Lou Lombardo (filmmaker)
| Lou Lombardo | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Louis Joseph Lombardo February 15, 1932 Missouri |
| Died | May 8, 2002 (aged 70) Woodland Hills, California |
| Occupation | filmmaker |
Lou Lombardo (1932–2002) was an American filmmaker whose editing of the 1969 film The Wild Bunch has been called "seminal". In all, Lombardo is credited on more than twenty-five feature films. Noted mainly for his work as a film and television editor, he also worked as a cameraman, director, and producer. In his obituary, Stephen Prince wrote, "Lou Lombardo's seminal contribution to the history of editing is his work on The Wild Bunch (1969), directed by Sam Peckinpah. The complex montages of violence that Lombardo created for that film influenced generations of filmmakers and established the modern cinematic textbook for editing violent gun battles." Several critics have remarked on the "strange, elastic quality" of time in the film, and have discerned the film's influence in the work of directors John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Kathryn Bigelow, and the Wachowskis, among others. While Lombardo's collaboration with Peckinpah lasted just a few years, his career was intertwined with that of director Robert Altman for more than thirty years. Lombardo edited Altman's 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), which had "a radical approach to the use of dialogue and indeed other sound, both in and beyond the frame." Towards the end of his career Lombardo edited Moonstruck (1987) and two other films directed by Norman Jewison. While his editing is now considered "revolutionary" and "brilliant", Lombardo was never nominated for editing awards during his career.
Lombardo's career began in Kansas City, where he was Robert Altman's cameraman working on training films and "industrials" for the Calvin Company. Altman ultimately became a prominent feature film director. Lombardo and Altman both relocated to Los Angeles in 1956, where Lombardo was employed as a cameraman by Republic Pictures. Lombardo's goal had been to become a director, and he decided that film editing was a more promising path. Lombardo became an apprentice editor at Revue Studios, at about half the salary he'd received as an assistant cameraman. As was common at that time for studio editors, an editing apprenticeship lasted eight years, during which Lombardo's work was uncredited. At the end of this apprenticeship, Robert Altman used Lombardo to edit a pilot program for television. This led to Lombardo's becoming an editor for the television program Felony Squad, which ran from 1966–1970.
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