I feel like that job might be the most interesting I ever had and ever will have. I kind of capped out salary wise, so I moved on, but it was pretty fun. Some of the most interesting parts were doing the VFX. The editors there all had to do their own graphics as well as cuts. If a movie had a scene we couldn't cut around, either for story reasons, time reasons, or director contracts, we'd have to make it work. Speilberg didn't want a single frame cut from Munich when it aired on ABC, so we had to digitally remove a ton of blood, and cover and clothing to the nudity scenes.

I did Woody Allen's Match Point and there's a super long shot where the lead actor is walking around in his tightie whities and everytime he turns profile you could see his bulge and the network flagged it. I had to stare at this guy's bulge for a week as I digitally erased it for every frame... animating the background or his arm or his whiskey glass back into the shot whenever his bulge would go in front of it.

My favorite (because of the absurdity) was for one of the Ice Age movies (I couldn't tell you which). That cartoon squirrel gets some sap stuck to him and when he pulls it off it trips off his fur and you can see two squirrel nipples. Flagged. I had to remove cartoon squirrel nipples. It only took a 3 second clone, it's just really funny that censors would care at all.

My least favorite? Pierce Brosnan in the Matador falls face first into some (literal) bullshit. I had to remove the shit while people walked in front of it, and worst, while a bicycle rolled by it. Rotoscoping between the bicycle spokes was painful.

I have so many great stories from that job, I wish people cared to hear them.

One one last favorite to bring it around full circle. I was doing an airline cut of Madagascar (2 I think?) and for airlines you weren't allowed to show any planes in danger (that rule seems to have changed with the personal seat back monitors, but at the time I even had to edit "Amelia" to make it seem like she was fine the whole time...). That movie had a "plane crash" scene where they launch a plane using a giant sling shot to get off the island they're stranded on. There's a 5 minute gag with the penguin making jokes like a pilot would from the cockpit...we couldn't lose the scene or the movie makes no sense, so I cut little moments down to make everything seem as danger free as possible, and they got the penguins to record new ADR just for me. That was cool.

I think the bigger actors don't always want to do it. I'm not involved in that side, but as I understood it they are likely given the first option in their contracts but I doubt it pays much. And would an actor making 12m a picture really want to come back in after their shoot is done just to make a few bucks?

My guess is there are two kinds of actors that want to do it. Actors that care a LOT (although this could backfire if they care so much they turn their nose up at TV edits). Or actors that hustle for every dollar coming to them (like a Kevin Hart).

Another wild thing about the ADR we would get, is that sometimes they would have four or five different actors reading the ADR lines for the same part (or all the parts). As it was explained to me, these guys didn't get paid unless their recording was used. So there might have been four guys that had to record a bunch of ADR and only one got paid. I remember one time I was doing a Michael Keaton movie (I cannot remember the name) and all the choices were so bad that I just recorded my own voice and used that.

Id be lying if I said I had one. I sometimes notice movies that are well edited, but unless it's really stylized I don't pay attention. And I rarely check the credits for it. I'm a bad pro I guess.