By Craig Ellenport

When Jeff Buchanan, ACE, and Zoe Schack began work on Beastie Boys Story — a “documentary experience” about the seminal hip-hop trio that is now streaming on Apple TV+ — the two editors were already intimately familiar with the project.

Jeff Buchanan

Before the documentary, there was a stage show. Before the stage show, there was a book tour. Along the way, surviving Beastie Boys members Mike Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) had been working with their good friend, Oscar-winning director Spike Jonze.

Jonze, who co-wrote and directed Beastie Boys Story, first worked with the band when he directed the popular music video for the hit single “Sabotage” in 1994. So when Diamond and Horovitz were planning a book tour before their memoir, “Beastie Boys Book,” was published in late 2018, they asked Jonze who they could get to create some photo and video montages to display behind them as they were reading.

Jonze recommended Buchanan, whose editing credits include Jonze’s Her. “I had been working with Spike for, like, 15 years,” says Buchanan, an editor at Final Cut in New York City. “So they started sending photos and YouTube clips, and there was just so much material. Eventually Zoe came on, and she and I just cut together all of these montages and photo montages, video clips for the book tour.” Both Buchanan and Schack have earned an Emmy nomination for their work on Beastie Boys Story.

After the book tour, Diamond, Horovitz and Jonze got together and wrote the stage show, which was basically Diamond and Horovitz on stage talking about their lives together and the history of the band, with a large screen behind them to support their stories with visuals. “Zoe and I were on in the beginning stages of the writing process of that, and we were at every performance and every rehearsal,” says Buchanan. “We were already cutting stuff that was going up on the screen while they were writing the show. We were on it even before the beginning.”

There had been talk from the start about turning the stage show into a movie. By that point, much of the heavy lifting for Buchanan and Schack had already been done. “The structure of it was already in place from the stage show,” says Buchanan. “They did four shows, and they wore the same clothes every night, so we were able to jump between shows pretty seamlessly. The first phase of the edit was essentially, ‘Which take should we use for each individual story?’ Sometimes it was, ‘Which take should we use for each individual line?’”

Zoe Schack

The heavy lifting that had already been done involved combing through hours and hours of footage and creating the photo and video montages for the stage show. “I don’t even know how many hundreds of hours in different formats of archival footage we ended up with,” says Schack, who is also an editor at Final Cut. “We had film footage that we had to digitize. We had European footage. We had MiniDV footage that was transcoded. We had MTV footage as 29.97fps. We had NTSC stuff. There was a really wide range of everything you could possibly imagine, so there was managing all of that stuff.”

More and more photos and videos turned up almost every day, so Buchanan and Schack were actually editing footage in between the stage shows. They said it wasn’t uncommon to be editing at night until 4 in the morning and then making more edits until just before the doors opened for the next show. “It was a pretty wild schedule for the live performances,” says Schack.

You might say the duo had “no sleep ‘til Brooklyn,” which coincidentally was the site of the final stage show.

The stage show was filmed with six ARRI Alexa cameras; Autumn Durald was the cinematographer. Buchanan and Schack edited the stage show content and, ultimately, the movie on Avid Media Composer. In addition to adding new photos and videos that weren’t in the stage show, another challenge was making smooth transitions as Diamond and Horovitz told story after story.

“Once we started playing with how b-roll could be cut in and how photos could be cut in, how you could use b-roll and photos to condense the stories even more and how you can use audience reaction shots to cut from one story to another seamlessly, that was when the movie really started coming together,” says Buchanan. “That’s when we found the style and the rhythm of how we were going to tell the story.”

Another challenge was helping to build a larger presence for the one member of the Beastie Boys who wasn’t there. Adam Yauch (MCA), who died of cancer in 2012, founded the Beastie Boys with Diamond and Horovitz. Diamond and Horovitz talk at length in the movie about how important Yauch was to them, both personally and professionally.

“A big part of it was really trying to include his voice throughout and making sure Yauch had a presence,” says Schack. “We would be going through different clips of interviews, MTV footage, anything we could find that would encapsulate this perfect moment. And if we found it, we would put it in. That way he was more part of the show. That was really great to do throughout, to keep on hearing his voice and make sure we incorporated him as much as possible.”

Buchanan credits Jonze with giving the editors plenty of latitude when it came to adding new footage for the film. “We could just explore and could keep adding and adding and adding,” he says. “The thing with Spike is, he’s not going to give up until it’s perfect. So when the guys are talking about how great it is to be in a band with their best friends and spend their life together, you’re gonna cut to a photo, and you’re not going to be done searching for that photo until you find the exact perfect photo.”

Buchanan says that was the biggest challenge they faced. “There’s 100,000 photos to choose from, and Zoe and I went through all 100,000 of them to find the perfect one. … That last step is combing through the material and going, ‘Is this the exact right photo to express this moment? Is that the exact right piece of film to express what they’re talking about?’ To me, that’s the biggest challenge of cutting a film like this.”

Ironically, the challenge of weaving in different footage that varied in quality turned out to be an asset in terms of storytelling. When the Beastie Boys first started performing in the early ‘80s, the only video available was amateur footage shot with shoddy VHS cameras.

“As they got bigger, as their career got bigger and bigger, the footage that they were being filmed on got nicer and nicer. It was this cool, subliminal perfect thing,” says Buchanan.

Buchanan and Schack used that evolution to help tell the Beastie Boys Story.

Craig Ellenport is a veteran sports writer who also covers the world of post production.