by Nicholas Don Vito

People ask me all the time how I ended up spending 25 years editing big network reality shows. The honest answer? I have no idea how any of this happened. But here’s my best attempt at reconstructing the chaos.

I graduated from Chapman University in 1987 with a B.A. in Film and Television Production and exactly zero industry connections. For the next two years, I scraped together whatever freelance work I could find — camera assistant, production assistant, assistant art director for TV commercials. I was busy. I was broke. I was building something, even if I couldn’t see it yet.

The break came in 1989 through my sister’s acquaintance (shoutout to the original LinkedIn: knowing someone who knows someone). A restaurant and nightclub chain called Grace Restaurants needed a shooter/editor for in-house projects. I said yes before they finished the sentence.

The gig was gloriously unhinged. Every week, I’d haul a dual-system ¾” deck, an ancient tube JVC camera, and a set of lights into a different nightclub — Coco’s, El Torito, Charley Brown’s, you name it — and film bar patrons dancing, drinking, and occasionally deciding the cameraman needed to see more of them than was strictly professional. I’d then cut the highlights into a music video that would premiere the following week at the same club, luring the crowd back to watch themselves on screen. Rinse, repeat, travel to the next city.

It was filmmaking bootcamp under the worst possible conditions: bad gear, bad lighting, enthusiastically drunk subjects, and a cuts-only edit setup. It forced me to actually get good.

After four years, I knew it was time to level up. Right on cue, nonlinear editing arrived — specifically, the Avid Media Composer, which was about to change everything. A friend was cutting infomercials on one of the first systems in Orange County and offered to teach me the ropes on a documentary about African dance. I worked nights after my day job learning it. I took to it immediately and never looked back.

Soon I was at OC Post/Shook Editorial, cutting infomercials, training videos, and commercials for ad agencies, with a producer breathing down my neck in a suite that billed at $150/hour. No pressure. I loved it.

Now I needed to break into Hollywood. I had a solid reel but almost no contacts in the city. So I did what any reasonable person would do: I mailed my demo reel inside a large coffee can, buried in coffee beans, with a custom label that looked like Chock Full O’ Nuts.

Reader, it mostly did not work.

Except for one producer. Janae at Montana Edit in Santa Monica thought it was hilarious, took the meeting, and booked me on a German-language music video by a band called Sweetbox. One thing led to another — as it tends to do when you just keep showing up — and Janae eventually introduced me to Joe, the post director at Triage Entertainment in Studio City. TV specials. Biography documentaries. DVD extras. And then, somehow, 25 years of network reality television.

Not exactly a straight line. But then again, the best stories never are.