Eclipse Staffing Change

EW reported a staffing change on the Eclipse behind the scenes team.

“Summit Entertainment, the studio behind the uber-successful Twilight series, confirmed this morning that it has replaced Eclipse editor Art Jones with Nancy Richardson, the editor of Catherine Hardwicke’s original Twilight film. The studio is not placing blame on Jones, who previously worked with Eclipse director David Slade on his horror film 30 Days of Night as well as Slade’s Ellen Page-starrer Hard Candy. They do believe, however, that Slade’s material – which they call “very good” – needed a stronger edit. The studio has more confidence in Richardson, who they say understands the emotion of the characters and is an ace at balancing action with the other elements of the film.”

We checked out Art Jones’ resume on the IMDB.  Counting Eclipse, he has worked as an editor on five films in total. Two are short films. Short films generally run no more than thirty minutes and, more often than not, they run under twenty. His full-length film work is limited to movies that David Slade has directed: Hard Candy, and Thirty Days of Night.

We also checked out Nancy Richardson’s resume on the IMDB. Nancy has worked on over 30 productions in movies and TV. She has served as an editor, foley editor (sound specialty), and consultant.  She’s worked with Catherine Hardwicke and Greg Nava on multiple projects as well as a variety of other people.

We sat on this story for 24 hours to see if industry insiders like Nikki Finke might weigh in, and so far no other industry insider is commenting. That’s a little unusual if there was some kind of behind the scenes turmoil.  Lots of Monday morning quarterbacking going on about this on various fansites ranging from grand conspiracy theory to amicable parting of ways, but industry insiders seem pretty quite.  So, take it for what it is, your guess is as good as ours. It’s going to be interesting to see if anything new develops here.