He carved out many signature features, including ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Eat’, ‘The Last Detail’, ‘Shampoo’, ‘Bound for Glory’ and ‘Heaven Can Wait’.
Robert C. Jones, esteemed film editor who like classics Guess who’s at dinner, Love story, The last detail and On the road to glory and presented a screenplay Oscar Coming home, has passed away. He was 84.
Jones died Monday at his Los Angeles home after a long illness, his daughter Leslie Jones, an Oscar-nominated film editor, told me, as did her father. The Hollywood Reporter. She called him her mentor, “a gentle and generous man and a comedic genius. He really was the sweetest man.”
His father, Harmon Jones, was also an Oscar-nominated film editor, honored for his work on Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947).
Robert C. Jones has worked regularly with directors Stanley Kramer, Hal Ashby, Arthur Hiller and Warren Beatty during his career, and in 2014 received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Cinema Editors.
After retiring from Hollywood in 2001, he spent the next 15 years as an admired professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Early on, the Los Angeles native was awarded Oscar noms for his work with Kramer It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) and Guess who’s at dinner (1967). In between he worked with the director Ship of Fools (1965).
For film editor turned director Ashby, Jones cut The last detail (1973), Shampoo (1975) and On the road to glory (1976) – which resulted in his third Academy Award editing nomination – and received his original screenplay Oscar, shared with Waldo Salt and Nancy Dowd, for Coming home (1978). He also worked on the script for There are (1979) but received no credit.
He has worked eight positions for Hiller: Tobruk (1967), The tiger makes it clear (1967), Love story (1970), Man from La Mancha (1972), The crazy world of Julius Vrooder (1974), See no evil, hear no evil (1989), Married him (1991) and The Babe (1992).
And for Beatty, the director, he edited Heaven can wait (1978), Bulworth (1998) and Love affair (1994).
Born March 30, 1936, Robert Clifford Jones dropped out of college and went to work in the shipping room at 20th Century Fox. “I took it without knowing what I was getting into,” he told Debra Kaufman in an interview in 2014 for CineMontage magazine.
Jones rose through the ranks to apprentice film editor and assistant film editor and worked on such films as Untamed (1955) and The long hot summer (1958). The track “was magical to me,” he said. “It opened my eyes to what my father had done.”
He was drafted into the United States Army, but gained valuable experience editing films and documentaries in Astoria, New York in 1958-60. Then, back home, he teamed up with Gene Fowler Jr. to John Cassavetes’ A child is waiting (1963) produced by Kramer, ed It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
Jones told Kaufman he was editing a movie “that just didn’t work at all” when he asked the director “if he minded leaving for a few weeks,” he recalls. “I remade it and restructured it and worked on performances. He came back and said, ‘Have you ever thought of becoming a writer? You just rewrote my movie with editing.’ A light went on in my head and I started writing. I learned to write by editing. “
Jones declined an offer from Ashby to edit Coming home, but when Salt was sidelined by a heart attack two months before production began, Jones came on board as a screenwriter. “It shocked me to get an Oscar,” he said. “When I went onstage to accept it with Waldo and the story’s author, Nancy Dowd, it was the first time I’d met them.”
He said United Artists / Lorimar Productions had given him a co-screenwriter with novelist Jerzy Kosinski on There are, but the WGA was the only one to grant Kosinski credit. “It was a dark day in my life,” he said. He focused on editing for the rest of his career.
His credits also include Ida Lupino’s The Trouble With Angels (1966), I love you, Alice B. Toklas! (1968), Josh Logan’s Paint your car (1969), Richard Fleischer’s The new centurions (1972), Cisco Pike (1971), Tony Scott’s Days of thunder (1990) Harold Becker Town Hall (1996), Crazy in Alabama (1999) and Unconditional love (2002), his last film.
His daughter, who received her Oscar nomination for Terrence Malick’s The thin red line (1998), assisted her father in such films as See no evil, hear no evil and The Babe early in her career. Like her father, she did not attend film school and had no formal training in editing.
“But what I learned was that editing doesn’t always require a specific set of skills. He taught me that talent is instead guided by a sense of compassion, integrity and the search for truth and authenticity. He had all that and more.”
As a USC, Jones not only taught students to edit, he supported and even helped fuel their passion for filmmaking and storytelling in general, Dean Elizabeth Daley of the School of Cinematic Arts said in a statement.
Bob was known for being patient and kind and for a great sense of humor. He involved students in the hallways of the school, joked with them and was literally a source of joy. He was a mentor not only to students but also to students. his faculty colleagues and members of the staff. Without a doubt, he was one of the school’s best-loved professors. “
In addition to his daughters Leslie and Hayley, survivors include his 59-year-old wife, Sylvia; grandchildren Sophia, Henry, Sammy and Phoebe; sons-in-law John and Joshua; and sister Polly.
Leslie noted that her father had created a series of “Grandpa Bob” video sketches for his grandchildren in which Grandpa Bob went into space, stole donuts, and explained the nervous system. The funny videos also went viral around the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Rhett Bartlett contributed to this report.