Fred von Bernewitz is a film editor, currently with HBO. His work in film editing over four decades ranges from TV commercials to features, including several Robert Downey, Sr. films.

Interviewed in 2008 by film critic Stuart Klawans

Stuart Klawans

Stuart Klawans has been the film critic for The Nation since 1988. He won the 2007 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism and he received a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a critical study of Preston Sturges...

 for The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, Downey recalled obtaining a camera and working with von Bernewitz during the 1960s:

The apparatus turned out to be spring-wound, so the takes could last no longer than 16 seconds, and the film stock was hundred-foot spools of Air Force surplus, salvaged from a dump behind an air base. (Film history can now account for the energetic montage and Scotch tape cinematography of Babo 73.) Postproduction was equally thrifty. “This friend of mine, Fred von Bernewitz, worked as an editor, so we’d sneak into movie editing rooms on the weekend and later send ’em some money.” It becomes evident that Mr. Downey begins most stories with the words, “This guy, a friend of mine.” Does that mean he felt he was part of a community? “Somewhat,” he said, then added: “There were possibilities. People back then were saying, ‘Let’s try this.’ It wasn’t a career. It was just fun.

Tales of Terror!

With Grant Geissman

Grant Geissman

Grant Geissman is a crossover jazz, contemporary jazz and new age guitarist and an Emmy-nominated composer for network TV series and TV movies. An in-demand studio musician, he has recorded extensively for several labels since 1976, and he can be heard playing guitar on the theme for Monk and...

, von Bernewitz is the co-author of Tales of Terror! The EC Companion (Gemstone Publishing

Gemstone Publishing

Gemstone Publishing is a U.S. company that publishes comic books and collectors' guides. The company was formed by Diamond Comic Distributors President and Chief Executive Officer Stephen A. Geppi. Gemstone published licensed Disney comic books from June 2003 until November 2008. The company has...

/Fantagraphics Books

Fantagraphics Books

Fantagraphics Books is an American publisher of alternative comics, classic comic strip anthologies, magazines, graphic novels, and the adult-oriented Eros Comix imprint...

, 2000). In Rambles, Chet Williamson reviewed Tales of Terror!:

First and foremost, there's the art: color reproductions of every EC comic ever, and not just the great ones. Here you'll find the covers and complete contents listings, including artists and writers, for everything from Picture Stories from the Bible to the last 1956 issue of Confessions Illustrated

Confessions Illustrated

Confessions Illustrated was a black-and-white magazine published by EC Comics in early 1956. Part of EC's Picto-Fiction line, each magazine featured three to five stories. The format alternated blocks of text with several illustrations per page....

. That just scratches the surface of what's inside this nearly 300-page oversized slab of a book. There are tons of historical material, including Bill Gaines

William Gaines

William Maxwell Gaines , better known as Bill Gaines, was an American publisher and co-editor of EC Comics. Following a shift in EC's direction in 1950, Gaines presided over what became an artistically influential and historically important line of mature-audience comics...

' complete testimony before the Senate Sub-Committee investigating the dismal influences of EC comics. There are plenty of other contemporary documents, photographs and interviews, as well as looks at where EC got the raw material for their stories. I was delighted to see that the chapter of horror stories in the Bennett Cerf

Bennett Cerf

Bennett Alfred Cerf was a publisher and co-founder of Random House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearances lecturing across the United States, and for his television appearances in the panel game show What's My Line?.-Biography:Bennett Cerf...

 collection Try and Stop Me, which terrified me when I was a kid, was mined assiduously by the EC crew. There are oodles of little nuggets like this, including features on the Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...

 adaptations, plenty of non-EC art by EC artists, material about early EC fandom, a complete index by story title and a fascinating interview with Russ Cochran, describing his efforts to get the original artwork out of Bill Gaines' storage vault so that he could reproduce it.

Von Bernewitz compiled the original edition of The Complete EC Checklist (1955). The first index to EC Comics

EC Comics

Entertaining Comics, more commonly known as EC Comics, was an American publisher of comic books specializing in horror fiction, crime fiction, satire, military fiction and science fiction from the 1940s through the mid-1950s, notably the Tales from the Crypt series...

, it has been reprinted several times with updates, and it served as a basis for Tales of Terror! For Mad

Mad (magazine)

Mad is an American humor magazine founded by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines in 1952. Launched as a comic book before it became a magazine, it was widely imitated and influential, impacting not only satirical media but the entire cultural landscape of the 20th century.The last...

publisher Bill Gaines, he compiled three volumes of The Complete Mad Checklist (1961, 1964, 1970).

External links

• Time: "That Old Feeling": Richard Corliss on Fred von Bernewitz