Hacks

Today on Art of the Cut I’m speaking with Emmy-nominated editor, Susan Vaill, ACE, who’s here to discuss editing Hacks. Also joining us is assistant editor, Stephanie Goldstein, who was able to do quite a bit of editing on this episode.

Susan edited 70 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and directed three. She won an ACE Eddie for editing Hacks, and this is her second Emmy nomination for the show. She’s also edited Abbott Elementary, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Space Force, and This is Us.

Stephanie has been an assistant editor on Gotham, Brooklyn 9-9, and Single Parents. She was bumped up to the editor’s chair on that show for 2 episodes.

Susan and Stephanie, it’s so great to have you on the show. Susan, tell me about this episode.

VAILL: It was a really special episode. It had a lot of callbacks to the season one work I did on Hacks as well, and I love being able to lean into that symmetry if I can.

This episode was about the premiere of her late night talk show, which has been a dream she’s been chasing since season one.

In season one, I cut the finale, which was her farewell show, and there’s a lot of beautiful visual similarities of her coming out onto the stage and all the little moment before coming out on stage and to just feel that sort of rhythmic similarity and thematic similarity - it’s very gratifying.

Also, I’m an LA native, so I was really happy to have been a part of this “I Love L.A.” episode.

The sound design of that entrance into the first show and the walk-in involved some cool creative choices.

VAILL: That is a big one - when she comes out. That credit really needs to go to Stephanie because they actually use your sound effect.

That high pitched beeping to create internal anxiety. The heartbeat was written in the script, but how do we also create what she is feeling?

Her point of view. They considered scoring that. Then they said, “No score.” Then, “Let’s put it back in.” It was kind of back and forth.

GOLDSTEIN: I just started with the heartbeat, then started to add in stuff that made me feel really tense when I was like listening to it all.

I had some drone noises and the ones that made me feel the weirdest, I just threw them in there. Then in the mix, they ended up doing the muted voices which is not something that I thought of. I wish I did, but those mixers are just genius.

VAILL: John and Brian, our mixers at Universal are incredible. I’ve had the pleasure of working with them on a number of shows. I just thought the final sound was spectacular. I was very happy to hear that your exact sound effect, Steph, lived all the way through.

So often these shows look like they’re just the way they came of the camera, but it went through many, many iterations.

A lot of times it’s a push/pull. We have the montage when she walks out, but then she leaves having that panic attack, then when she goes out for the real thing, she’s kind of almost having a panic attack, so we needed to create some symmetry with that.

We really went for the sound design in the first cut. It was too much actually. People said, “It sounds like she’s going to die!”

GOLDSTEIN: I had some helicopter rotors in there and an earthquake sound. I definitely went over the top with the earthquake rumble.

VAILL: That was so good! But it was too much, so we pulled it back, then it all started to creep back.

That’s what happens. It’s like pulling taffy sometimes. You go too far then you go too many steps back, then you kind of start to bring it back again.

Also having three show runners and having to show them all every different version that they want to see creates a lot of opportunities for revision.

I think that young editors don’t fully appreciate the process and how you’ve got to embrace the changes, notes and revisions. Talk about your attitude towards those notes and changes.

VAILL: Way back to my first season cutting Grey’s Anatomy, my very first episode was this really big deal episode where Derek breaks Meredith’s heart.

That scene was such a critical, important scene. I knew it was just this giant, important scene of romance and pain and all those things. There was a little camera pan that felt sort of accidental on Patrick Dempsey, but it was still the best take.

I remember being in the room with Shonda [Rhimes} and the writer Krista Vernoff, and having to take them on the same journey I went through, which is: here are all the iterations of how we could play those two lines.

They had to go on the same journey. We wound up with that take that had the little camera move in it, because in the end, it wasn’t about that. That was the best one.

To get back to the question of the scene where Deborah comes out on the stage. One thing that I also really loved about that is that there was a similar scene in that season one finale where she’s about to go on stage, and Jimmy and Kayla are basically saying almost the same things, like, “My dad is looking down on this.”

Or Kayla says, “Bitch! You got this bitch!” So it’s a very similar comedy rhythm too, which I really think is kind of a wonderful subliminal thing that this show does: the rhythms of the dialog stay true.

That “Bitch! You got this, bitch!” went through every possible take of Kayla’s and every alt and eventually we came back to the one I had had and my editors cut, but that’s okay. They need to see it. That’s how they learn to trust the editor, too.

Steph can speak to the fact that I constantly leave tons of alt takes stacked up in my timeline so that I can very quickly show multiple alts.

It creates a very messy timeline while we’re working, but it’s kind of like when you’re in the kitchen and there’s flour everywhere.

GOLDSTEIN: On Single Parents, showrunner Liz Meriwether wasn’t often in the office and she would want to see a string out, so we even for just one line we would do a string out and they could pick the one they liked the best, then we’d throw that in.

That actually helped a lot. We did that a lot for not just not just line reads, but for stock shots, all kinds of stuff. It just made it easier for them to look at because they’re on set.

The pace of the show is just so fast that we really needed to give them things to look at to figure out what they wanted to do.

When we do those stringouts I usually start with the last take and then go backwards.

VAILL: I think when Steph says “pace” she means the pace of making the show. When you work on Hacks, you work six days a week, sometimes seven days a week. That’s because the showrunners are so busy and their time is so valuable and so limited and so that’s one way of like, multitasking.

They just want to keep going with me and they can make the requests to Steph: “Can you do a string out of this and send it to us? We’ll look at it later and then we’ll tell you which take we like.”

I had very serious technical challenges on this one. We were working remotely and sometimes I had to have Steph drive. I would text her to say, “Go to take 12.”

It was great to have, an assistant who was really an editor and I could trust to jump in the chair and drive for a little while.

Emmy-nominated editor, Susan Vaill, ACE

Technically, how were you working remotely?

VAILL: Evercast and Jump Desktop. The problem was we were on an Avid version from 2018 with the old Mac trash cans. We couldn’t even put slack on the computer, because it was such an old OS system!

That’s one challenge of remote work is that, you know, technically there’s many more hiccups and then you have to be in charge of them and manage that at the same time.

GOLDSTEIN: When Susan was having the technical issues, there’s only so much I can do, beause I’m not there to physically help like a normal assistant.

But while Susan was fixing her tech problems, I could continue on and do some notes or continue pulling takes or whatever. We just had to just keep things moving because the pace of the work was very, very quick and you had to be on your toes.

VAILL: You’ve been working remote for the last like four years, right?

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, I haven’t been back in the office since March of 2020 when I actually finished up Single Parents, Season two. I have not been back.

I was really hoping that this would be in the office, but no such luck yet. I’m still hoping that one of these days I get to drive my car somewhere.

With Stephanie being an accomplished editor in her own right maybe it isn’t quite as important to work in person, but I really feel like assistants are missing out in really important ways when they’re remote.

VAILL: I agree 100%. To be able in person for her to give ideas is crucial.

GOLDSTEIN: I was on a show as an assistant working in person where I would cut scenes then the editor would say, “You cut that so have the director work with you to go through those scenes.” When you’re remote, the editor can say, “Stephanie did this,” but it’s not really going to register.

VAILL: And nobody really wants to be on Evercast all day. I’ve always tried to have assistants cut scenes and if it’s gone really well I’d have them do the notes and have the showrunner or the director give them the notes and do the notes in front of them so that they can have that practice.

Steph doesn’t even need that practice because she’s already been cutting. But the industry took quite a hit and many people were out of work. It was very happy to give someone who’s already an editor - and fan - the chance to come in and work on an incredible show that’s definitely going to build your skill set because it’s very challenging.

Part of what makes it challenging is the remote work. I personally prefer to make comedy in person. When you can have that hallway of all the editors and you can call them into the room to watch a cut at lunch and see what makes people laugh, it always feels so different when someone’s in the room with you.

To make comedy by yourself is tough. What makes it work for Hacks is that showrunners Lucia Aniello and Paul Downs are in the same room very often, so at least they have that group experience when they’re watching over Evercast. At least there’s more than one of them present. And sometimes Lucy’s sister -who’s one of the writers on the show - comes in or the other showrunner Jen Statsky comes in.

For editors it’s just a little bit more distancing. I find it really important to be able to turn around and talk to the showrunners. It’s really devastating for our industry - for our guild - to have assistant editors not getting that chance. It’s not just about editing, it’s about learning how to develop the relationships, learning how to develop creative trust, learning how to navigate those crises. And that’s all weird when it’s underwater through a Zoom screen or whatever. It’s so much more important to develop those interpersonal skills by being in person.

GOLDSTEIN: I will add, that it helps you learn how to read the room. I’ve worked with a lot of people that don’t know how to do that. So that’s definitely something that helps in person. When you’re sitting with the showrunner, you get the vibe. On Single Parents I worked with an incredible mentor named Pam Archer.

She got me to the editing chair for sure. if I was working from home, I don’t think anybody really would have paid attention to me. But being in the office every day and being able to do a lot of scenes, doing notes… I started doing scenes with Pam, then she would have me do notes. I worked my way up during season one, then in season two I was able to do even more and jumped in a lot more when I was needed.

I feel like all my editing jobs have been from home. As an assistant it’s a lot harder to get noticed working from home without making a big show and taking up all the space in the room, which you shouldn’t be doing anyway.

VAILL: Even in terms of just building your career, Steph and I would have never met if I was working remote because Steph was an office PA on Grey’s Anatomy for season six and seven, and she would bring the call sheets. She poked her head in and introduced herself and said she was interested in editing and told me she’d been a part on that Drew Barrymore movie Whip It, which I’ve loved.

I literally remember talking to you in the hallway about that movie. I think Dylan Tichenor cut that. We wouldn’t have gotten to develop a relationship without being in person. Then as our careers both progressed, I wound up cutting some pilots and comedies on the CBS Radford lot while Steph was working on Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

She would hear I was on the lot and she would swing by and meet my assistant. It was gratifying to be able to continue our relationship that way. You can’t bump into each other when it’s just Evercast and have a quick lunch or just pop in and watch whatever we’re working on.

So, I’m really grateful that we had that time and that Steph was really proactive in coming to find me and staying in touch.

GOLDSTEIN: On Grey’s I had weird hours. Some days I’d start work later, so I’d come in and sit with Susan’s assistant to watch how all the bins were organized. She would show me how to do the paperwork. I had no idea how. They don’t teach you how to be an assistant when you go to film school. They just teaching you editing. So I had no idea. Even though I was an office PA, I was always in post and if they were ever looking for me, they knew I was probably in post.

VAILL: That’s what you have to do. That’s what lets you know that she’s committed and she wants to do this and that she’s someone that I would want to work with. These opportunities are really important. I think it’s interesting for ACE and MPEG that we’ve noticed that our events are being attended in greater numbers than ever. The desire for community has increased threefold, fourfold. Every event is sold out because I think editors are very much craving each other’s company.

Shout out to Stacy Katzman, who was the my longtime assistant on Grey’s Anatomy and helped mentor you, too.

Let’s talk about choosing licensed music. What kind of decisions are in there? Who’s helping make those decisions, and how much of a process is that to go through on this episode?

VAILL: It was a pretty major process. That opening montage was like an entire other episode. In fact, during dailies, Paul apologized: “Sorry for giving you footage for two episodes!” because the montage covered so much.

It covered every department doing all the prep work to make a show. They really wanted to show what really happens in a writer’s room, building the wall of sketch ideas and how a set is built in. The wigs are constructed by hand, starting from one strand of hair and the curtain - that is barely even visible in the frame behind the host of the show - is still hand-cut, hand-sewn.

So it was really important to them to show that, so it was this huge montage as well as telling the story of our characters. Deborah is exercising and eating less and less, and Ava is just getting more and more anxious and stressed out. It was a big balancing act.

In terms of license music, Lucia and Jen are absolutely brilliant at music selection. Back in season one, I remember Lucia saying that in another life she wished she could have been a DJ.

She has her finger on the pulse of so many artists. Coming from Grey’s Anatomy, I used to feel like I knew music pretty well.

She and Paul just have an incredible collection and library and mental collection of music. They would send us playlists. Also, our music supervisor, Matt Biffa, who’s this lovely London man, and he would send lots of cool tunes.

We would go both ultra-modern indie and also super-retro soul. That grew out of season one where we didn’t have a big budget. We were using a lot of big band sort of soul stuff that started coming in because of the Las Vegas-ness of it.

You’re not going to get Sinatra, but let’s get some things that have some brass and stuff like that. Even those songs were too expensive for us, so we started to get cheaper library tracks then we were trying to do temp score.

Comedy is one of the hardest things. What I had learned on Grey’s Anatomy was that sometimes a needle drop is much better than score for comedy, or a little piece of a needle drop, because it has pace and it’s well produced.

You’re already in an emotional place with it, so we started using intros and outros of some of these library songs that were like Old Soul from the early 70s.

This one band, Freddi Henchi and the Soul Setters were like the number one blues band in Denver in 1970. I loved them and they had these amazing band intros, so we started using those as our little transitional pieces because of the energy.

And they were so well produced.

So that big montage at the start of the show started with them filming most of it to the Genesis song, “That’s All.” Paul Downes directed this episode.

Partial timeline “Hacks”

They actually filmed it while that song played in the background?

VAILL: Yeah. So when Jean was doing kettlebells and exercising at the house, just to have her be doing it in the rhythm that he felt like would be good for the scene.

I think he knew we might not eventually use that Genesis song, but the BPMs - the pace of it - was what felt right. And we did try setting it to that, but then we just started exploring.

GOLDSTEIN: There was one day we send the showrunners 12 cuts that were just different songs with no picture changes.

VAILL: Actually there were picture changes because I always had to nudge things to hit properly. If it didn’t hit, the song’s not going to work. But generally the structure stayed the same.

GOLDSTEIN: It was “Lonesome Loser” from Little Feat for quite a while.

VAILL: One that kind of took hold for a while was the Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited,” which was kind of this awesome retro vibe. It worked with the underlying idea of women working, which has always been such an important theme of the show, but I think maybe it just wasn’t cool enough. Matt and I freaked out over this Prince song: “Baby, I’m a star.”

Come on! Prince! it was kind of legendary just to see that montage up against that song. We tried Blondie. That felt legendary.

But it just never really struck a chord. We were always torn between trying to find a song that felt like it was sort of on theme, but also had the right energy and build.

And there were certain things we always wanted to have hit - like that rolling out of the calendar and the trust fall and putting on the beat through the breakfasts getting smaller and smaller.

But I wrapped before the show was mixed and they changed the song and came up with “Breakthrough” by Queen, which is thematically an incredible choice. Songs were flying in and out.

GOLDSTEIN: John Philpot is one of the other editors and he’s very musical, so I feel like that he does passes on a lot of musical stuff on the show. I think that was his pick.

VAILL: I’m not sure if it was his pick or not, but he messaged me a couple of song suggestions during that as well. I loved that he got a chance to work with that song.

Some shots that had gone away that had been in my early cuts came back in and I was very happy to see them, like starting on the empty page in the writers room and the stress ball…

We had such a cornucopia of shots to choose from that those things got left behind at a certain point. One of the benefits of having three showrunners is that one of them will remember something and ask, “Can you put that back in?”

The showrunners are very democratic, and they always vote. One person is the tiebreaker, and they stand with that. It can create a lot of extra work because you have three masters that you must perform for, but it also creates, a very dialed-in final product because it’s been through such a rigorous trio of brilliant minds, each wanting to see it their way, and then democratically deciding which one was the best way.

Did you cut that montage dry, or did you cut it to the opening Genesis song?

VAILL: I will play music while I’m editing. I’ve done that since Grey’s Anatomy, partly just to make sure I’m familiar with the music that we should be considering, because usually that’s a huge amount of work to do.

It saves me time. I think I just heard the Blondie song on So-Cal Sound one day, and I just loved that it was classic little punk. It had such a beautiful sound.

It kind of spoke to what they were doing. I think my first couple versions were to “Dreaming,” “That’s All,” and “The Lonesome Loser.”

I think I started with “Dreaming.” It gives the showrunners an opportunity to say, “Okay, not that one. Not that one.” So what lived out of those three songs was “Lonesome Loser” - kind of like a March Madness bracket.

GOLDSTEIN: They had done previs before we started. I pulled that into our project. It was stock shots to kind of see what they might want to pick up.

It was repeating stock shots: a wig, a scale, a lady exercising and it would repeat faster and faster. That was the layout. I think they were trying to figure out how many shots they needed. That was cut to a “Lonesome Loser.”

VAILL: I think Paul really responds to symmetry and in season one we had, “Nothing” by Billy Preston, which appeared twice during that season, both during montages. if it’s not clear, they love a montage. This is a show that loves a montage.

They will script out a lot of it then shoot every possible option of it, then just lean on you as the editor to make it tighter and tighter and tighter, tighter and tighter.

It’s quite an experience, honestly. I think that the montages of Hacks are kind of worthy of their own subset of analysis because they’re really incredible examples of visual storytelling - incredible examples of editing rhetoric.

Going back to your original question, yes, I will often pick a song just because it helps me get going.

There’s a huge golf montage in This Is Us with Sterling Brown, and there was such a mountain of footage and I found this song that was just amazing.

I just cut the whole montage to that, and it just helps kind of keep you motivated to plow through all that footage and keep going because there’s a destination. In This Is Us that song got replaced with score.

I think 108 of Hacks we were really out of the budget on music, so they really wanted me to find something cheap. Eventually Paul said, “Just put in ‘Nothing from Nothing.’” Then it syncs up because you’ve cut it rhythmically.

So for that opening montage you could drop it in and only have to do minor adjustments because the pacing was familiar to the universe of songwriters.

We tried so many songs. I tried “Neutron Dance.” At one point Matt sent us a whole bunch of Tom Petty music because they really love the show and they would love to have Tom Petty…so let’s put Tom Petty. At some point that wound up not sparking joy for Paul

GOLDSTEIN: This episode actually had two montages originally that were scripted. There’s all this other pre-show stuff that eventually got split up into different little parts, but I was able to put that together. I was really proud of that montage.

But then during the screening for the first cut they said, “Do we need that?” and it got split up into different chunks.

VAILL: I’ve seen those shots sprinkled throughout other episodes this season. And there’s a little bit of scene rearranging that they did in there too, just to keep it moving, so it kind of didn’t fit anymore. But there were two montages at one point in that show.

The final shot is great.

VAILL: The last shot of this episode is Ava and Deborah sitting side by side in the emergency waiting room. This show is really a two-hander between Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart. This season started with them at kind of the greatest odds they’ve ever been at - the greatest division.

There’s an incredible gulf between them as both soulmates and collaborators, so this was the episode where they finally start to cross that gulf, so having them sit together side by side and the irony of watching this thing they’ve been yearning for to happen – for Jean - for her whole life, but they’re watching it in the most unglamorous location.

The whole episode has been about “how are we going to celebrate this big night?” For Jean, she wants to celebrate with celebrities and for Ava, with the writers, and Jimmy just wants to be included anywhere.

Eventually, it’s really about getting our core duo back together. Only it’s in scrubs with crazy people in an ER waiting room. That is an important motif that has appeared throughout the show. and the pilot.

The Hacks pilot has this huge scene in Jean’s living room where they’re sitting opposite each other. There’s a 50-50 shot where you see that they’re on opposite sides of the screen. By the end of season one, they’re sitting side by side on Ava’s bed after her father’s funeral.

It’s just very symbolic blocking. So season four started with a giant gulf between them, and this is the first moment where they’re really together and they’re together on the same level.

Can you talk about using music and picture edits as punchlines? Somebody will say something funny and instead of a laugh track, either there’s a visual cut or a music piece spotted perfectly.

VAILL: Everything is very musical, so sometimes the music is just on the rhythm. That’s why a lot of comedies don’t have score. Like Abbott Elementary had zero score in it. It’s because the music is happening in just the pacing of the dialog.

That’s one reason why I think in season one we develop that little technique of grabbing these beautifully produced intros to these blues and soul songs, because they had such drive and energy, and that’s hard for a composer to beat.

So that’s a motif that has kept going. I think especially John Philpot has combed through APM and those music libraries to find the best possible versions of songs where we could use that instead of having score commenting on the scene.

Needle drop is just supporting the energy of the comedy moment. That drive and melody of a song supports that much more sometimes than actual score does.

We have two composers now. Their score is so extraordinary in the dramatic and emotional moments. It’s so beautiful and it’s so signature.

A lot of comedies are intentionally overwritten. They write 12 jokes and you end up with three in the episode. Can you talk about the editing decisions of taking a show that’s overwritten and getting it to its final form?

VAILL: That’s actually something I really enjoyed when I migrated from dramedy - Grey’s Anatomy - into comedy was discovering that they’re intentionally planting more jokes than they need in the script so that they have the options to choose from.

I had often found in drama that the showrunners were very, very, very, attached to the dialogue. And it was really delightful when I started working with comedy writers to see that they’re not precious. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

They let it go. But the one that does work, they will dial in the minutia of a syllable, the focus of a syllable.

In comedy it’s not just that it’s overwritten, but that they allow improvisation to happen. The scene with Carol Burnett was actually the very first scene I got on this show.

Deborah’s food intake has created a health problem for her, so they wanted to have a little touch on that idea about the food story.

So when she sees Carol Burnett in the waiting room, they tell this story about Planet Hollywood and how Deborah got food poisoning from bad mahi mahi at the opening of Planet Hollywood.

It’s a joke, but within the joke is actually a serious point, because then Carol Burnett says, “Food is the key to health.”

When I cut that scene together - with all the improv they did – it was about 4.5 minutes long. Carol Burnett launches into the most extraordinary, immprov anecdote about Carol Channing eating whale blubber, so I thought, “All right, let’s just let’s just roll with it!”

Carol Burnett did it in the Carol Channing voice! I knew it would never make it into the show, but because it’s Carol Burnett, I had to edit together the whole thing.

I had to make it work. I cut it together but Paul said, “We need to stay with the meat of the scene” which was Debra finding solace with someone who can give her advice about stage fright.

So they do often have a lot of jokes. And that’s where this, trifecta of decision-making will come in (the three showrunners)

One of them will prefer one alt to the other. Then they’ll almost barter sometimes. like, They’re really considering each other’s knowledge of comedy, as well as just the emotional response to comedy.

GOLDSTEIN: And all of that goes into ScriptSync. Every line gets put in. I type it all in by hand and if you miss an improv-ed word, they’ll notice, so you have to make sure you get all those in.

They want to know every single word delivery, because sometimes an actor will just change one word and they want to know which line reading is just the slightest bit different.

That is really important. It has to be almost a literal transcript of every moment of dialogue.

Do you use that ScriptSync very much when you’re actually cutting, or is it only in the revising process that you use it?

VAILL: Both for sure. Because I’m doing a similar process to what the showrunners want to do. They ask for line cuts. You can click through the lines and see which one will fit better. Steph color codes it, so I’ll see where there are alts or improv lines are.

Then she’ll type those into the script as well. So being able to see that just looking at the script page and see the alts, instead of having to look for a locator in the shot and then go to the locator.

They also shoot three cameras, so it’s a lot of footage to get through. I’m on a one-hour thriller drama right now and it’s so much less footage.

GOLDSTEIN: That’s unusual. I feel like dramas are usually more. Some of that performance stuff was shot with six cameras because we also had footage from the cameras you could see on set: the ped cameras.

They were like the actual camera that you use for a late night show. So there were times when we had like multicam groups of six instead of three.

We had all that footage from those cameras, but they never wanted to use those. They only wanted the cameras that were operated by our amazing DP, Adam Bricker and his crew.

As a comedy editor, I think scripting (use of Avid’s Script Integration and ScriptSync) is very important.

I have heard on your podcast some some drama editors say they don’t use it, but I feel like I it’s really important for comedy to get timing - at least for the revision part because you want to get the funniest take and sometimes it’s not always the first thing that you see when you’re revising.

I find that really important for comedy editing to have that scripting ready to go.

Do you feel like YOU have to be the funniest person in the room? Or is a comedy editor’s job more analytical?

VAILL: What I find most important is that I am the most “able to laugh” person in the room, and I try really, really hard to just put on my audience hat when I watch and just to try to be as present and fresh and just see if that makes me laugh.

I have found that that is an ability I’m very grateful for, especially when working remote and no one else is in the room with me.

I’ll just do something to make things feel different. I’ll stand up or I’ll go sit on a different chair or I’ll take my laptop into a different room. Anything to change my perspective a little bit. So that helps me to engage in seeing it a fresh way

With showrunners like Paul and Lucia, who have done both on-camera comedy, and Jen Statsky, who is a brilliant comedy writer and was part of The Good Place and Parks and Rec. They’re the funniest people in the room, for sure.

So you just need a sense of humor as in that “you get it?”

VAILL: Comedy is relative. What people find funny is relative. I’ve experienced that on several different shows: where I found something hilarious and someone else didn’t.

Let’s talk about the intercutting of the two scenes that happened after the first show was taped: the dinner/club scene and the bar/tow truck scene.

VAILL: The storyline of Deborah at dinner was the storyline that Steph cut. Ava let’s all the writers go at the bar and there’s this big, beautiful, wide shot of her all alone.

Steph had started her side of that with a different shot, but then we realized that we have these beautiful matching wide shots that we’ve got to embrace. We could see that there’s an intentional matching there.

GOLDSTEIN: That got cut down somewhat, but there were many, many good jokes in there. They move those scenes around a little bit.

I don’t remember the exact order that they were written, but I know that dinner scenes ended up in a chunk in the actual episode, but in the script they were it was a little bit more spread out. I think that it made it a little bit cleaner and clearer for where everybody was at the time when they when they moved the scenes.

VAILL: There were very little notes on your scenes except for like, “Make it shorter.” The cage dancing went on for quite a while.

GOLDSTEIN: I definitely milked the cage dancing in the first cut. That was about a two minute scene, I think it’s about 20 seconds now. But I thought, “Let me just put everything in there.” Deborah’s feeling herself. The next cut down is basically what ended up.

VAILL: What I enjoyed about the intercutting of those two storylines was that they’re both feeling a bit put out and lonely. Neither one has the people around them that they want to be celebrating with, yet they both find a way to kind of bounce back.

For Deborah, it’s letting her ego be stroked, and being adored at this club. Then for Ava, it’s finally getting to show a little bit of game in the sex shop, because she’s usually so awkward romantically. it’s usually the source of a lot of cringe comedy for her. She had so many amazing slinky deliveries.

One thing about Paul as a director is that I find his episodes tend to be ones that have a depth of emotion.

They usually seem to be the episodes that are less on-the-page funny, but have more expressiveness in terms of what’s happening with the characters. I don’t know if he chooses those scripts himself.

On season one there’s this beautiful, slo-mo Las Vegas montage of Ava and the guy she was with, George. I just remember being in love with so many of those shots and really forcing myself to commit to just three.

No more than I needed to tell the story. I watched Steph go through that experience as well. It’s so fun to see Damian cutting loose and see Deborah enjoying herself, but you’ve got to just bring it down to the essential shots that tell the story.

GOLDSTEIN: It’s also hard because I want to show Damian cutting loose, but Deborah’s the main character. You got to toe the line of not featuring Damian too much, but just showing him having a good time then she’s having a good time.

VAILL: You did a really nice job showing them cutting loose compared to the tension, especially for Damian. At dinner they’re so awkward. Then he’s loosening up in the car and then he’s totally loosened up on the dance floor.

Then that last little interchange that they have where he tells Deborah, “This cute guy wants me to go home with me,” is honestly the loosest and warmest and most authentic I think I’ve ever seen him and Deborah.

So it’s a sort of little microcosm of the emotional development of their relationship in just one storyline, which is exactly why I told Steph to take that whole story because you’re going to tell the beginning, middle and end of it.

And instead of just handing an assistant one scene and they may not have a sense of where this goes in the whole spectrum of everything, I’m getting a chance to see my fellow editor take a whole storyline and understand it from and process it and develop it from beginning to end.

Susan Vail, ACE with her ACE Eddie for Hacks.

Susan, you’ve already won an ACE Eddie for editing Hacks. Now you have two Emmy nominations for it. How do you judge editing?

VAILL: I have a theory about editing. You were asking about how to choose the episode that you submit. It’s about the best script, and it’s the editors job to create that third rewrite, as we say.

So we start with the script and then they shoot and then the editing is the third draft or the final rewrite. So I believe that with the final cut you are also co-writing practically.

So if you started out with a great script and you deliver on the goods that was started with - that word on the page - I think that’s the episode you should submit, because if you read it and achieved what you felt when you read it, you’ve done your job and you’ve done your job really well.

Especially in comedy, it’s understanding that less is more. I love that we get to delve into both the sort of the very straightforward comedy editing of sharp dialog, then also these expressive music montages. It’s a wonderful balance.

I love The Bear. I thought The Bear was very funny and it’s also some of the most exciting editing I’ve ever seen. Sometimes it’s good to notice the editing and sometimes it’s not good. In the case of The Bear, I will watch that and notice that editing all the time because they’re superstars.

Also, What We Do in the Shadows is a show that you almost don’t notice the editing, but I can’t even imagine the amount of footage that is behind all of that work. It seems so nimble and so funny and so improvised. It’s just an impressive delivery.

Then there’s The Rehearsal, which is like art. It’s rigorous, intense art.

So what do you judge? I think you judge who executed the script in the best way that accomplished the subtext that was desired. I think that’s it is about who nailed the subtext?

GOLDSTEIN: I watch a lot of comedy and I usually don’t finish watching an episode without thinking, “Oh man! That should win for best Editing, because you don’t notice it a lot of times, but I definitely do. Sometimes I’ll see some wonky cut, which happens a lot more now because of the pace of things and people are just emphasizing the joke rather than the continuity.

Assistant editor Stephanie Goldstein in her remote studio

Last question for you, Susan. You’ve directed a short film and three episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. How does your editing translate to your directing and vice versa?

VAILL: There’s sort of personal career answer to that, which is that when I was preparing to direct Grey’s Anatomy, after being there for 8 or 9 seasons, I had been directing one act plays and short films in graduate school.

I feel like I was sucked in by the goals and the vibe of film school where everybody wants to be a director. As an editor, you really get a front row seat to what it’s really like for directors. You see them agonizing over the footage they got or didn’t get. You hear about their lives, which are really tough, tough for them. It’s a tough, tough business.

While I was shadowing directors, one of the things that they had us do was a speed-dating session over at ABC Disney for a bunch of the minority shadowing team cohort candidates. They wanted us to make a list of the shows that we might want to direct.

For me, there was one drama on it and 12 comedies. Just that act of writing down my goal helps clarify things so much.

That was where I realized that I want to be doing comedy, and I left Grey’s a few years later. I stayed and directed two more episodes.

I loved This Is Us, but they had departed from some of the comedy that had been more of the focus of the beginning season, and I had to remind myself that I left Grey’s - which was a wonderful, solid, stable job. I could still be there, but 11 seasons was plenty.

I left there to really develop my skills in comedy because that’s what I had always loved watching. The beginning seasons of Grey’s had a balance of comedy and drama.

You asked how does directing inform my editing. Directing helped me to realize that I wanted to be a comedy editor.

The experience of working so closely with directors and the cutting room, what I realized is that the cutting room is a place of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, and the set is a place of just constant confrontations with what you can and can’t have.

I just felt so much more empowered as a filmmaker - as a storyteller - in the editing room, surprisingly, than on the set where sort of the raw footage is being created. You feel like a magician.

You can do almost anything in editing. I just enjoyed that experience so much more, sso I guess comedy editing and directing informed each other for me to understand where my superpowers are.

I think, I learned from the comedy editing of Grey’s Anatomy, that comedy was the secret sauce for the show in the beginning. I’ve helped share this with other showrunners since then, that comedy’s a much easier shortcut to connect your audience to the characters.

You laugh with them, you laugh at them, you feel empathy for them.

You feel this huge gamut of authentic emotions: laughter’s authentic! When you laugh, you’re not doing that accidentally. You couldn’t help it. So you authentically identify with the characters. Then when you take those characters into more emotional places, the audience cares about them so much more.

That’s your secret sauce to making your audience fall in love with your characters. You bind the audience to your characters through comedy and then they have your characters’ back when they go through these different challenges.

So, that’s what I guess I would say I learned from comedy and drama. It’s less about directing and editing.

I think in the editing I learned the power of the close-up, the power of what the actors doing before you say action and after you say cut.

Sometimes that’s the most authentic listening moment. I think editing really taught me about authenticity, and then that helped me as a director.

When I did direct I want to get those authentic moments. I will never forget talking to Kiki Palmer, who was a guest star in one of my episodes of Grey’s Anatomy.

She was playing a young mother who’s giving birth and I had a little baby, too, so I was able to just go up to her and just talk really quietly into her ear about what it feels like after the moment your baby is born. I told her, “I know you haven’t been through this yet, so …”

And I just remember she looked up at me and she said, “You’re a really good director.” I thought, “That’s it. I’m done. I’m not directing ever again. That’s it. I’m good.”

Stef and Sue, it was so great talking to both of you. Thanks for being on Art of the Cut. Congratulations on your Emmy nomination.

VAILL: Thank you. I’m really grateful for you to have us both here. Assistant editors don’t always get that co-editing credit, but it’s really important that people know how much they do creatively, so thanks for letting us spotlight the good work they do.

I absolutely love talking about into assistant editors, especially when they have great editing experience as well. So thank you both.

VAILL: Thank you.

GOLDSTEIN: Thank you.