Sidney Meyers

Sidney Meyers (March 9, 1906 – December 4, 1969), also known by the pen name Robert Stebbins was an American film director and editor.

Sidney Meyers was born in New York City on March 9, 1906, and grew up in East Harlem, then a teeming immigrant neighborhood.

He was the eldest child of Abraham and Ida (née Rudock) Meyers, who had immigrated from Poland to the United States around the start of the 20th century.

On completing his studies he spent some three years as a member of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, then conducted by Maestro Fritz Reiner.

As was the case with many sons and daughters of immigrant families during the seemingly-endless Great Depression, he was drawn to left-wing political ideas.

Ralph Rosenblum, who was mentored by Meyers, describes the exhausting process from the editor's point of view: "I sit in a corner at one of the Moviolas piecing together a sequence that was shot from five different perspectives.

The documentary tells the story of the rehabilitation of a young, emotionally disturbed African-American boy; it contains text written by James Agee and narrated by Gary Merrill.

In a 1949 review, Bosley Crowther defined the film: "Out of the tortured experiences of a 10-year-old Harlem Negro boy, cruelly rejected by his loved ones but rescued by the people of the Wiltwyck School, a new group of local film-makers has fashioned a genuine masterpiece in the way of a documentary drama."

Edge of the City (1957), which Meyers edited, was directed by Martin Ritt and starred John Cassavetes, Sidney Poitier, Jack Warden, Kathleen Maguire and Ruby Dee.

Edge of the City was based on Robert Alan Arthur's screenplay which was the final episode of The Philco Television Playhouse: "A Man Is Ten Feet Tall" (1955).

Edge of the City was praised by representatives of the NAACP, the Urban League, the American Jewish Committee, among others, for its courageous depiction of an interracial friendship.

The camera footage was done by cinematographers Haskell Wexler, Helen Levitt and Jack Couffer; the music is by Leonard Rosenman.

In the words of John Hagan: "One can see how, in its study of a woman whose marital problems have estranged her from the world, it anticipated, if not influenced, such films as The Misfits, Red Desert, and Juliet of the Spirits."

The latter, largely a European tradition, included "city symphony" films, which aimed to show people as products of the man-made environment in which they lived.

The place of editing in creating the final artistic product is so central that the editor is on occasion given credit as consultant, or even co-director.