Image Credit: Jeff Vespa/WireImage.com; Linda R. ChenBeing Quentin Tarantino’s film editor couldn’t have been easy work. There were the long, unexplained gaps between projects, the fact that her boss was a movie-mad perfectionist who always had the ideal version of his film already playing inside his own head, and the intimidating challenge that all of his movies hinged on cutting back and forth between time, place, and characters — imagine trying to keep all of the mobius-strip plotlines of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction straight. But Tarantino was so devoted to Sally Menke and such a fan of her work that he never employed anyone else to cut his films. And he was such a fan of her as a person that he routinely assembled “Hi Sally” reels (included on the extras of many of his DVDs) where the cast and crew would begin each take by looking into the camera and giving her a shout-out she’d see months later to cheer her up in the editing room and push her to forge ahead. Along with Martin Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, it’s hard to imagine a more collaborative director/editor duo than Tarantino and Menke — a partnership that came to a sudden and unexpected end earlier today when the news hit that Menke, 56, was found dead near L.A.’s Griffith Park. Menke had apparently gone hiking in the morning heat with her dog and was found by searchers in Beachwood Canyon after her friends reported to police that she’d failed to come home. Her Labrador retriever was reportedly found alive beside her.

Menke graduated from the NYU film program and served as an editor on 1990′s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. There were other films after that, but her career really took off  when she partnered with Tarantino, an encyclopedic video store clerk-turned-auteur, on 1992′s Reservoir Dogs. The brilliant independent film about a band of nameless career criminals who assemble for a botched heist and reassemble in a warehouse trying to figure out how it all went wrong and whether or not they had a rat in their midst, made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival that year, turning Tarantino’s into one of the most electrifying debuts Hollywood had ever witnessed. There was no arguing that he was a genius, but it was Menke’s editing of the low-budget film that made it so unique and revolutionary. READ FULL STORY »