postPerspective Update

Beastie Boys Story:
Editing the Spike Jonze Doc

By Craig Ellenport

When Jeff Buchanan, ACE, and Zoe Schack began work on Beastie Boys Story, the "documentary experience" for Apple TV +, the two editors were already intimately familiar with the project. 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, also directed the band’s 1994 music video for “Sabotage.” So when Diamond and Horovitz were planning a book tour before their memoir, “Beastie Boys Book,” was published, they asked Jonze who they could get to create some photo and video montages to display behind them as they were reading. He 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.”

The stage show was basically Diamond and Horovitz on stage with a large screen behind them talking about the history of the band. “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.”