily. He talks with us about the political and cultural events he witnessed in Ann Arbor during the late 1960s and early 1970s and how his experience at The Daily helped shape his work as a photographer and film editor. Over 5,000 of Jay's photographs taken for The Michigan Daily are available in the Jay Cassidy Photo Collection at the Bentley Historical Library.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: Hi, this is Amy.
• [00:00:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: And this is Elizabeth. And in this episode, AADL talks to Jay Cassidy. Jay is an award-winning Hollywood editor known for his work on many feature films, including Into The Wild, Silver Linings Playbook, A Star Is Born, and the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Jay came to the University of Michigan in 1967 and was a photographer and editor for the Michigan Daily. Jay talks with us about the many political and cultural events he and his camera documented during the 1960s and 70s, his evolution as a photographer and filmmaker, and his decision to become a film editor. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jay. You were born and raised in Chicago. What made you decide to attend U of M?
• [00:00:53] JAY CASSIDY: Well, I grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, and there was a great flood of people from Highland Park who went to the University of Michigan. It was seen as the -- if you didn't get into an Ivy League, and you had to go to a state school -- it was Number 1. But I actually was living in Washington, DC when I went to the University of Michigan and I got in. My sister was there for her final two years. I got in "early decision" and said, Enough of this college stuff. I'll just go there because I knew Ann Arbor a little bit. It just was a big relief and you know, your senior year in high school was without a certain pressure.
• [00:01:47] AMY CANTU: Did you know what you wanted to study? Did you have a plan already in place?
• [00:01:57] JAY CASSIDY: You knew what you were interested in. And how that manifested in what you studied, that's kind of what you're figuring out when you went to university. I knew what I was interested in, which had to do with journalism, it had to do with movies, and it had to do with photography. With those thoughts in mind, you have to navigate the resources at the university, which are, for those disciplines were...there's just Hubert Cohen was teaching. He was in the engineering department, and he was teaching. I had an 8:00 class with him. It wasn't really creative writing, it was legible writing, coherent writing. I can't remember what it was and I got to know him and really through him and some other people discovered the Cinema Guild, which became an enormous distraction in any academic pursuits I had. Because I could justify you're building a filmic literature by seeing all these movies. And so that's got to be part of your education, and it was.
• [00:03:32] ELIZABETH SMITH: What was your first introduction to film photography and working with that process?
• [00:03:39] JAY CASSIDY: I had as a kid benefited by having cameras around. My grandfather had brought some cameras from Germany, and he had given them to me. As a hobbyist kid, you learned photography and the darkroom techniques and that thing. Certainly in high school, you were aware that this was a bigger pursuit in terms of the cultural range of what photography was and who the great photographers were. I certainly knew those things and had studied them in high school.
• [00:04:32] AMY CANTU: When you got to Ann Arbor, you were here at a pretty remarkable time in the city's history and the university's history.
• [00:04:39] JAY CASSIDY: Sure.
• [00:04:39] AMY CANTU: Politically, culturally, socially -- it was really something. Did you fall right into that? Were you part of some of the various political groups at the time, or did your photography actually acquaint you with that? I know that you worked for the Michigan Daily.
• [00:05:01] JAY CASSIDY: Yes.
• [00:05:01] AMY CANTU: Can you talk a little bit about how you became involved and how quickly and what it looked like to you?
• [00:05:08] JAY CASSIDY: As a freshman, I wanted to go to work for the Daily. I knew about the Daily by reputation, and there was the building on Maynard Street. For the first time -- in probably September of 1967 when I've been there for a week or two -- they had a call for people who were interested in working at the Daily. I went to that event. The photo editor of the time was Andy Sacks, who I know you guys have interviewed. I met the various people on the photo staff at that time. Tom Copi -- he had graduated, and I think he was working on the Ensian -- but he was around. Robert Sheffield... Oh, boy, it's hard to remember everybody. But I met the core people at that time and I came spectacularly unprepared in the way of a portfolio to show the work. I had one picture. I showed them the one picture and sort of rolled my eyes or whatever. Then the process was that people are given a chance, and if they don't blow it, they work their way onto the Photo staff. And so I did in fall of 1967. And it was great training doing university -- just learning how to conduct yourself, you know, as you go to cover things. To your question: Very soon the coverage was required to be of political events. And so I think I learned and experienced the politics in Ann Arbor straight through The Daily. When you're 18, you're influenced easily often. What you're influenced by is coming at you from more than one source. You have that process of sorting up what's legitimate and what's not. I think The Daily gave you a framework for helping to think about that because The Daily aspired -- you know, we always said it aspired to be the New York Times of the West or of the Midwest. Those standards got filtered down to us and that helped -- a framework of thinking about this barrage of different political events that were happening. The two most significant events of the 60s, as you look back, are Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. In many ways, Civil Rights had taken a very dark turn with the riots. I went to U of M a month and a half after the Detroit Riots in 1967, and the Vietnam War was about to take a really dark turn in the January of 1968 with the Tet Offensive, so that both of those events...they were a context for the thinking at the time, and the experience at the time. You couldn't escape it. When you talk about the dysfunction now in Congress, this isn't the first time there's been a political divide in the country that rends people, families, and discussions. With Vietnam, for us, it was always a neurosis because you had friends who were involved in the military and a father who had been very much involved in the military in the Second World War. Those neuroses, they came to bear on one's behavior. Those were the forces at that time, thinking back. And now we have a quite different situation, but never mind.
• [00:10:33] AMY CANTU: Did you join the SDS or did you protest the Vietnam War directly? Or were you only experiencing it through your photography for The Daily?
• [00:10:43] JAY CASSIDY: Psychologically, any club that would have me, I don't want to join, to quote Woody Allen [LAUGHTER]. You know, I was very leery about... Also, in covering these events, you saw the dynamics of the people. And of course, when you see the dynamics of human beings, you realize -- eye-rolling -- I'm going to join this group with those people? So I was not. Here again, The Daily was a perfect framework to observe and keep my own judgment to myself.
• [00:11:25] ELIZABETH SMITH: You worked at The Michigan Daily for about three years, and then you also worked as a photo editor. Can you talk about that transition and how the job was different?
• [00:11:34] JAY CASSIDY: The photo editorship, of course, was a rolling job, in that as you got to be a junior, usually that's when you inherited it, and you had it for part of your senior year. I got it in, I have to remember, I think it was the winter of 1970, and had it. Then I got mononucleosis, so I had to pass the gauntlet, maybe in April or something. I really got sick and so I passed the gauntlet, and then that was pretty much... I didn't do much in the fall of 1970 or '71. Then in '71, I didn't do anything. I was off the staff. But after getting sick, I didn't do much for The Daily...other than like it and I was friends with all the people who were working there.
• [00:12:39] AMY CANTU: Sticking with the Daily for a minute, you have a remarkable number of negatives at the Bentley Historical Library. Oh, my gosh. Protests of the ROTC bombing, SDS meetings, the South University riot. Which of these negatives -- or are there particular photographs that stand out for you as something you're particularly proud of? Any of the photos?
• [00:13:08] JAY CASSIDY: Nancy Bartlett at the Bentley had this idea in, I think it was 2006, about contacting photographers from earlier eras, from The Daily and building up the Bentley library collection. Her original idea was, Send us your 10 best pictures from that time. I was thinking about that a lot. Then I had all the negatives from that time and they were in a storage unit, so I was like, This is not good. It was a couple year process, but from about 2007-2010, I said, These negatives -- though I have them in my possession -- they really don't belong to me. They belong to the university because the university permitted me to wear the mantle of Michigan Daily photographer, which gained me access and gained me a privilege to do this photography. Frankly, I don't want any money. The Bentley is offering a place to store them, which is far better than what I have. I had a 35-millimeter scanner. I ended up -- and it took a couple of years scanning all the negatives into digital form, and then spent quite a bit of time cataloging them. But I realized quite quickly that what I might choose as a good photograph, it may be doing a disservice to the event, and the event was far more illuminating -- any of these events -- when you looked at the whole series of pictures. So you have good pictures, bad pictures, technically bad pictures, all on a roll. If you just look at them one after the other, you get a view of the event that's different. If you say, Ok, I'm going to give these to the University of Michigan, I'm going to relinquish all rights to them because... you know, I just feel that's what you should do. But at the same time, you're saying, Future people who look at these pictures in the library, you have a better interpretation because you have all of them. All of those lofty thoughts... Suddenly, I had no weekends because all you're doing is scanning. It was a lot of work. As soon as you're done, you're happy you did it. So that's been there 10 years. The library keeps me informed when people request pictures and things. It's very gratifying to see who, why, and what people are looking at these pictures for. I consider that's kind of the final circle for my Michigan Daily event. It's like, give it back and let the world look at it. In this period, certainly, it was a couple of years later, but they also digitized The Daily. It's completely done now, and so you can look back. I had a little trouble when I was doing it because that wasn't there, and so I couldn't reference things exactly. I remember when it finally was there, I was able to look up some things and, Oh, that happened there, and this sequence of events occurred that way. But it's fantastic. So what the Bentley's done is certainly -- for Ann Arbor's history and Michigan's history -- is fantastic.
• [00:17:46] AMY CANTU: We use that Michigan Daily archive all the time.
• [00:17:48] JAY CASSIDY: Oh, I bet. When I was there, there were the bound volumes in the library, and they were just that. They were versions of the paper that were bound together. They might have had them from the teens, and they were in that off-library section of The Daily. It wasn't like we didn't look at them and use them, but the paper was not going to survive that newsprint. I should also say I was so lucky to be there when they printed the paper down in the basement, you know when it was complete... They set all the typesetters. That was a fantastic experience. We all have little burn marks from where you got a little lead... If you didn't have a scar from lead popping off of something... But it would happen at 2:00 in the morning when you're putting the paper to bed. That was the end of a certain technology. By the late 70s, it was all done. It's kind of like you got to be in a battleship when they aim the battleship with little mechanical computers. It felt like that technology.
• [00:19:17] ELIZABETH SMITH: Wow. I was curious about what it was like when you were on assignment. Was it just you usually, or were there multiple photographers? And then what were you looking for when you were assigned these events and taking photographs?
• [00:19:30] JAY CASSIDY: It varied. Sometimes it was just me. Sometimes you'd go with another writer from the paper and sometimes when we had the Chicago Bureau for the Democratic National Convention, there were several photographers and there's several writers. We all went our own way to do the coverage. It was a big enough event that made sense. It varied by the event. A lot of the events, especially at the university, you'd just go to alone. Go cover Jim Morrison and The Doors at the -- I can't even remember the place. I remember the hall. So you'd go cover that concert, which was spectacular. And he was drunk; Jim Morrison had to be taken offstage and it became a minor legend in The Doors history, that concert. A lot of it, you're just doing it on your own. Sometimes you have a writer who sets you up and says, This is why we're doing it. Sometimes not. You don't know what you're going to find often. You did those assignments, especially the ones of rallies and political things. You just didn't know what was going to happen.
• [00:21:04] AMY CANTU: Were you ever in a particularly precarious position? Were there any scary moments? You certainly were in a few tense political...
• [00:21:15] JAY CASSIDY: There were dumb street riots in the June of 1969 that were quasi-political, but they didn't really elevate much beyond a spring riot that you might have in like Florida. You know, it was about that level. Those pitted the Ann Arbor police against the kids demonstrating in the street, not really demonstrating because most of the population of students was gone at that time. And so, these kind of dumb riots... I did get beat up by the Ann Arbor Police in that, and another photographer took a great picture of me getting whacked with the billy clubs. But that was a stupid riot. It wasn't political at all. Robben Fleming was present and he handled it so well. Anyway...
• [00:22:28] ELIZABETH SMITH: At some point, you figured that you wanted to be a filmmaker. Can you talk a little bit about what in your experience with photography might have led you to that, or what was it that...?
• [00:22:43] JAY CASSIDY: I think it's...in that photography and the newspaper are variations of storytelling. I think that making films became stories in another medium. I was very attracted to documentaries initially and I was very attracted to movies that, here again, great cultural changes, the mid-'60s, the films of the French New Wave, the Italians, started being available to be seen in this country. And those stories were not being told in the Hollywood / television venue at that time. It became a quite eye-opening vision that you could tell stories of that nature, whatever that nature was, and have them be a film. 1967 also Bonnie and Clyde got released at the State Theater and it played for two weeks and was gone. Then Pauline Kael wrote this article about the film in, I think it was November of 1967 in the New Yorker about the film, and Warren Beatty convinced... Warner Brothers hated the film and Jack Warner only made it because Warren was a star at the time. In January of 1968, the film got a re-release and it came back to the State Theater. I had read the New Yorker article and I said, I got to see this. I went like three times because it was so unlike anything that was coming out of Hollywood at that time. It was such smart storytelling. And I eventually met all of the participants in my years out here. I never lost my fanboy appreciation of that film. Actually, with Mr. Beatty, I knew him out here in another context, and we had good discussions about Bonnie and Clyde. He was very happy to see some little punk whose life was changed by that movie.
• [00:25:26] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious about any work you did with the Ann Arbor Film Festival or other festivals in town. I read that you worked with George Manupelli in the '70s?
• [00:25:36] JAY CASSIDY: Yes. In navigating the university to find what I liked, I was not in the art school, but I could take courses in the art school, and as a freshman, I took George's beginning filmmaking class and then got to know him. I think he might have had another class, but still got to know him. I think also in my freshman year, I got on the board of Cinema Guild, and that was probably through Hugh Cohen and others that I met. When you're on the Board of Cinema Guild, you are overseeing that week of the Ann Arbor Film Festival because at that point, it was the Architecture and Design -- which is now called Loach, Loach Hall, I think it's named? [OVERLAPPING "Lorch"] But that building was the Architecture and Design building, that art and architecture building. Cinema Guild sort of oversaw it, so that's how I got involved in that. Then George, I think in 1971 or 2, he got a job at the university in Toronto and so he left U of M. Then the management became quite, um, "Who's going to do it?" I helped out in 1970, in '71, in '72. When he left, I did some of the mechanical management -- it would have been '72, I think -- but at the same time, I was leaving Ann Arbor in '72 as well, so I wasn't going to be able to do it forever. But it got passed around. John Caldwell was involved and Woody Sempliner. First, while George was away, in order to keep the festival going, Cinema Guild was involved. Then the film festival, years after I left, became the separate entity and then got involved with the Michigan Theater. It's a whole different self-sustaining entity now. But at the beginning, it was, How was George going to run it from Toronto?
• [00:28:16] AMY CANTU: You were very influenced by contemporary cinema that was happening at the time. You mentioned with Bonnie and Clyde, as well as New Wave and some of the foreign film that the Campus Cinema was showing and presumably experimental film too with the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Did you know that you wanted to do editing at that point, or did you have other ideas about how you wanted to pursue a film career? How did it lead to editing?
• [00:28:47] JAY CASSIDY: When I left Ann Arbor, I had gotten a job working on the McGovern campaign in 1972 running for president for a firm that was doing the political advertising. In that situation in Washington DC I started editing these political commercials and that led to...the company also did documentaries, so I worked editing some of the documentaries. Then I came to California and you were into a much more...a different, a real industry. When you analyze the industry, you have to figure out where the fun is. The fun, it's often fun if you're a director, it's often fun if you're a writer. It's certainly fun if you're an editor. And everybody else--it's hard work. You very quickly figure out that it's no fun on a set. You have to get up early in the morning and you're just there to help a cameraman or a director have fun, and maybe the actors, but it's a particular kind of torture for the actors. Once you kind of sort out what the process is and then you figure out the editing is... You know, you do a film three times: You do it when you write it, you do it when you shoot it, and then you do it when you edit it. The writing extends over all three parts of the process. So, having sort of figured that out, I gravitated toward the editing and stayed there.
• [00:30:30] ELIZABETH SMITH: Did you have any influence from people you were working with that led you in that direction and people that you collaborated with frequently?
• [00:30:37] JAY CASSIDY: When I was out here or in Ann Arbor?
• [00:30:40] AMY CANTU: Either one. What in Ann Arbor led you to that future work that you did?
• [00:30:46] JAY CASSIDY: We made a bunch of films in Ann Arbor -- just little groups of people. Sometimes they would get run at the film festival and so I did some of those. In that case, you're doing everything: You're shooting it, you're editing it. You're casting the people and directing it. Learning filmmaking on that level was very valuable to what became getting involved in the industry was.
• [00:31:15] AMY CANTU: Were you friends with Lawrence Kasden in Ann Arbor?
• [00:31:18] JAY CASSIDY: I was. He was on the Cinema Guild Board. So we saw each other in that respect. He said he was -- when we were both leaving Ann Arbor, he said, "I'm going to write my way in." And he certainly did.
• [00:31:32] AMY CANTU: [LAUGHTER] He sure did. Were there other cultural events -- the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival...? I know you did some coverage in the Canterbury House and the Film Festival. Can you talk a little bit about those experiences and how they impacted your work and life?
• [00:31:54] JAY CASSIDY: The first Blues Festival, it would have been August of 1969 -- I think it was early August -- was a real watershed moment for Ann Arbor. And I didn't have anything to do with this organization, but I knew the group that was. They were finding people like Clifton Chenier who had completely gold teeth and played an accordion. This is not what is to be expected at a university concert, and singing Zydeco music. They brought together such a wealth of blues players in that two days that... I look back at who played and I said, I mean, Oh, my God, all of these people. In many cases, they were older and as we all know, the blues tradition had been rediscovered in the early 60s in the wake of rock and roll and the Folk Revolution, and it certainly extended into blues players. Many of these people you could find on the Harry Smith recording, which was such a watershed recording, and the other field recordings that had been done in the 30s and 40s, and there they were up on stage. It was quite an event for Ann Arbor, and then I was gone by the time there was another one. But I certainly did attend that and took pictures that sit in the Bentley Archive.
• [00:33:58] ELIZABETH SMITH: Also, you mentioned Andy Sacks earlier on and you also knew Fred LaBour.
• [00:34:03] JAY CASSIDY: The one thing about a university situation, you meet people and make friends that you still have today. Sacks and Labour being two of them, and Sarah Krulwich, who was a photographer on The Daily and who really broke some barriers with the athletic department. I'm sure you know those stories about her being the first female photographer allowed on the field and almost thrown off publicly in the middle of a Michigan football game. She has her own quite interesting...and if you haven't talked to her, you should. I ended up taking some pictures of her about to be thrown off the field at that time. You sort of don't realize that at the time, what she's doing, but the athletic department is what you'd expected to have been at that time, which isn't to say it was any worse or better than other athletic departments. But it was... Female sports and female journalists covering it? That just didn't happen. It was something else. And breaking it down, Sarah contributed a little chink in that. It's so funny, as you look at Ann Arbor history: I was talking to Fred about this. Michigan just won this last year and so they got a lot of coverage. Everyone called the Michigan Stadium the Big House on the coverage. I was thinking back when I was there. Nobody called it the Big House. It was just the Michigan Stadium, and it was big, and it held 100,000 people plus or whatever it was. Then it was a big experiment to put down tartan turf, I think, in 1969, which ended up with rug burns for football players. Then I think that was yanked out, and so we were all aware about what an iconic stadium it was, but nobody called it the Big House, nor did everybody at that time, finish a sentence by saying "Go Blue!" [LAUGHTER]. What you have now is every phrase you finish it: "Go Blue!" Nobody said that. We're talking to Fred and I asked him, like, Reality check. I don't remember saying "Go Blue" as a chant at that time, nor "The Big House." So I just wonder when that branding occurred. But I've been gone for a long time. There's a lot of time for it to have established itself as the norm.
• [00:37:18] ELIZABETH SMITH: Of your time in Ann Arbor, what are you most proud of?
• [00:37:22] JAY CASSIDY: One is getting out. [LAUGHTER]. It became an easy, comfortable place to be because you were with groups that agreed with you on everything. It was a fairly small-scale view of the world. People ahead of me like Daniel Okrent, who was at The Daily a couple of years ahead of me, he went off and started working in New York in the publishing industry. You realized, Oh, this is a little moment in your life. But you better leave it behind because it's just that -- a moment -- and it's too comfortable and it's too easy to stay and there are challenges out there that you better engage in.
• [00:38:14] AMY CANTU: This is maybe a strange question. I was just curious if in any of your work, from all the films that you've been affiliated with in the last 50 years: Does Ann Arbor show up in any of the decisions you have made as an editor? Was there ever a moment where you're thinking, I learned something from my time in Ann Arbor that shows up. Or was there ever a moment where you just remembered an event or a situation or a person from your time in Ann Arbor that helped you make decisions as a creative person?
• [00:38:53] JAY CASSIDY: I think the latter. And working on some of the documentaries, like on An Inconvenient Truth, which we did in 2005. You were working in a context where you realized the film was not so much about climate change and global warming as it was about what happened to Al Gore from 2000. Here it was five years later. It became... The story of that film is what happened to Al Gore. The plot is his telling about his history with studying global warming and legislature and all that. So the distinction between what the story is and what the plot is...that's a discipline that I think you learn -- that I learned -- out of journalism. That you had to sort that out. If you're telling the story, you're telling the story which is going to engage the audience, and the cold hard science would not engage. But what had Al done in those five years? And then we had the horrible situation of Katrina happening. We started to make the film -- it actually had been shot; the stuff with Al Gore -- and I hadn't actually started working on the editing of the film. But Katrina happened and suddenly you had this event that was pretty shocking, that people could be treated that way during a weather event, and that as a context to the film. That was standard stuff I learned at The Michigan Daily -- is how to think about that. You're now making this movie, and you didn't even prepare for it, but there's a context to it that people can relate to, and you have to use that context to help tell your story.
• [00:41:22] AMY CANTU: That's really fascinating.
• [00:41:24] JAY CASSIDY: It's a long time ago that I was there, but it was the right place for me. I was very lucky.
• [00:41:34] AMY CANTU: Well, thank you so much for talking with us. [MUSIC]
• [00:41:36] JAY CASSIDY: My pleasure.
• [00:41:41] AMY CANTU: AADL Talk To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library. [MUSIC]