Established Alumni
› Keimon’s Story
From Senior-Year Project to the Editor’s Chair

By Joe Schuster, Chair and Associate Professor
Communications and Journalism Department



When Spencer Keimon was a student at Webster University in the early 1990s, he had a passion for storytelling.

“I love narrative,” he says.

Early on, he thought he’d express that passion through fiction—he had a fondness for the work of Woody Allen and became involved, as Allen did early in his career, in stand-up comedy. When he graduated, he saw himself moving to California and working in the film or television industries.

In his senior year, needing a video project to fulfill the requirements for one of his courses, he made a documentary about others trying to make it in the comedy business, largely because—since he was also involved in that world—he had access to people who would be open to telling their stories to him.

In a way, that senior project was a turning point in Keimon’s life: He discovered he could express his love of narrative through documentary, through non-fiction—something he does today as an editor for a reality TV series in Los Angeles.

The editor, he says, is, in many ways, the person who crafts the story in reality TV.

“You’re creating it in the edit bay,” he says. “You can’t make it up—in the case of an episode in which there’s a competition, the producers will tell you who won, and they will tell you the themes they saw in shooting it—but, as editor, you have to find a beginning, a middle and an ending in the footage you’re given, and you can often create (interesting and compelling) moments from what you find.”



Over the last decade, Keimon has worked as editor for “Survivor,” “American Idol,” “Switched,” and “Wickedly Perfect,” among a number of other shows. Most recently, he’s been editing a new NBC summer series, “Meet Mister Mom,” which began airing in early August. In the show, producers send the mothers of large families off to a spa for a week, while the father is left behind to run the household. Keimon edited the second episode, which aired August 9.

To edit the episode, Keimon started with more than 100 hours of raw video that he had to structure into a 43-minute-eight-second story. Not surprisingly, tackling that mammoth project takes considerable time. Keimon worked on the episode for ten or more hours a day for twelve weeks—and often those were seven-day weeks.

“It can get pretty grueling,” he says. “Sometimes I was working until 4 a.m.”

Part of the reason it takes so long to edit a show is there are so many entities involved in approving the final product: the producers, the network representatives.

“You’re constantly changing things. You’ll have a producer come in and say, ‘I don’t like this; I want to do it this way,’ and then someone else coming in and saying, ‘I don’t like the music; change the music.’ You have to learn to handle the politics of the situation.”

Still, he’s been fortunate, he says: so many people go to Los Angeles to be part of the industry and can’t find work, or go long periods between jobs. Keimon has worked fairly steadily ever since he moved to Los Angeles in 1994, although he didn’t become an editor until a little more than four years ago.

When Keimon first arrived in California, he knew he’d have to pay dues and was willing to take any work that came along.

“I was young and I was really hungry,” he says. “When I first came out, I thought I had a job through the friend of one of my uncles, as a post-production assistant on a television show, and so I drove for three days to get here in time for the job to start but when I got here, it turned out, I didn’t have the job after all, because I didn't have experience.”

He persisted, however, and through a friend of one of his aunts found work as a production assistant at Dick Clark Productions—which meant he was essentially a delivery boy, driving around town picking up and dropping off packages.



It may not have been glamorous, but he was in the industry and once there, he began talking to everyone he met about how he might advance. One of the people he met helped him find work as a production assistant on a show called “Tattooed Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills,” a show Keimon said was heavily influenced by the popular “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.” From there, he took a series of PA jobs, finally landing work in post-production, doing the rather tedious job of tape dubbing.

Through it all, he continued asking for advice about working in the industry from anyone he met, including Danford Greene, who was nominated for Academy Awards for editing Robert Altman’s MASH and Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. Some of the editors began letting Keimon sit in while they worked and eventually he worked his way up to assistant editor and finally, in 2002, landed his first job as editor, for the UPN show “Extreme Dating.”

If Keimon has learned anything from his 11 years in Los Angeles, it’s that perseverance is the key to working and being successful.

“Early on, I went through this stage where there were times I couldn’t find work and didn’t have a lot of money,” he says. “It was upsetting, but you have to keep your eye on the prize and persevere and be positive. It’s a really tough business and so you have to keep a good attitude; you have to meet a lot of people, shake a lot of hands. When you’re starting out and you’re at a low level, keeping long hours for six days a week and not being paid for that sixth day because you’re new, you just have to realize, in the grand scheme, that you’re working toward something bigger.”

“I’m happy I came into my own, finally. It took a lot of years to get into the editor’s chair—years you spend doing thankless hard work in which you don’t get a lot of respect. But if you’re eternally optimistic, willing to do anything, do the extra bit to get people to notice you, you’ll succeed finally.”

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