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“Paring the Story Down to Its Bare Essentials”: Editor Joshua L. Pearson on Sly Lives

Still from Sly Lives!. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) examines the life and legacy of legendary funk act Sly & The Family Stone. Rather than biography, the film opts as an examination of legacy that combines archival footage with discussions among friends, family and other musicians.

The film is Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s follow-up to the award-winning Summer of Soul. For the new film, he reteamed with editor Joshua L. Pearson, who explains how his background in music and long history with music videos prepared him for the job.

See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.

Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?

Pearson: I had the privilege of working with Ahmir Thompson and Joseph Patel on Summer of Soul; they hired me because of my background in music and video art, as well as my track record editing documentary films and TV series. I have many tricks in my toolkit, and one of them is very rhythmic, funky editing of archival footage. During the 1990s I was in an electronic music video group called Emergency Broadcast Network, and I made many music videos using custom-made beats and found archival footage. On Summer of Soul, I was able to occasionally flex that style in a way I had not been able to in many years. So when Sly Lives came along, Ahmir and Joseph wanted to once again tap into that extra capability of mine, which is like icing on a cake foundation of good storytelling.

Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?

Pearson: I’m always looking for the most emotional moments of interviews and trying to reduce things to the most emotional essence possible. There are always digressions and sorry rabbit holes that are tempting to go down, but I try to detail things to the core story. I love working with strong collaborators who can shape stories on paper using transcripts, which I use as a jumping off point for further exploration.

Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?

Pearson: I like to post links and screen and get feedback as often as possible. Again, working with collaborators is incredibly important to me. I also love working with Avid ScriptSync; I now do not need an assistant to pull interview selects because I prefer looking at a whole page of transcription and editing my own selects from there. It lets me build dialog and storytelling very quickly. I am now experimenting with having selects sequences transcribed and possibly working from those. I also like to get temp music into scenes as soon as possible to play with mood; music is so important for mood and vibe creation, on top of rhythm.

Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?

Pearson: I started out as a painter at Rhode Island School of Design and then began making video art in the late ’80s using 3/4 inch tape editing. It was incredibly painstaking, but it builds character. During the ’90s, Emergency Broadcast Network was signed to TVT Records, and we did lots of live shows projecting our videos from VHS tapes and using computers to manipulate video in real time. By the 2000s, I entered the world of documentary film editing at Radical Media, where I worked until 2023. There was a bit of a learning curve coming from video art, as for instance one of my first directors had to explain what a “scene” was. I slowly made my way from editing trailers and sizzles to tackling long form TV and films, learning massively from directors like Joe Berlinger, Liz Garbus and Morgan Neville and countless great producers along the way.

Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?

Pearson: I’ve used everything from Premiere to Media 100 to Final Cut 7 and Final Cut X, but have landed at Avid due to its stability cutting long sequences, and its ScriptSync capabilities. I absolutely love working from transcripts.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?

Pearson: The hardest scene to cut was probably the chunk of the film where Sly is slipping into drug use and obscurity, and we introduce his children in addition to trying to follow his musical arc. We were juggling a lot of information, and once again it came down to paring the story down to its bare essentials and discarding some rabbit holes.

Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has the film taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?

Pearson: The film changed my perception of the extra struggle that Black artists go through, even when successful. The idea that they are under extra scrutiny by the media and the press really hit home for me.

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