Paul Seydor

Paul Seydor is a film editor and Professor of Cinema at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, where he teaches advanced editing and other aspects of filmmaking. He came to editing after being a professor of literature at the University of Southern California, where he completed Peckinpah: The Western Films (1980, University of Illinois Press), widely regarded as a seminal book on its subject and one of the best studies of an individual director.

He holds BA degrees in Literature and Journalism (1969) and an MA in Journalism and American Studies (1971) from the Pennsylvania State University; he earned his PhD in American Civilization from the University of Iowa (1976). He did his first editing for Roger Spottiswoode, one of the Peckinpah’s editors turned director, with whom he worked on The Best of Times, Time Flies When You’re Alive, Turner and Hooch, and The Last Innocent Man. A little later he began a longstanding collaboration with Ron Shelton that eventually included White Men Can’t Jump, Cobb, Tin Cup, Play It to the Bone, Dark Blue, and Hollywood Homicide.

He has twice been nominated for the American Cinema Editors “Eddie,” winning for The Day Reagan Was Shot (2000). He also wrote, directed, and edited a documentary, The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage, which was nominated for an Academy Award® for best achievement in a documentary short subject of 1996, as well as receiving numerous other awards and nominations. An updated and expanded edition of his critical study, now titled Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration, was published in 1997. In 2006 he prepared a special edition of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for the Warner DVD set Peckinpah: The Legendary Westerns, for which he also provides part of the audio commentary.

In the last several years he has edited a string of hit movies that include Guess Who, Barbershop 2: Back in Business, Because I Said So, This Christmas, and Obsessed. He has written an essay on preparing the special edition of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for a forthcoming anthology Peckinpah Today, due out in 2011 from Southern Illinois University Press. He has just finished editing his first feature‑length documentary, Beyond Right & Wrong: Stories of Justice & Forgiveness, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and Lekha Singh.