Sam O'Steen - Life and Career

Life and Career

O'Steen was born in Paragould, Arkansas. As a child in Burbank, California, O'Steen would try to make it onto the Warner Bros. lot hoping that it could be an entree to work in the editing room. O'Steen was finally able to secure a position as an assistant editor in 1956, when he became George Tomasini's assistant editor on Alfred Hitchcock's 1957 film The Wrong Man. As was typical at the time, he served as an assistant editor at Warner Brothers for eight years; his first credit as editor was on Youngblood Hawke (1964), which was directed by Delmer Daves. Within a year, O'Steen had become the editor on Mike Nichols' first film as a director, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. O'Steen was Nichols' principal editor for nearly thirty years, during which he edited twelve of Nichols' films; their last film together was Wolf (1994).

O'Steen had been working as a principal editor for only three years when he edited Nichols' second film, The Graduate, but Patrick J. Sauer considers this film to be the epitome of O'Steen's editing:

Nowhere are O'Steen's skills more apparent than in Dustin Hoffman's classic debut film, The Graduate. O'Steen gives the audience time to study the performer's face before cutting the scene. O'Steen allows for long, personal looks at Hoffman's facial expressions to give the viewers an idea of what the character is thinking instead of the "quick-cutting" seen so often in modern films. In The Graduate Hoffman's expressions at the party scene are as important to the character as any bit of dialogue and O'Steen does not cut the scene short.

In his volume from the History of American Cinema series, Paul Monaco emphasizes the innovative aspects of the editing of The Graduate:

...with The Graduate, both Nichols and O'Steen had an opportunity to push their collaboration in the direction of a more innovative editing style. For example, one sequence in the film begins with the recent college graduate Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) floating on an air mattress in his parents' swimming pool. As he leaves the pool to walk back into their house, the scene cuts smoothly to a room where Benjamin is meeting an older woman ... for clandestine sex. Over the next couple of minutes through continuous editing the scenes shift back and forth between his parents' home pool and Benjamin's mental projections of his meetings with Mrs. Robinson. ... This associational montage shows adeptness of the editing technique and reinforces the inner sense of Benjamin's feelings of alienation and ambivalence ...

O'Steen directed seven films for television in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975) and Kids Don't Tell (1985). He also directed one feature film Sparkle (1976).

O'Steen's editing of The Graduate (1967) was honored by a BAFTA Award for Best Editing, and he was nominated for this award again for Chinatown (1974). He was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Film Editing for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), Chinatown (1974), and Silkwood (directed by Mike Nichols, 1983). In 1976, O'Steen won the "Most Outstanding Television Director" award from the Directors Guild of America (DGA), and his film Queen of the Stardust Ballroom won the "Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Movies for Television" award from the DGA. O'Steen was also nominated for an Emmy award for "Outstanding Directing in a Special Program - Drama or Comedy" for his work on Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.

O'Steen was married twice, and he had four daughters. Sam O'Steen's memoir of his editing career, Cut to the Chase: Forty-Five Years of Editing America's Favorite Movies, was published in 2001, shortly after O'Steen's death, by his second wife Bobbie O'Steen (née Meyer). The book is written mostly as a transcript of Sam O'Steen's responses to questions posed by Bobbie O'Steen, with sidebars about individual films and filmmakers. Ray Zone has characterized it as "one of the very best anecdotal histories of filmmaking in print."