From Spielberg’s Editing Room to Hit TV Producer: UT Austin Alum Ricky Kreitman’s Extraordinary Career Journey

It’s not every day that working as a summer camp counselor paves the way to an Academy Award, but that was exactly how Ricky Kreitman’s editing and producing career began.

Today, Kreitman lives in Los Angeles and has worked on some of reality television’s biggest hits, from editing and producing for “The Bachelor” franchise to editing for “Survivor.” Most recently, he signed on to edit season 21 of the smash-hit fashion competition series “Project Runway." But before he checked off boxes that other filmmakers spend their entire careers chasing, he was making claymations and live-action shorts on Super 8 film with his friends in Dallas.

Kreitman recalls finding his passion for filmmaking while watching independent movies at a local theater. He was drawn to popcorn flicks, but found that true-life stories — such as Errol Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line” and The Beatles’ “Let It Be” — stayed with him long after, sparking his curiosity about cutting footage together to tell stories.

Upon graduating high school in 1989, Kreitman enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin as a business major, following in his father’s and older brother’s footsteps. But film was always in the back of his mind. In the early ‘90s, UT Austin’s Radio-Television-Film program was rising in popularity thanks to prolific alumni like Richard Linklater, director of “Slacker,” an Austin-centric film. Then there was Robert Rodriguez, who famously directed the independent film “El Mariachi” on a $6,000 budget.

Rodriguez’s feature took home multiple awards, including Sundance Film Festival’s Audience Award in ‘93 — and Kreitman was captivated. He knew he had to finally take the leap and trade financial analysis for editing movies. But like many young filmmakers, he struggled with the unpredictability tied to working in the industry.

Lone Star roots, Hollywood horizons​

“Growing up in Texas versus growing up out here in LA. I mean, you're not exposed to the industry, and the industry seems so foreign and like a fantasy,” Kreitman says. “So, going for a [film] degree seemed like a huge risk.”

He called his father, admitting that something had to give. “That was scary because [...] it’s scary for a parent, too, to encourage their kid to get into something so risky. But you know, he said: ‘If that’s what you’re passionate about, you need to go for it.’”

So, Kreitman enrolled as a Radio-Television-Film student, pursuing the television track. He sharpened his skills under the guidance of industry veterans, from Nick Caminos (director-producer, “That’s Hollywood,” “National Geographic Specials”) to the legendary Robert Foshko (writer-producer, “Tales of Tomorrow,” “The Man from U.N.C.L.E”). He even studied alongside Matthew McCounaghey, who went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for “Dallas Buyers Club” in 2013.

During his time at UT Austin RTF, Kreitman took a three-camera class, a single-camera class, an introductory production class, and editing classes. His three-camera filmmaking class was on a real Hollywood-style sound stage, an experience that allowed his class to light the set and be a camera operator on each other’s projects.


It was in the editing room that Kreitman flourished. Nonlinear editing had only just begun to take off in the early ‘90s, and while the University had one Avid system, it was exclusively for graduate film students. To avoid constantly redoing his work, Kreitman learned how to cut each shot with a highly intentional mindset. Plus, the support he found among his classmates smoothed over small setbacks.

“We cut “Gunsmoke” episodes in 16mm,” Kreitman says. “We cut “Moss Landing,” which was a soap opera from the '80s — we cut that on videotape, too. And just on that RTF floor, there was a real community. You’d see your friends and all different kinds of people passionate about filmmaking.”

A summer camp job lead to an Oscar​

In ‘94, Kreitman graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Radio-Television-Film, eager to start working in the industry. But the path to his big break was delightfully unconventional.

“What I tell people is: there’s no linear way to success. You don’t look in the classifieds or online and find a job and just move up. But what I did do is — I grew up going to a Jewish summer camp outside of Waco, Texas, starting when I was nine years old, and I ended up being a staff member there.

“In the early '90s, everybody had a VCR. The camp director wanted to make promotional videos and send every kid home with a 30-minute video yearbook for the summer. He knew I had a passion for film and media, which is why he asked me to have that job.”

Kreitman spent the entire summer with a video camera on his shoulder, recording the campers’ activities and conducting interviews. He cut and combined footage by hooking up two VCRs. His first documentary experience set the stage for him to not only excel at linear editing at UT Austin, but to also get his first job after graduating at a Dallas-based company that produced these same promotional videos for camps nationwide.

Later, he returned to visit the same summer camp where he had worked as a counselor right before he planned to move to LA. Steven Spielberg had just released “Schindler’s List,” which garnered acclaim from critics and audiences. Spielberg started the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in an effort to interview as many Holocaust survivors as possible before they died — a total of around 4,000 people, according to Kreitman.

As fate would have it, Spielberg had sent postcards calling for volunteers to Jewish youth organizations across the country, including Kreitman’s summer camp. Kreitman grabbed one, and that got the ball rolling for a life-changing opportunity.

“My first job in LA was at a post-production house, which a friend got me — for $7 an hour, delivering dailies to “Star Trek,” things like that,” he says. “But I also volunteered for the Foundation. So, I was working for Steven Spielberg, on the Universal lot, at the age of 24, within two months of moving to LA. It was really incredible.”


Kreitman worked in post-production, duplicating tapes for safety onto digital formats, then digitizing them so they could ultimately be streamed online. He finally got his hands on an Avid in the backroom. Today, you can purchase an Avid for around $200 and download it to your device. But back then, working on one was rare. Kreitman took full advantage, staying nights and weekends to make it his specialty — and ultimately take a paid position as the Foundation’s editor.

In 1996, director James Moll and the Foundation began working on their first feature, “The Last Days,” exploring the tragedies and triumphs of five Hungarian Jews (also called Shoah) placed in Nazi concentration camps during the final year of World War II. It was Kreitman’s first major project as an associate editor for James Moll, who was both directing and editing. And the result was almost too good to be true: The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in ‘99.

“I think the takeaway from that is: don’t turn down any opportunity. It was a volunteer position, but a couple weeks after I volunteered, I got a call saying, “Hey, do you want to work here?” And I said, 'Absolutely.' Then I had a parking spot at Universal Studios. It was a pretty exciting time in my life!"

Breaking into reality TV: From "Survivor" to "Project Runway"​

Fresh off "The Last Days" winning an Academy Award, Kreitman received yet another monumental opportunity. “Reality TV was just kind of starting — “Survivor” began in 2000, along with “The Real World” and other early shows. VH1 was the biggest reality cable channel at the time and reached out to James Moll to ask if he wanted to direct an episode in this new format. He said, ‘Sure, if I can bring my editor.’

That was how Kreitman entered the world of reality TV. He had recently started a family, so it was the best way to apply his nonfiction storytelling skills to earn a living due to how many editing gigs were available.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, he was also working on more documentaries, such as “Running the Sahara,” a film about three men who tried to become the first people to run across six countries, along with "Price for Peace," his second collaboration with Moll and Spielberg. Kreitman found that his favored approach to creating those films — cutting footage as if piecing a puzzle together — worked for reality TV episodes. He ended up becoming an editor and producer for "Survivor," for which he was nominated for three Emmy Awards, along with “The Bachelor," "The Bachelorette," and “Bachelor in Paradise." Both franchises have been on the air for an impressive combined 48 years and are widely considered pillars of modrn pop culture history.


Most recently, Kreitman signed on to edit “Project Runway,” noting that “The Bachelorette” is currently on pause. He’s still early into his tenure, but he expresses optimism and excitement about this new direction in his career, noting that "It’s going to be a great new season."

“The Bachelor,” however, remains the series that has earned Kreitman the most attention. Thanks to the ever-buzzy “Bachelor” Nation and how so many of its cast members end up becoming social media influencers (see: Jojo Fletcher and Sean Lowe), it may not come as a surprise that it’s also the one that people want to discuss the most. For young filmmakers and super-fans curious about how the franchise comes together, Kreitman breaks down the show's editorial pipeline.

“Editors received rough outlines and were each assigned about four hours of footage,” he says. “Each act spanned from commercial break to commercial break and included a concrete event, like a group date.” (As an afterthought, Kreitman says that a lot of shows work the same way, pointing out that “Survivor” has a challenge and the Tribal Council.)

From there, a producer helps isolate confessional interview sound bites, one of the rawest and most vulnerable parts of the show. Kreitman considers it the backbone of the reality TV format.

“It takes about a week just to screen everything,” he says. “Find the best material, notate it, tear it down — you identify where the best stuff is. That’s where you learn your kind of editing: In your head while you’re watching it. You’ll say, ‘I can use this bit here, this bit there,’ because we know where we’re going to end up.”

Editors usually have about four weeks for their first cut. From there, editors and producers collaborate on whittling down the footage, incorporating notes and feedback. Kreitman compares this part of the process to turning a block of clay into a sculpture: You start big and keep trimming and working the material until you achieve the right shape. In another week, editors show it to the network and its executives, maximizing the footage’s entertainment value before locking it down for the show.

The through line to Kreitman’s editing process? Start with who’s going home on “Survivor” that week and working backwards from there. “Same thing on “The Apprentice:” who’s getting fired this week? Same thing on “The Bachelor:” who’s not getting a rose? Then you usually have a red herring — someone else who might go home — and you tease the audience.”

Kreitman describes these franchises as game shows at their core: Every season, there’s a winner, and that defines how the story is told. That begs the question: Is it rigged?

“I think what people get wrong — everybody thinks it’s scripted, that it’s all made up. And it’s not. It’s real,” he attests.

Cutting footage into viral moments on "The Bachelor"​

Even as he begins cutting footage of rising fashion designers in Hedi Klum's workroom, Kreitman remains proud of his work and impressed by how much thought and time goes into developing “The Bachelor.”

“In my role as a co-executive producer on ‘The Bachelor’ and ‘Bachelor in Paradise,’ I would go to the field quite a bit and witness people working long days to collect these stories so we could craft them in post,” he says. “It’s a lot of passionate camera people, art directors, and casting agents making incredible TV.”

Kreitman also underscores that embracing joy on the job can lead to incidental wins. He remembers candid moments he edited to make himself and his friends laugh that became cemented in “Bachelor” nation history. Take the unintentionally amusing (though some disagree, like “The Bachelor” alum Taylor Nolan) conversation between Annaliese Puccini and Arie Luyendyk on “The Bachelor” season 22 where a demolition derby group date went wrong.

“Annaliese just started crying, and she said that when she was a little girl, she had been in a bumper car at a fair and suffered ‘bumper car trauma’ since people kept hitting her,” Kreitman says. “I took some stock footage of a little girl in a bumper car and had her narrate this 'sad' story. Sometimes, you cut things just for fun [...] and it ends up getting a little attention.”

Reflections on "The Apprentice"​

It’s not uncommon for people to ask Kreitman about his involvement with “The Apprentice," yet another TV series in his impressive editing portfolio. The premise: contestants compete to win an internship with real estate mogul Donald Trump.

Though the series ended in 2017 as Trump jumped from the Hollywood walk of fame to the White House, “The Apprentice” had an undeniable cultural impact. Kreitman believes that it was not only Trump that generated excitement among viewers, but also seeing scrappy, intelligent everyday people rising to the challenge week after week.

Then came what Kreitman describes as a total 360 for the series: The celebrity version.

Though some viewers might be inclined to believe Trump's antics were the most intense parts of working on the show, Kreitman attests that these contestants took the crown. “Gary Busey and MeatLoaf got into a physical fight. They had to create art and host their own gallery event, and they were actually fighting over whose paints they were. [...] It was crazy.”

Finding success in the ultra-competitive film industry​

As an editor and producer with an impressive range, Kreitman has a word of advice for film students and aspiring filmmakers, especially those who are struggling to find their path: “There’s one thing that’s very hard in this industry: switching genres.

“So, if you want to get into film — narrative film, scripted television — you should chase that. Because it’s really hard to go from reality to scripted. It would be hard for me, as a nonfiction or reality or documentary editor, to get a job on a scripted project and vice versa.”

Kreitman’s credo is also informed by a piece of advice he received at the seminar for UT Austin RTF alumni in LA: Work begets work.

Upon asking Kreitman how nepotism in the industry might contradict that nugget of wisdom, he says, “It’s not necessarily nepotism — though of course, that does exist. But in this freelance world, where we’re always looking for the next gig because there are no staff jobs, the way you keep working is to do good work."

He's also not shy about pointing out that attending film school gave him a critical advantage in the industry. No matter your niche, Kreitman believes that it’s essential to know the current software, camera gear, and audio programs. “Get as much experience while you’re there as you can. Take advantage of the tools, and help on everybody’s projects, and learn as much as you can. Offer to hold a boom mic, help edit, whatever. If you can make great TV without a lot of hand-holding, that’s gold.” He lives by his own standards, aiming to be the kind of on- and off-set collaborator who can deliver quality work on time.

Knowing that many film school students are trying to etch their names into the industry, Kreitman recommends taking a chance — particularly when time is on your side. “When you’re young and don’t have a family or a mortgage, you can take more risks. Don’t necessarily take the first job that’s offered to you just because it’s there. Hold out and pursue the things you want to pursue as a career.”

Kreitman also suggests watching “Project Greenlight,” a competition-based HBO TV series for unknown filmmakers created by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. The winners select a writer and a director to make a feature. Kreitman edited the first season, which culminated in the creation of “The Battle of Shaker Heights” with a young Shia LaBeouf.

He stresses that his recommendation isn’t biased. “It’s a really interesting show for aspiring filmmakers to watch — it shows all the nuts and bolts. Each episode covered everything from pre-production to budget challenges to editing and release.”

Navigating the freelance film grind and what's ahead​

As a father of two daughters, one who just graduated, Kreitman is blunt: “I probably wouldn’t encourage them to chase this industry. Because it’s freelance work, and it’s stressful. You have to come to terms with that and figure it out financially.”

His reservations make sense. Many young film students inevitably find that their parents may take the same protective stance, and the industry has faced numerous setbacks in the past few years, including rising fears around labor issues, strikes, and hiring freezes. At the alumni seminar Kreitman attended earlier in his career, speakers were open about fighting to find consistent freelance work, with a dry season lasting around three months each year. Even then, it wasn't uncommon for editors to live off their savings during lean times.

Kreitman reiterates that embracing the “Work begets work” mindset is the most feasible way to succeed. “Be the person they want to bring to the next thing, and the next. Whether you’re getting lunches, driving dailies, ingesting footage — be the best at it. Be the hardest worker.”

Film editors in particular need to master the tools, Kreitman says. Not only their technical uses, but also how to tell a compelling and cohesive story using them. “Your first job will likely be as an assistant editor, which is more technical. Ingesting footage, organizing media, doing computer repairs — things like that. Going in knowing how to use the software and hardware is a huge step forward.”

No matter how much you learn in film school, Kreitman stresses that fighting through ups and downs in the industry is inevitable. However, he balances resilience with realism, reflecting on his journey with pride — and encourages new filmmakers to do the same.

“Even during these slow times, I’ve managed to eke out a career,” Kreitman says. “My dad’s gone now, but he got to see that letting me pursue this [...] worked out. I’ve told important stories that keep the memory of the Shoah and the horrors of World War II alive. And I’m proud of the hundreds of hours of TV I’ve made. I hope to keep doing it.”

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"Project Runway" season 21 returns with a two-episode premiere on Thursday, July 21 on Freeform. If you have questions about UT Austin or film editing for Kreitman, share your thoughts in the comments below.

Curious about studying film at UT Austin? Read our interview with Michener Center screenwriting alum Kendra Daniels. If you've already applied, don't forget to log your application in our database.


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