In the decade after earning his education degree at UConn, Cob Carlson \u201976 (ED) taught fifth grade and earned a master\u2019s in education in Hartford, managed a Whole Foods store in North Carolina, and worked for the YMCA in Greenwich, Connecticut.<\/p>\n
While doing marketing and public relations at the Y, Carlson realized it wasn\u2019t where he was meant to be \u2014 he kept coming back to how much he enjoyed his \u201cAmerican Cinema\u201d course at UConn taught by dramatic arts professor Michael T. Gregoric.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe talked about this concept called the cinematic correlative; that a film needs a lot of people to get made. He was not a proponent of the auteur theory, where it\u2019s the director\u2019s film,\u201d Carlson recalls.<\/p>\n
At the time, Carlson regularly visited an arthouse theater in nearby Norwalk, The SoNo Cinema, with a friend who was a filmmaking graduate student. As they discussed the films, his friend told him she thought he had \u201ca good eye,\u201d adding \u201cyou\u2019d make a good editor.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat really got my juices flowing about film and I just decided to go for it,\u201d says Carlson. He completed an accelerated filmmaking program at New York University, where he then taught for three years and discovered editing is the part of filmmaking that he likes most.<\/p>\n
In the early 1990s Carlson moved to Boston, a center for documentary filmmaking. \u201cThe editor is like a hired gun,\u201d he says. \u201cProducers and directors would hire me to do the hands-on work of assembling the film.\u201d<\/p>\n