Robert Swink(1918-2000)

Robert E. Swink, a top-notch editor favored by directors no less scrupulous than William Wyler and Franklin J. Schaffner, first moved to Hollywood with his family in 1927, and made the place his home for the rest of his life. Following graduation from North Hollywood High in 1936, Swink turned down a football scholarship in favor of an apprenticeship in film editing at RKO, where he remained for years, barring a World War II hitch in the US Army Special Services, editing training films. Beginning in 1944, he was promoted to cutting feature films. In 1952 Swink moved over to Paramount, where he started out with William Wyler's Carrie (1952), and shortly thereafter received his first Academy Award nomination for Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953). In the three decades of steady work to follow, he would edit pictures as various as The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), The Best Man (1964), Papillon (1973) and Three the Hard Way (1974), and receive two further Oscar nominations, for Funny Girl (1968) and The Boys from Brazil (1978). As well, he served as second unit director on a handful of films, though unlike his contemporary Robert Wise he did not make the jump to director. He might have made an excellent one, judging from the crackerjack pacing and faultless dramatic instinct evident behind all the films he touched, and the respect he garnered from the frequently demanding directors who repeatedly hired him. Meaning to retire after completing Franklin Schaffner's Sphinx (1981) in 1981, Swink was coaxed out of retirement to supervise the editing of the finally unreleased feature "And They're Off." He returned to work one final time: as the favorite editor of director Schaffner (they had had five prior collaborations), he was the logical choice to assemble the footage for Welcome Home (1989), as Schaffner had died before the post-production phase.