He recorded many striking features, including ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner’, ‘The last detail’, ‘Shampoo’, ‘Bound for Glory’ and ‘Heaven Can Wait.’
Robert C. Jones, the esteemed film editor who shaped classics like Guess who’s coming to dinner, Romance, The Last Detail and Destined for glory and shared an Oscar script for Coming home, died. He was 84 years old.
Jones died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles after a long illness, said his daughter Leslie Jones, an Oscar-nominated film editor, as well as her father. The Hollywood Reporter. She called him her mentor, “a kind and generous man and a comedy genius. He really was the sweetest guy”.
Her father, Harmon Jones, was also an Oscar-nominated film editor, honored for his work on Elia Kazan Gentlemen’s agreement (1947).
Robert C. Jones had regular collaborations with directors Stanley Kramer, Hal Ashby, Arthur Hiller and Warren Beatty during his career and was awarded an award for the overall work in 2014 from American Film Editors.
After retiring from Hollywood in 2001, he spent the next 15 years or more as an admired professor at the USC School of Motion Picture Arts.
Early on, the Los Angeles native received Oscar nominations for his work with Kramer in It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy world (1963) and Guess who’s coming to dinner (1967). In the middle, he joined the director in Ship of Fools (1965).
For Ashby, the film editor who became director, Jones cut The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975) and Destined for glory (1976) – the one that resulted in his third edition Oscar nomination – and received the Oscar for the original script, shared with Waldo Salt and Nancy Dowd, for Coming home (1978). He also worked on the script for Being there (1979), but his credit was denied.
He edited eight resources for Hiller: Tobruk (1967), The Tiger Makes Out (1967), Romance (1970), Man from La Mancha (1972), The crazy world of Julius Vrooder (1974), See no evil, hear no evil (1989), Married to him (1991) and The baby (1992).
And for Beatty, the director, he edited Paradise can wait (1978), Bulworth (1998) and Love affair (1994).
Born on March 30, 1936, Robert Clifford Jones dropped out of college and went to work on the 20th Century Fox expedition. “I took it without knowing what I was getting into,” he told Debra Kaufman in a 2014 interview for CineMontage magazine.
Jones moved up the ranks, becoming an apprentice film editor and assistant film editor, working on films like Indomitable (1955) and The Long Hot Summer (1958). The work “was magical for me,” he said. “It opened my eyes to what my father had done.”
He was drafted into the United States Army, but gained valuable experience during his 1958-60 season in training films and documentaries in Astoria, New York. Then, back home, he teamed up with Gene Fowler Jr. to edit John Cassavetes A child is waiting (1963), which was produced by Kramer, and It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy world.
Jones told Kaufman that he was editing a movie “that just didn’t work” when he asked the director “if he would mind leaving for a few weeks,” he recalled. “I cut and restructured and worked on the performances. He came back and said, ‘Have you thought about being a writer? You just rewrote my movie with the edit. ‘ A light bulb went on in my head and I started to write. I learned to write by editing. “
Jones declined an offer from Ashby to edit Coming home, but when Salt suffered a heart attack two months before production started, Jones joined as a screenwriter. “I was very shocked to receive an Oscar,” he said. “When I took the stage to accept this with Waldo and the author of the story, Nancy Dowd, it was the first time I met them.”
He said that United Artists / Lorimar Productions gave him a co-screenwriter credit with novelist Jerzy Kosinski in Being there, but the WGA granted Kosinski exclusive credit. “It was a dark day in my life,” he said. He focused on editing the rest of his career.
His credits also include that of Ida Lupino The problem with angels (1966), I love you, Alice B. Toklas! (1968), Josh Logan’s Paint your wagon (1969), Richard Fleischer The new centurions (1972), Cisco Pike (1971), Tony Scott’s Stormy days (1990), Harold Becker’s town hall (1996), Crazy in Alabama (1999) and Unconditional love (2002), his last film.
His daughter, who received her Oscar nomination for Terrence Malick The thin red line (1998), helped his father in films like See no evil, hear no evil and The baby early in your career. Like her father, she did not go to film school and had no formal training in editing.
“But what I learned was that editing doesn’t always require a specific skill set. He taught me that talent is guided by a sense of compassion and integrity and the search for truth and authenticity. He had all of that and more.”
As USC, Jones did not “just teach students to edit, he supported, and even helped to boost, their passion for cinema and storytelling in general,” said Elizabeth Daley, dean of the School of Motion Picture Arts, in a statement. .
“Bob was known for being patient, kind and with a great sense of humor. He involved students in school corridors, playing with them and literally being a source of joy. He was not only a mentor to students, but also to his faculty colleagues and staff members. Without a doubt, he was one of the school’s most beloved teachers. “
In addition to his daughters Leslie and Hayley, survivors include his 59-year-old wife, Sylvia; grandchildren Sophia, Henry, Sammy and Phoebe; sons-in-law João and Josué; and sister Polly.
Leslie noted that his father created a series of video sketches for his grandchildren, “Grandpa Bob”, in which Grandpa Bob went into space, stole donuts and explained the nervous system. The funny videos also spread through the USC School of Motion Picture Arts.
Rhett Bartlett contributed to this report.