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Still one of the best-selling books of all time since its publication in 1976. The Hite Report offered a groundbreaking insight into women’s sexual desires through anonymous survey responses. Despite her success in demystifying vulvas and those who possess them, the book’s author Cher Hite remains a relatively obscure figure in popular culture. Director Nicole Newnam’s latest film, The disappearance of Sher Hitetries to bring this woman back into relevance as he investigates why her legacy has remained untold for so long.
Editor Eileen Meyer talks to Filmmaker about her experience cutting this project, while also offering insight into how she came to work in the industry as a whole.
See all the answers to our annual Sundance Editor Interviews here.
director: How and why did you end up editing your film? What were the factors and qualities that led to your being hired for this job?
Mayer: I worked closely with Nicole Newnam on the 2020 film Creep camp. We developed an instant comfort with each other on this film and our collaborative style left us with a strong desire to work together in the future. When she approached me about the Shere Hite project, I was immediately intrigued. I spent many, many hours researching Cher and her work while we were waiting for the funding to come together, and it was very clear to me how compelling her story could be on film. NBC News Studios teamed up with This Machine in early 2022 and we started editing right away. It was a whirlwind from there.
director: In terms of the progression of your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to improve, or keep, or remove, or completely redo?
Mayer: Our immediate goal was to understand the language of the film: the elements, the pace, the music and the voice. As a result, we approached the cut linearly, so the first 20-30 minutes of editing were very fine-tuned before we started building the rest of the montage.
Once we felt collectively comfortable with the language and key elements of the film, it was easier for us to build the rest at a faster pace and with a clearer vision for telling the story.
There were many different elements available: Cher’s personal archives at Harvard contained thousands of small pieces of paper with her ideas and thoughts scribbled down, hundreds of hours of archival video, her several published books, including a personal autobiography, and hundreds of original and anonymous written and audio surveys .
One of our most important goals was to tease out and improve Cher’s relationship with her anonymous respondents. It was essential for us to highlight the intimacy of this dialogue and how she eventually conveyed these confessions to the public through her books. The scraps of paper in her personal archive proved especially valuable to how we built Cher’s first-person voice, which drives much of the story. It also helped show how personal the material was for Cher, a key element of her character.
It was essential for us to emphasize that Cher believes that the personal is political. She pushed boundaries, confronted biases around gender roles, and continued to confront politics head-on, though her questioning of societal norms caused more controversy.
Finally, and most importantly, we decided to highlight how feminist thought and knowledge about vulvar bodies has been suppressed over and over again for centuries.
director: How did you achieve these goals? What kinds of editing techniques, or processes, or screening feedback allowed this work to happen?
Mayer: We were faced with a very short timeline, so we decided the best way forward was to build the film sequentially from start to finish. Each step and each decision was built upon the previous scene or series of scenes to maintain a consistent rhythm, tone and story.
Our first full build wasn’t finished until just before the Sundance submission deadline. Fortunately, by this point we had a really strong sense of overall structure and were able to work through each scene and sequence as we built to ensure a polished rough build.
We worked with several story consultants for perspective at each stage of the process, and our consulting editor, Mary Lampson, was instrumental in mentoring, providing us with a week-long editing workshop mid-edit and many rounds of notes and feedback along the way.
Several feedback screenings in recent months provided the reactions and feedback points we needed to help us get to the nitty-gritty.
director: As an editor, how did you get into the business and what influences have influenced your work?
Mayer: I studied documentary film at Hampshire College and during my year-long thesis project I realized that editing was my favorite part of the end-to-end process.
My first job out of college was at a small documentary production company in New York. I went from being an unpaid intern to doing it all—office manager, camera assistant, boom operator, production assistant, editorial assistant—as the size of the company allowed me to try out a wide variety of jobs. As an Associate Editor, I had the privilege of working with Nancy Baker as my first mentor, and she shaped me and my work and ultimately deepened my desire to pursue editing.
After that job I moved to Memphis, Tennessee and started focusing on my own film projects about the history of local music and lived there for six years. During my time in Memphis, I worked with several inspiring filmmakers who mentored me and gave me my first editing jobs. Since it was a smaller town, I was able to work my way up from assistant to editor very quickly.
After moving to Los Angeles in 2013, I edited my first feature documentary as the film’s co-editor The best of enemies, a collaboration between director Morgan Neville and director/musician Robert Gordon. I was lucky enough to co-edit this film with Aaron Wickendon, who became my next great editing mentor on several films since then. After the release of The best of enemiesI pursued the Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship and was accepted in my second round of applications in 2016. It opened many doors for my career.
director: What editing system did you use and why?
Mayer: I’ve been editing with Avid the last few movies. I prefer Premiere Pro as it’s much more intuitive for me since learning [Final Cut Pro] 7 — the best software ever.
director: What was the hardest scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?
Mayer: There were many complex scenes in this film, but one that stands out as the most difficult is with illustrator Robert McGuinness, who worked with Cher early in her modeling career. She served as inspiration for his crime fiction book covers and illustrated posters.
Cher was Robert’s muse and as a result he created hundreds of photographs, pencil drawings, paintings and artwork that covered his studio where we interviewed him. Given the volume of small elements, we had to cut the scene as a montage to honor the complex artistic process they shared together.
I find montages by nature to be the most challenging scenes to edit, and this particular sequence was exponentially more difficult. This movie has quite a few edits, in general, so I guess I got the chance to brush up on my skills!
director: Finally, after the process was over, what new meaning did the film take on for you? What did you find in the footage that you might not have initially seen, and how did your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding you started with?
Mayer: The deeper we got into Cher’s world and psyche, the more vulnerable and passionate she became for us, and ultimately the more vital it was to paint the portrait of her life, work and erasure.
At first, Cher seemed like a performer—a bit cold, collected, and weird—because all we had access to were her media appearances, many of which were later in her career after years of attacks and criticism. But after interviewing those who knew her best and loved her most, and delving deep into her personal archives, a portrait of her innermost thoughts and artistic process emerged. We learned about her passion – and compassion – for her subjects, survey respondents and politics. We were blown away by this incredible woman and even more honored to have the opportunity to tell her story.
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