XL Cover Story: The Next Next Wave

Leah Marino: Movie editor, 35

By Chris Garcia
Dec. 1, 2005

Kelly West/AA-S
The Next Next Wave
Reginald Harris	René Pinnell
Myrna Cabello	Justin Raiford
Attic Ted	Leah Marino
Wendy Colonna	Nathan Green

(Cut to: Leah, the editor, blushing.)

The editor, modest and taciturn when pressed to talk about herself, is Leah Marino, a 12-year Austinite who is forging a reputation as one of local film's best and busiest documentary editors. If a good movie editor can acknowledge how much cutting and shaping is responsible for the quality, clip and coherence of a film, then Marino owns solidly earned bragging rights.

"If I didn't have a big impact on the films, I wouldn't be doing my job," she says.

Marino, a soft-spoken Boston native, got her first break as assistant editor on Hector Galan's lauded PBS series "Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement." She worked at Galan Productions for six years, editing an Emmy Award-winning segment of the series "The Border." Her first feature film was "Imelda," Ramona S. Diaz's sometimes comically unflattering portrait of the Philippines' Imelda Marcos. Among other plaudits, the movie was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Marino's metier, she says, is "creating the film's arc" — locating and sustaining a cogent, accessible story in the heap of footage a director shoots. "I think I understand what viewers will like."

That's called instinct, one of an editor's critical tools, and one Marino has displayed in the Austin-made documentaries "Light from the East" by Amy Grappell and "Dirt," Jeff Bowden's gritty chronicle of stock-car racing that won best documentary feature at this year's Austin Film Festival.

Sitting at a cutting console, away from the set and the stars, Marino knows she's posted far from movieland glamor. "I think that's partly why I became an editor," she says. "It's hard for me to stand in the spotlight."

Finally making a living at her craft is sufficient for Marino. She's currently putting the finishing touches on "A Creek Runs Red," a PBS eco-doc about a Superfund site in an erstwhile Oklahoma mining town. She would like to return to her fledgling directorial project, a collection of live performances at Antone's, but has found that editing fosters its own sense of propriety born from a genuine artistic investment.

"You get very attached to a film when you're editing it," Marino says. "It's a piece of you. And it's really hard to give that up at the end sometimes. You're kind of like a nanny, the very influential baby-sitter who baby-sits the project the whole way through, then you have to give it back to the director. You have to remember it's not your own."

But you can't forget that so much of it is indeed yours.