Perceiving an Emerging Practice in the United States - Text 1
The American trade press paid little attention to editing until 1912, when an informal survey in Moving Picture World uncovered a “prevailing jumping-jack tendenc[y]” and determined that virtually every company had been, in the words of E.W. Sargent, the journal’s “contributing editor” [sic], “bitten by the lightning bug.”[1] Biograph and D.W. Griffith were held responsible because of their sustained reliance on and development of crosscutting, whose belated adoption by other companies contributed to the upward trend in shots per reel. Of course not all manufacturers noticeably increased their “cutting rates” – that is, the number of shots for every thousand feet of film. And when increases did occur, they sometimes emerged inconsistently within individual studios. So while the practice of editing was gaining traction in the 1910s, the trade journals took notice, as instances of “editing” being mentioned by name increase significantly after 1915.