Robert Dalva, Oscar-winning film editor on ‘The Black Stallion,’ has died at 80
He worked on the original ‘Star Wars’ and collaborated with director Joe Johnston on movies including ‘Jumanji’ and ‘Captain America: The First Avenger.’
Robert Dalva, the Oscar-nominated film editor who worked on the touching family adventure The Black Stallion and five films with director Joe Johnston, including Jumanji and Captain America: The First Avenger, has died. He was 80.
Dalva died of lymphoma on January 27 in Marin County, California, according to his son Matthew Dalva.
Dalva attended USC film school in the same class as George Lucas, and he joined him and Francis Ford Coppola in San Francisco in 1969 to launch their innovative American Zoetrope production company.
The friendship paid off when Lucas hired Dalva to handle second-unit photography on the original Star Wars film (he shot the land speeder racing across the desert) (1977).
Dalva collaborated with director Carroll Ballard on the Coppola-produced Black Stallion (1979), which starred Mickey Rooney in an Oscar-nominated performance.
“We had almost a million feet of film,” Dalva told in an interview in 2012. “A two-hour movie is approximately 12,000 feet. And the island section of the film, which lasted about 37 minutes, accounted for three-quarters of that million feet. So the big battle was getting the island section down to a reasonable length.”
Dalva recalled later walking down the street near Zoetrope when “Francis pulled up in a taxicab and got out. And he said, ‘Robert if there’s a sequel to Black Stallion, you want to direct it?’ And I said, ‘Sure, Francis.’”
The Black Stallion Returns (1983), shot in Italy and Morocco, marked the only feature Dalva directed. (He did helm episodes of Crime Story and Lucas’ Clone Wars for television.)
Born in New York on April 14, 1942, Robert John Dalva booked movies for a film program while attending Colgate University and took a film class most Fridays at Syracuse University, where he learned how to run a camera.
“The real start for me was seeing The 400 Blows by François Truffaut. It was then that I realized that movies could really capture [you],” he said.
After he graduated from Colgate in 1964, he spent three years at USC, where his classmates included Lucas, John Milius, Caleb Deschanel, Walter Murch, and Randal Kleiser.
He landed a job with future Oscar-winning film editor Verna Fields (Jaws) at the US Information Agency right out of college, then cut Agnès Varda’s Lions Love (1969) on a flatbed editing machine.
Dalva edited the Johnston-directed October Sky (1999), Jurassic Park III (2001), and Hidalgo (2001) in addition to Jumanji (1995) and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). (2004). Johnston, by coincidence, also worked on Star Wars as an ILM representative for the film’s miniature and optical effects unit. They didn’t realize it until many years later.
Dalva edited Haskell Wexler’s Latino (1985), Brian De Palma’s Raising Cain (1992), Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club (1993), The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005), Touching Home (2008), Immortals (2011), Lovelace (2014), Sweetwater (2015), and Heist (2015).
Dalva also served as a cinematographer on the fourth and fifth seasons of the CBS crime series Nash Bridges from 1999-2000.
In 2017, he began teaching part-time at the San Francisco Film School and later edited the documentary Evolution of Organic (2018) and the feature San Francisco Stories (2021). He was a big Giants fan and was at Game 3 of the 1989 World Series with his daughter Cory when an earthquake rattled Candlestick Park.
He is survived by his wife, Marcia, whom he married in 1964; son Marshall; daughter Jessica; grandchildren Nathan, Zach, Luellen, and Calvin; and brother Leon.
Donations can be made in his memory to EngenderHealth, the Tulane Brain Institute, the Mendocino Area Parks Association, and/or the California College of the Arts.
Dalva “felt that movies move through time but are finite,” according to Matthew Dalva. “The experience of a movie takes you along second by second, minute by minute, shot by shot until the experience ends. In a movie, however, time is rarely real; it is compressed and manipulated. The stories he helped tell, pace, structure, and set the mood for entertained and inspired millions to explore new worlds and stories.”
In his 2012 interview, Dalva said taking a course in race car driving at Sears Point in Sonoma, California — a present from his wife — made him a better film editor.
“It was kind of a method to help you focus on what was happening right in front of you,” he explained. “And if you are in a car driving a hundred miles per hour, it makes sense to be completely concentrating on what you are doing. I came away with a sharpened ability to concentrate. And it has helped me enormously. I think I had the ability, but the driving school sharpened it.”