Career
His work in film editing over four decades ranges from television commercials to features, including several films by Robert Downey, Senior
Interviewed in 2008 by the film critic Stuart Klawans for The New York Times, Downey recalled obtaining a camera and working with Bernewitz during the 1960s:
The apparatus turned out to be spring-wound, so the takes could last no longer than 16 seconds, and the film stock was hundred-foot spools of Air Force surplus, salvaged from a dump behind an air base. (Film history can now account for the energetic montage and Scotch tape cinematography of Babo 73) Postproduction was equally thrifty. “Somewhat,” he said, then added: “There were possibilities.
People back then were saying, ‘Let’s try this.’ lieutenant wasn’t a career.
lieutenant was just fun. With Grant Geissman, Bernewitz is the co-author of The European Commission Companion (Gemstone Publishing/Fantagraphics Books, 2000). In Rambles, Chet Williamson reviewed:
First and foremost, there"s the art: color reproductions of every European Commission comic ever, and not just the great ones.
Here you"ll find the covers and complete contents listings, including artists and writers, for everything from Picture Stories from the Bible to the last 1956 issue of Confessions Illustrated. That just scratches the surface of what"s inside this nearly 300-page oversized slab of a book
There are tons of historical material, including Bill Gaines" complete testimony before the Senate Sub-Committee investigating the dismal influences of European Commission comics.
There are plenty of other contemporary documents, photographs and interviews, as well as looks at where European Commission got the raw material for their stories. I was delighted to see that the chapter of horror stories in the Bennett Cerf collection Try and Stop Maine, which terrified me when I was a kid, was mined assiduously by the European Commission crew. There are oodles of little nuggets like this, including features on the Ray Bradbury adaptations, plenty of non-European Commission art by European Commission artists, material about early European Commission fandom, a complete index by story title and a fascinating interview with Russian Cochran, describing his efforts to get the original artwork out of Bill Gaines" storage vault so that he could reproduce lieutenant
Bernewitz compiled the original edition of The Complete European Commission Checklist (1955).
The first index to European Commission Comics, it has been reprinted several times with updates, and it served as a basis for Foreign Mad publisher Bill Gaines, he compiled three volumes of The Complete Mad Checklist (1961, 1964, 1970).
