Today we’d like to introduce you to Don Money.
Hi Don, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My passion for storytelling started at a very young age. Although I didn’t start pursuing it until later, I got my first glimpse of it as a 13-year-old boy when “The Shawshank Redemption” came to my hometown of Mansfield Ohio to film. One of the actors stayed in a houseboat on the same lake that my family had a boat on as well, and other people around the lake were extras in the film, and I remember thinking that was so cool. It was the first time that movies became real to me, not just some sort of make-believe fantasy world that you could only dream about working in but never actually do.
Flash forward about eight years, and while I was attending college at The University of Toledo (studying for a degree in computers/business), I heard an ad on the radio for a local talent agency and that they were having an open call. So I went, not even sure what it would end up being, and the next thing I know I had gone to a talent showcase in LA, and then after graduation to NYC, where I spent two years in an acting conservatory. I did the whole bartending/auditioning thing and had a little success here and there. I had a small part on “As the World Turns” off and on for a year, as well as getting to work on “I Am Legend” & ABC’s “Cashmere Mafia”. I did tons of indie films and short films, basically anything I could get my hands on and actually book. But with having a business degree, I also loved that side of things too. So I started a production company with a friend of mine from college who was a director and we went on to make one movie, which basically ended up being a real crash course in filmmaking for me. Then in 2007, I ended up doing an off-off Broadway production of the play “Boys Life” and that’s where I met my wife Emme Rylan (General Hospital/The Young and the Restless/Guiding Light/Bring It On: All Or Nothing). We moved to LA in 2009 (after Guiding Light had been canceled) and had our first son Jackson. I was still acting at the time, auditioning whenever I could while catering parties in the Hollywood Hills or working as staff at movie premieres, etc. I would book sporadically again (shorts, commercials, etc.) but I never got to the place where anything was consistent. I had no clue when my next gig would come in, what it would be, or even how much it would pay.
There was no consistency or job security anywhere. Then in 2011, we got pregnant with our second son Levi, and that’s when I decided to try and do something different. I had already taught myself Final Cut Pro from my work on the movie I had made in NYC and from having done my acting demo reels (and reels for all my friends), and I really liked it. But if I was going to take a shot at editing as a career, I needed a better foundation. So I went back to school for editing to learn AVID and Adobe Premiere and then I hit the ground running. My storytelling experience from having been an actor for over a decade turned out to be invaluable. It’s not too difficult to learn the technical side of editing, but what is difficult, and something that can’t necessarily be taught in a classroom, is the storytelling side. Just knowing what buttons to push inside an editing program doesn’t mean that you know how to actually tell a story. And with my connections I already had from the acting world, I was able to get some editing gigs right away and have been working consistently ever since, something I was never able to do when I was just focused on acting. What I thought was going to be my only career in the industry turned out to just be the beginning of a much longer journey to where I am today. I’m not opposed to going back in front of the camera again, but editing (as well as producing and developing) is something I fell more in love with than I ever thought I could. When I think back on it, deciding to become an editor was the best career decision I ever made.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Haha – “smooth” is definitely NOT how I would characterize my journey through the industry. But I will say it got a lot smoother when I changed what I was focused on. The acting world is an incredibly tough nut to crack. Having to go on 100s of auditions to finally book one thing, and then to go months (or sometimes years) without booking anything else is so difficult on you mentally, physically & emotionally. And then once you start a family in the middle of all that (I have three lovely children now – my daughter Dakota was born in 2017), it gets that much tougher. But for me, once I switched to doing something else, it opened up my ability to go after different types of jobs, which in turn allowed me to stay working consistently. The one thing that never changed for me however, is my love of storytelling. It’s in my core. And so for me, as long as I am doing that, in whatever fashion that may be, I’m able to stay on as smooth of a road as I can.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I predominately work as an editor in film and television. When I was a kid, I always loved puzzles, and to me, editing is kind of like that, except that the pieces you use can fit together many different ways, and you don’t have the final picture on the front of the box to tell you what is has to look like in the end. It’s also the final re-write of the script in a way, where you really flesh out what the story is and how it plays out. The editing process is basically the last step in the creative storytelling phase, so being a part of that is something that is really cool to me.
With almost 40 features under my belt now and a sitcom (and countless shorts, trailers, commercials, sizzles & promos), there isn’t any genre that I haven’t gotten to cut. From “Truth or Dare”, to “Merry Kiss Cam”, to “Impress Me”, to “List of a Lifetime” to “Untitled Horror Movie” to “Royal Rendezvous” to “On Fire” (in theaters Sept 29th), to “The Kiss List” (coming soon), being able to work across all genres is something I’ve very proud to be able to do and something that I think helps to set me apart from others. I’m not just a “comedy guy”, or a “horror guy” – I’m a storyteller – and to me, it doesn’t matter what genre that story is in. I think my acting background also sets me apart from other editors. I’m very fast and efficient when I’m going through the footage and I’m very keen on my actors’ performances. I know the beats in the scenes from the first moment I read a script, and the character arcs and the story arcs, and I can see how the actors’ are playing the scenes from the acting side, so I can support them and those choices wholeheartedly. I’m doing for my actors what I would’ve wanted my editors to do for me when I used to be in front of the camera. In a weird way, I’m still an actor, I just do it vicariously though my cast!
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I think for me, I love LA because of its diversity. The multicultural element of it all is such a wonderful environment to live and create in. It truly has all walks of life that lends itself to a very well-rounded way of looking at the world. And the weather, you can’t beat the weather, haha! And the food – we can’t forget about the amazing food you can find all around the city! I could do without the traffic though. It’s funny, whenever I’m not in LA and people talk about how far something is, they talk in the distance or miles, which then equates to a “normal” amount of time to get there. But in LA, we don’t talk in distance, we talk amount of time, because if we actually looked at something that is 12 miles away, and then said it could take up to 2 hours to get there sometimes, I think we’d go even more crazy!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.moneyedits.com
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- Twitter: https://twitter.com/DonMoney79
