‘Black Stallion’ Movie Editor Was 80 – The Hollywood Reporter

Robert Dalva, the movie editor who earned an Oscar nomination for his work on the touching household journey The Black Stallion and collaborated with director Joe Johnston on 5 movies, together with Jumanji and Captain America: The First Avenger, has died. He was 80.

Dalva died Jan. 27 of lymphoma in Marin County, California, his son Matthew Dalva instructed The Hollywood Reporter.

Dalva attended USC movie faculty in the identical class with George Lucas, and he went to work with him and Francis Ford Coppola in 1969 because the pair launched their modern American Zoetrope manufacturing firm in San Francisco.

The connection paid off when Lucas employed Dalva to deal with second-unit pictures — he shot the land speeder going throughout the desert — on the unique Star Wars (1977).

On the Coppola-produced Black Stallion (1979), starring Mickey Rooney in an Oscar-nominated efficiency, Dalva partnered with director Carroll Ballard, who additionally did second-unit work on Star Wars.

“We had nearly 1,000,000 ft of movie,” Dalva stated in a 2012 interview. “A two-hour film is about 12,000 ft. And the island part of the film, which was about 37 minutes of the movie, represented three quarters of that million ft. So, the large battle was getting the island part all the way down to a manageable size that made sense.”

Later, Dalva recalled, he was strolling down the road close to Zoetrope when “Francis pulled up in a taxicab and received out. And he stated, ‘Robert, if there’s a sequel to Black Stallion, you wish to direct it?’ And I stated, ‘Positive, Francis.’”

The Black Stallion Returns (1983), shot in Italy and Morocco, marked the one function Dalva directed. (He did helm episodes of Crime Story and Lucas’ Clone Wars for tv.)

Born in New York on April 14, 1942, Robert John Dalva booked motion pictures for a movie program whereas attending Colgate College and took a took a movie class most Fridays at Syracuse College, the place he realized tips on how to run a digicam.

“The actual begin for me was seeing The 400 Blows by François Truffaut. It was then that I spotted that motion pictures may actually seize [you],” he stated.

After he graduated from Colgate in 1964, he spent three years at USC, the place his classmates included Lucas, John Milius, Caleb Deschanel, Walter Murch and Randal Kleiser.

Proper out of college, he landed a job with future Oscar-winning movie editor Verna Fields (Jaws) on the U.S. Data Company, then reduce Agnès Varda‘s Lions Love (1969) on a flatbed enhancing machine.

Along with Jumanji (1995) and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Dalva edited the Johnston-directed October Sky (1999), Jurassic Park III (2001) and Hidalgo (2004). Coincidentally, Johnston labored on Star Wars, too, as an ILM consultant for the movie’s miniature and optical results unit. The 2 didn’t understand that till many years later.

Dalva’s enhancing résumé included Haskell Wexler‘s Latino (1985), Brian De Palma’s Elevating Cain (1992), Wayne Wang’s The Pleasure Luck Membership (1993), The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005), Touching House (2008), Immortals (2011), Lovelace (2014), Sweetwater (2015) and Heist (2015).

Dalva additionally served as a cinematographer on the fourth and fifth seasons of the CBS crime sequence Nash Bridges from 1999-2000.

In 2017, he started educating part-time on the San Francisco Movie Faculty and later edited the documentaries Evolution of Natural (2018) and San Francisco Tales (2021). He was an enormous San Francisco Giants fan and was at Sport 3 of the 1989 World Collection along with his daughter Cory when an earthquake rattled Candlestick Park.

Along with Matthew and Cory, survivors embody his spouse, Marcia, whom he married in 1964; son Marshall; daughter Jessica; grandchildren Nathan, Zach, Luellen and Calvin; and brother Leon.

Donations in his reminiscence will be made to EngenderHealth, the Tulane Mind Institute, Mendocino Space Parks Affiliation and/or California School of the Arts.

Dalva “felt that motion pictures transfer by means of time however are finite,” Matthew Dalva stated. “The expertise of a film takes you alongside second by second, minute-by-minute, shot after shot, till the expertise ends. However time is never actual in a film, it have to be compressed and manipulated. The tales that he helped inform, tempo, construction and set the temper entertained and made hundreds of thousands expertise totally different worlds and tales and see new issues.”

In his 2012 interview, Dalva stated taking a course in race automobile driving at Sears Level in Sonoma, California — a gift from his spouse — made him a greater movie editor.

“It was form of a technique that will help you concentrate on what was taking place proper in entrance of you,” he defined. “And if you’re in a automobile driving 100 miles per hour, it is smart to be fully concentrating on what you might be doing. I got here away with a sharpened potential to pay attention. And it has helped me enormously. I believe I had the flexibility, however the driving faculty sharpened it.”