By Jay Hopkins

The eight-episode limited series Fellow Travelers, which airs on Paramount+ with Showtime, stars Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey and is based on the book of the same name by Thomas Mallon. The series follows the complicated relationship between two gay men in the 1950s, Hawkins Fuller (Bomer) and Timothy Laughlin (Bailey), leading double lives and navigating homosexuality in an era of unacceptance. The book is set exclusively during the height of McCarthyism, but the series expanded the time period and spans over four decades up to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Christopher Donaldson

Ron Nyswaner was the show’s EP/showrunner/creator. Directors included Dan Minahan (also an EP), Destiny Ekaragha, James Kent and Uta Briesewitz.

The show’s picture editors were Christopher Donaldson, ACE; Wendy Hallam Martin, ACE; and Lara Johnston. The Toronto-based team collaborated at Picture Shop using Avid Media Composer.

Donaldson cut Episodes 1, 2 and 7 and was the first one onboard. He and Minahan worked on smaller things for the show before shooting began, such as camera tests and the opening credit sequence. Donaldson then recommended Hallam Martin. They liked what she did on Queer as Folk and hired her on the spot. She was excited about coming onboard and working with Donaldson again after teaming up on The Handmaid’s Tale. She cut Episodes 3, 5 and 8. Then Johnston joined the team to cut Episodes 4 and 6.

postPerspective spoke to all three to find out more.

What was your post workflow like?
Christopher Donaldson: The workflow was created by our post producer, Richard Anobile, who unfortunately passed away during production, and the people at Picture Shop. We established the technical workflow over the first two episodes. When Wendy started on Episode 3, we had a good sense of our daily workflow and how we were shuffling media between different computers.

Wendy Hallam Martin

Wendy Hallam Martin: We had the dailies first thing in the morning, then we’d screen and meet to discuss them so we knew the tone. It was a challenging assembly process because we were covering four decades, and we had to carefully track Hawk and Tim and the power dynamic between the two characters. Our physical workflow was to assemble the scenes as they came in and then take four days to create an “editors’ assembly.” We then met with the directors. James Kent, who directed Episode 5, which I worked on, was the only one who came in to Picture Shop. Destiny Ekaragha directed Episode 3 but was in London when we did the director’s cut, so we did it remotely on PacPost. Robbie Rogers, who wrote Episode 5, came in to do a pass before Ron did.

Christopher, Lara, and I worked very collaboratively, showing each other our cuts, giving notes or thoughts such as, “This happened in the previous episode, so maybe Hawk needs to be a little more conniving in this scene.”

Describe the pace of the editing.
Donaldson: I was doing three of the first four episodes, so it was intense. We shot out of sequence for weather, so Episodes 3 and 7 were Block 2. It was very busy for me at the beginning, especially through to the director’s cut, and then with Episodes 1 and 2 when I was also working on Episode 7. After the directors were finished, there was time in the schedule, out of respect for Ron and his process, so it didn’t feel like the episodes were being shot out of a cannon, especially because Ron was very focused being on-set.

Lara Johnston

Episodes 1 and 2 were the standard schedule of five days for the pilot, four days for Episode 2. The challenge with most episodes were just that they were very long. My assembly of Episode 1 was 88 minutes, and my assembly of Episode 2 was 86 minutes. The process took a little bit longer because we really needed to get them down without butchering them. The post schedule itself was sensitive to Ron and him wanting to get it right. There was no demanding, “We need this” and “We need this now.” They were willing to let us take our time, which was great.

Hallam Martin: We had a lot of different emotional scenes, like the sex scenes. They were fun and fast and flirty, then the Cozy Corner [underground gay nightclub] with the sultry singing, and then the raid. We really got to play with pace. Then in Episode 8, it just completely halts. The pace slows right down, and it becomes an emotional piece.

Lara Johnston: This is not a fast-paced show in the traditional sense of an action or thriller-based show, but it does move briskly through three decades, and there’s a lot of story packed into the eight episodes. Pace is always something you’re thinking of and controlling as an editor, and in Fellow Travelers it was about finding the balance between revealing plot and keeping the story moving, but also slowing things down to get deep into these complex characters and their lives and emotions.

Sometimes you’re trying to cut out the shoe leather of logistics (like how a character gets from point A to point B) so you can spend more time with the emotion and real meaning of a scene. For example, there’s the bedroom scene with Hawk and Tim in Episode 4, when Hawk gives Tim the cufflinks. They are getting out of bed, putting on their clothes, moving around the room, and Ron just wanted to get that done as quickly as possible. He wanted us to get to the core of the scene, which is the heart-breaking moment when Hawk gives Tim a present but then emotionally sucker-punches him by asking him to do him a favor (getting the compromising photos of McCarthy to Schine). It’s a matter of figuring out the balance between not boring and not confusing the audience and getting them to engage as deeply as possible.

The episodes are an hour long, but they move very fast and are over before you realize it. At the same time they move slowly through the lives of Hawk and Tim. How did you accomplish that?
Donaldson: Ron did such an amazing job of shaping these men’s lives over those eight episodes. The book itself ends in the ‘50s, so Ron built what happens in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. For the most part, those time period choices were pretty well-structured. Once we were in the edits themselves, jumping back and forth between the storylines, they became more emotionally instinctual. But certainly, the dramatic beats between various time frames were all Ron, and they were worked out well in advance.

Because we shot the order of the Episodes as 1, 2, 3 and 7, with 7 being a jump of about 25 years, it was astonishing to see how the actors built and tracked their performances. Jonathan Bailey knew exactly how he was going to play Tim in the ‘70s. It wasn’t like he could just progress. He’s playing this character as a young, naïve and innocent man [in the ‘50s]. Then he changes hair and makeup to play the same man in the ‘70s, but his entire body and way of being are different.

When you have actors who are dedicated to working out the difference in the characters over the span of time, going back and forth between the time frames becomes much easier for you as an editor because they’re giving all the signs. They’re giving the audience the information they need.

Hallam Martin: When we were cutting, we were very conscious of not overstaying our welcome in any scene. We kept the pace lively so that we earned the moments during the more emotional beats in Tim and Hawk’s story. The visual textures are so rich in this series. There is so much visual eye candy. Add incredible performances to that, and you get completely lost in it. Time just flies as a viewer even though you feel like you’ve lived every second with Tim and Hawk.

Johnston: Ron is also so experienced as a storyteller… not just as a writer, but in post. He did Homeland, Philadelphia and many other things. He knows how to think about the story, and he’s not precious in the editing suite. He will try anything and is not afraid to lose stuff. Fellow Travelers came out of his lived experience, and we took the time to get it right.

The series jumps time periods, but you’ve said that some of the scenes in the same time period were shot together. How did that work, and how did you keep track of it all?
Donaldson: Episodes 1 and 2 took place primarily in the ‘50s, with framing in the ‘80s. For ease of production, they would shoot, keeping people in the same costumes in the same sets and in the same locations. They shot a lot of ‘50s material, and a couple days’ of ‘80s material, so on and so forth.

As we moved deeper into the series, it became more complicated, and the second block was probably one of the more complicated ones. It was almost entirely in the ‘70s and ‘50s, so they had to jump back and forth. But that was ultimately production’s cross to bear. If the actors and everyone else are on their game, as they were in this case, and with Ron’s sense of how he wanted it to play out emotionally over all eight episodes, it became something that was just a scheduling trick.

Hallam Martin: There was a lot of tone, so we had to check other takes to make sure that Tim was reacting the way he should be; we didn’t want to make him too childlike. Those kinds of discussions went on in the cutting room. It was tricky to cut in the sense that we had to watch for that through the decades as well. For instance, Allison Williams [Lucy Smith], literally changed the octave of her voice from early on. She was a smoker, so as we got later into the episodes, her octave would adapt. We had to keep an eye on things like that.

Which scene was the most difficult to edit and why?
Donaldson: For me, it was the threesome sequence in Episode 7 because as a scene it had to do many things simultaneously. It had to be hot, it had to be awkward, it had to be graphic, and it had to be emotional for Tim and Hawk… yet at the same time not. Tim is there as a support figure with the love of his life as he watches him have sex with another man.

The actors were extraordinary. It started with a fight when Tim went after Craig. It was certainly the scene that took the longest to get right. And it had to lead to that moment of Hawk looking at his son, causing his emotional release on the bed. It was a lot of fun, but it took a long time to get it right.

Hallam Martin: The hardest one for me was the Army-McCarthy hearings in Episode 5 [when the US Army brought charges against Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn for abuse of power]. Telling the story of the proceedings — and with the plot twist of the photograph — created a ton of footage. I had three full bins of three cameras running full time.

Johnston: Episode 6 was a challenge because we moved it around a lot and did a lot of restructuring. We pulled the scene cards out, moved stuff around and got it to a place that Ron was happy with. When we showed it to the network, they bumped on the transition into one of the storylines from the 1950s, which we eventually ended up cutting. It was hard to lose because there were a couple of really great scenes, but ultimately Ron knew that those scenes weren’t the best for the episode — and it’s always hard to lose stuff you really love.

Which scene was your favorite or easiest scene to edit?
Johnston: There’re so many favorites to choose from! I really enjoyed the scene when Hawk is taking the polygraph. It was a pretty hard scene to cut because I felt like I was lost in the wilderness when I first saw the dailies, like I was never going to be able to make it work. But the director, James Kent, really liked what I did. He encouraged me to push it further, so we pushed it further in his cut. He said, “It will never stay like this, but we’ll just show it to Ron like this and he can dial it back.” But Ron also really liked it and said to push it even further, even though he didn’t think we’d be able to leave it like that either. So we pushed, and it basically stayed the way it was. It was really a joy to watch some things with Ron because his heart was in it so much.

Hallam Martin: One of my favorite scenes is when Hawk tells Tim that he’s going to marry Lucy. The reason it’s my favorite is because Jonathan Bailey’s performance was so outrageously good. It was so understated, but you can tell he just got hit in the heart with an arrow. I love that scene between the two of them.

Donaldson: My easiest scene was probably the first sex scene between Hawk and Tim. They had such incredible chemistry. When you’re editing, sometimes you put two shots together, and suddenly, it’s exponentially larger than the two shots were on their own. That happened over and again on that scene, which was a thrill to edit. You almost don’t feel like you’re editing; you’re just channeling this incredible energy between the two actors.

My favorite scene to edit was in Episode 2. Tim goes to a party at Mary’s house, and they’re playing charades. There is rock music playing, and they’re all having so much fun, but it somehow didn’t quite feel right to me. I told Dan Minahan [the director of the episode] that went a little off-book and made the scene very emotional rather than fun. When I faded out the music and brought in the score, suddenly the scene lifted off and became very emotional. That’s when I felt I knew what I was doing on the show. I loved these characters and these performers, and I felt like I was going to be a legitimate part of it.

Jay Hopkins is a freelance writer and indie film producer who has been working in the post production industry for decades. He is based in Los Angeles.