Jackie Gleason: A Personal Remembrance

It was during the late 1970s and early 80s that I got to know and work with Jackie Gleason in Miami.

Gleason knew of the concept of off-line editing and I had one of the first off-line 3/4-inch U-Matic editing systems at the time in the Miami area. Thus, Gleason hired me to do the off-line editing of the last two episodes of the Honeymooners on 3/4-inch tape.

We quickly ran into a problem. The accuracy of primitive small format editing in those days was plus or minus 30 frames-per-second. Gleason said that wouldn’t work, because his comedy had to be more precise than that. He needed plus or minus two frames a second in order to see if a gag worked or not.

It was not in me to say “no” to Jackie Gleason. So I went to work to figure out a way to do it. No equipment invented at that time could do the level of editing accuracy on U-Matic tape that I needed. (It was to come within a year, but not then.)

To get the edit to within two frames of accuracy, I had to keep trying manually on a hit or miss basis. The edit would have to be random luck. I kept editing the same shot over and over until it got closer to Gleason’s goal. It took hours, days, weeks to finish the job. I was glassy eyed before it was over.

And this, mind you, was a rough cut edit. The on-line editing, done much later, was frame accurate. (And it was far quicker and easier!)

What I learned from working with the Great One is that precise timing is EVERYTHING — in comedy, acting, music and just about anything else. It was a valuable lesson hammered into me that I would always remember.

In the photo above, Gleason and the cast of the Honeymooners in the 1950s in New York. That same set was used years later for the final shows taped on Miami Beach.