New York City-based award-winning editor Mari Keiko Gonzalez has cut live performances, concerts, and documentaries for some of the world’s greatest artists, including Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, Tony Bennett, Lauryn Hill, John Legend, Paul Simon, John Mayer, Parliament Funkadelic, Willie Nelson, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Billy Porter, Mariah Carey, Carrie Underwood, and Alicia Keys.

Mari’s father is a civil rights attorney who represented the trans activists at The Stonewall Riots, and her mother was a Broadway and television actor, teacher, and playwright. Mari studied at The School of American Ballet and performed in The Nutcracker with Mikhail Baryshnikov at Lincoln Center. She was a champion equestrian who attended The High School of Music and Art, and later went on to study medicine at The University of Pittsburgh. In the early ‘90s, Mari wrote, directed and edited the experimental short films The Love Thang Trilogy, Target, and X-Girl, which focused on identity, sexuality, and race. They screened at film festivals worldwide and remain in permanent collections at Brown University, New York University, UC Berkeley, Yale University, The New York Public Library, among others.

She’s currently editing a four-part docuseries called James Brown: Say It Loud, directed by Deborah Riley Draper and produced by Mick Jagger, Questlove, and Peter Afterman that will be released in 2023.

We sat down to talk with her about editing in the new world and the trials and tribulations of a career in music documentaries and performance.

‍

What drew you to the art of editing in general? How did you end up here?

I kind of fell into it by accident. When I was really young, I was an activist, and so a lot of the communication that we did was visual. So, I started doing these experimental short films about identity and sexuality. I was maybe 21 or 22. I was very young when I had my daughter; I was in college, so I always had a million different jobs. I would take these jobs with corporate television companies with access to equipment so I could do my little videos. They were sort of visual poems and they had educational distribution. I did a lot of film festivals. A lot of my friends who are now Hollywood directors, at the time were so young that they had no money to edit or do anything. So, I just sort of taught myself (this is before any non-linear editing systems were around). I would edit a lot of people’s films and videos—films that were transferred to video. And then I worked as a tape operator at a post-production house in Manhattan. I just wanted to learn everything there was. I really thought it was important to learn the technical side of filmmaking because I didn’t go to film school. So, I became friends with the engineer who built the facility, who was later at Sony Music Studios, and he was like, “Here, read this manual.” So, I learned everything in this analog machine room with all of these guys—it was really wild. But I had four or five different jobs, from working at National Organization for Women selling these luxury tours for the Metropolitan Opera to being the front desk receptionist at this corporate television place, where I ultimately became friends with the creative director and his girlfriend. He could see that, after hours, I was always editing something and he said, “We have this video that we’re doing for this blue-chip financial group—a corporate video. Maybe you want to edit it?” And I was like, “Really? Okay!” So, Alan Rosenthal gave me his shot, and I edited the video, and I remember that the money that I made just in one day was the amount of money that I made in the entire week from all of my jobs, and I was like, “Oh, interesting…” 

All my other friends, who were artists, would always tell me, “You should be an editor. You have such great timing, you’re so good with music.” And I’m like, “Ugh, I’m a director, I would never want to do that, it’s so tedious.” But I started getting all of these editing jobs. I started doing music videos at first. And then when Frank Sinatra passed away, I don’t know how they got my name, but someone at Sony Music Studios called me in to do one of the many short tribute videos for him. And then I just never left.

^{Mari Keiko Gonzalez working in an offline editing room in 1993.}

‍

So, you fell into the music niche just because of circumstance?

Yeah, I got that little Frank Sinatra short video, and then, literally, I started just working at the studio. And the studio was incredible. Unfortunately, it’s no longer there; it should have been a historic landmark. There were so many historic albums that were recorded there and concerts that were shot there. The stories! I was there for a very long time, until their doors closed. I sort of cut my teeth there, as they say. There weren’t that many women at the time who were editors, and I used Avid Media Composer, which had only been out a few years. I had taught myself how to use it very early on, when I was working as a receptionist. Nobody really knew how to use it that well. I started doing multi-camera, which I taught myself when I was at Sony.

There used to be this show on PBS, which was one of the best music shows ever—and I’ve worked on a lot of music shows—called Sessions at West 54^th. David Byrne hosted it one year, Chris Douridas hosted it another year, and the final season that I worked on, which was 1999, I believe, John Hyatt hosted it. People would walk by my room and be like, “Oh, who are you?” I was a baby. There were a lot of women or people of color working in support positions, but it was mostly white dudes, much older than me. I was the youngest, I was the only woman, and the only Asian woman. But I got to do everything. Staff editors were like, “Six o’clock, I’ve got to go. Mari, do you want to work on Hard Rock Live? Do you want to work on Divas Live?” I was like, “Okay.” And I just started doing all these concerts. It was an amazing time.

What do you think are some of the unique challenges of editing concerts, performances, and other musical content?

It’s a very, very small group of people, and you sort of get pigeonholed into doing stuff. When I was at Sony, it was like, “Oh, Mari just does music, she doesn’t do documentaries.” We had gotten hired on this Miramax documentary about Russell Crowe’s band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, and they hired me only to do the music, not to do any of the narrative, even though I had done a lot of docs. I ended up doing most of the films for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Then they started dividing things, like, these are the documentary people, and these are the music people, and I was known as the music person. But I can tell the stories; this is really what I do. And now people are like, “Mari, she’s a documentary editor.” I’m like, “No!” But I still have people who call me who have known me for 20 years. They all work with the same people. I did the last Destiny Child’s World Tour, and the woman who was the head of production at Sony ended up forming her own company, so I did a lot of stuff for her, and now she runs Beyonce’s company, Parkwood. Once you work with a big artist, people just will call you. Ten years later, they’re like, “Hey Mari, can you do Tony Bennett’s variety show?” By the way, we did the Gaga-Tony Bennett at Radio City remotely.  If we were using Evercast, we wouldn’t have had the problems we were having. We were trying to use Zoom and Jump, and it was just a disaster. I said to my assistant, let’s just export this and put it in something else. I just can’t. None of those things ever work.