Photograph by Armando Koghan
St. Louis native Joe Leonard is an editor on the hit TV show Glee. His intense, 60-hour-a-week job is our gain—the show, a farcical look at the melodrama surrounding a high-school glee club, is comedy gold. In his (exceedingly rare) spare time, Leonard shoots his own comedy shorts and features, and helps run the “We Make Movies” indie-film collective. (“Snuggle Bunny,” a short viewable at FunnyorDie.com, will screen at this month’s St. Louis International Film Festival.) But he’s really a Gleek at heart. —B.K.
• My typical day starts with watching what I cut the night before and realizing that it isn’t quite funny enough or quite dramatic enough or fun enough. [Laughs] The biggest thing about editing Glee is the high expectation of having a hit show on TV and trying to come up with something that’s as good as or better than what we’ve done before.
• Typically we work from 8 or 9 a.m. ‘til about 8 or 9 at night. We have long days, and tight schedules. There are musical numbers that are a blast, very dark comedy, drama, and all of it’s fun to work on.
• The craziest thing is how quickly it all happens. It’s a seven-day shooting schedule, and they expect us to get done with the cut one week after shooting, and it goes on the air a week after that. For each 44-minute show, they’ll shoot 30 hours worth of footage, and we have to find the correct 44 minutes.
• Especially for the music numbers, we shoot from several cameras at once, so at any given time there could be 50 or 60 shots you can use: a wide-angle, a crane, a close-up, an insert of feet dancing, et cetera. The rhythm and shot selection is all that you do when you’re cutting a music number.
• As an editor, when you go on set, people look at you, like, “Why aren’t you editing? We’re working—why aren’t you working?” So I don’t ever stick around too long on the sets.
• Some of my favorite Glee moments include the first time we did “Sue’s Corner,” when she gets on the local news and does a sort of op-ed. And when Sue did the Vogue video from the Madonna episode. There have been so many. When Kurt told his dad he was gay—I loved that scene and the message in it.
• I laugh at the show in the editing suite all the time. In fact, that’s sort of the test: You have to trust your judgment about what’s funny and what’s not. You want to laugh even the tenth or the hundredth time you watch it.
• The guy behind the show is Ryan Murphy—it’s his vision. Working on Glee is like being involved in a movie where everyone does their best to channel the vision of what’s on the page and continue what we’ve done before, that offbeat, quirky tone. The question at the end of the day is, “Does it please the boss—did we push things in the correct direction?”
• I cut the funeral portion of the episode “The Funeral.” [In which Sue’s mentally challenged sister suddenly dies, and the Glee Club gives her a funeral themed after Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.] It was kind of touching in an odd way.
• I like that Glee can totally be in this insane universe of high school musicals, and Jane Lynch’s wackiness, and every once in a while really deal with a subject with honesty and still be funny. It’s a unique show.
• I edit in a darkened room. There are times when you want to open the window and let in the sun or take a walk around the lot, just to get some vitamin D.
• Because the show is shot so quickly, the editors are on a rotation. I cut every third episode.
• Another editor is also a St. Louisan. He’s a SLUH and Mizzou grad named Doc Crotzer. We became buddies out here, and we’re both editors, and I chose to bring him in. He’s the best.
• There’s a composer named Jimmy Levine who does all of the music in the score, so we have a library of every cue that he’s done, and we cross-reference them and use that library to figure out if there’s a good “Rachel’s-losing-her-mind” cue or, say, the drums when Jane Lynch does “Sue’s Corner.”
• Each episode presents its own unique challenge. We’ll place music where we can, and upload it for him to look at and communicate what we’re missing. Like if we need a theme for Will and Emma’s relationship, he’ll write a couple of new cues as needed for each show. Getting the score is a big part of locking the show down.
• I grew up in Kirkwood and started making movies in high school, and I was a theatre guy. I would do crew and I acted badly, too. [Laughs]
• Three or four years ago, I shot my directorial feature, How I Got Lost, in New York and St. Louis. I find a way to get back to St. Louis to shoot when I have a project; it’s fun to shoot in a place that I’m really familiar with.
• How I Got Lost is a road movie that ends up in St. Louis. It’s about these two guys who are running away from their problems in New York. They end up in a small town that’s supposed to be in Ohio, but we shot in Kirkwood, at the Kirkwood train station and at Spencer’s Grill. We also shot at some baseball fields, and at the River City Rascals ballpark in O’Fallon for the finale of the movie. That was so much fun.
• I did an independent feature over the summer that’s going to festivals this fall. It’ll probably be at the St. Louis Film Fest in 2012. It’s called 3 Days of Normal. It’s a romantic comedy about a small town deputy and a sort-of celebutante starlet who fall in love. It’s a really sweet movie made for less than a million dollars that will have to struggle for big release. It stars Mircea Monroe, who was recently in The Change-Up with Ryan Reynolds.
• I just found out that one of my shorts will be screened at the St. Louis International Film Festival. It’s called “Snuggle Bunny.” [It’s a deranged comedy about a guy in a bunny suit who attacks people.]
• I’m one of the founders of “We Make Movies,” an L.A. workshop for reading and producing indie film projects. It’s a fantastic way to develop new stuff to work on, and it’s a lot of fun.
• I’d love to be an acclaimed director, but really what I love about what I do is the filmmaking and the creative process. I love editing Glee and feature films. I think I’ll always want to direct. Since I was 16, I’ve had movies bouncing around in my head that I want to direct. I love being where I am in the process and the business: right in the middle of it.
