Kenny Holmes grew up in Reno, went to Wooster High and Truckee Meadows Community College, ran a news camera at Channel 4, then moved to Los Angeles, where he still works in television. He’s co-producer, editor and director of photography for Score, a feature-length documentary about Hollywood film score composers. The official release is in June, but first Holmes and collaborator Matt Schrader will host two screenings at the Nevada Museum of Art May 6, one at 3 p.m. followed by a Q+A with Channel 4’s Joe Hart and another at 6 p.m. followed by a Q+A with Vanessa Vancour from the University of Nevada, Reno. For tickets visit www.nevadaart.org/calendar.
You interviewed almost 60 composers. As an editor, how do you even begin to deal with that much footage?
The project itself started off as—we don’t know what we’re going to get. … In the beginning we were like, hey, maybe we could get someone like Hans Zimmer. This is our first film. We had to build the trust of the industry. We didn’t anticipate getting this many interviews. One thing we knew was we didn’t want a narrator. We had to craft our questions based on holes we had in the film. In order to fill those holes, we got more interviews. [Composers said], “Maybe we’ll do it if so and so’s doing it.” … To concisely answer your question, there’s a ton of footage. We shot a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. Whittling all of that down into 90 minutes was tough. The original cut was over two hours. … There are still film buffs who are like, “Show us the six-hour version.”
Was editing for film a lot different than for TV?
I do really fast paced editing on a daily basis, because we don’t have a lot of time. I felt really at home. We’re laying the sections, pulling down the sound bites. The only difference was I had so much more time, which sometimes is a blessing and sometimes is a curse, because I’m a perfectionist. The difference with doing the documentary versus news is a lot of the content I had to find myself, whereas in news we shoot it all, and it’s right there in my face, and we put it together. We tried to keep similar pacing to news. … A lot of people have commented on this on the festival circuit. They could sense that we had a background that just was different than a documentary film background.
How long did the whole process take?
From starting to plan, to completion, was just about two years. We both have a background in news. We’re used to doing minute-and-a-half documentaries every day with a short deadline. … We raised the money through crowdfunding—Kickstarter, Indiegogo. We did this project in our free time, before or after work, or on our weekends. We didn’t really anticipate where it was going to go. We finished the movie last June and did the festival circuit to see if there was interest for distribution. We have North American distribution rights through Gravitas Ventures. They’re putting us in theaters in June in select cities and Canada. After that, out to digital, international as well. There’s no language barrier. People in Japan love John Williams music as much as Americans do. There are people around the world messaging us. We’re using Google Translate. I think everyone in the world is, whether they know it or not, a film score fan.