Mary Cybulski, the top-notch script supervisor who helped keep things coherent on such complicated films as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, has died. She was 70.
Cybulski died Saturday after living for four years with glioblastoma multiforme, a brain tumor, a publicist announced.
Cybulski served as a script supervisor on more than 40 features, working with such directors as Charlie Kaufman, Ang Lee, Stephen Frears, David Mamet, Jodie Foster, Jane Campion, M. Night Shyamalan, Tony Gilroy, Nancy Savoca and John Sayles.
She wrote the 2014 book Beyond Continuity: Script Supervising for the Modern Filmmaker, which many consider the bible of the profession.
“Our specialty is storytelling,” she wrote. “It is our job to understand the bones and the spirit of the story. We imagine all the little bits of the movie we are making: what they look like and sound like, how they move and how they impact each other when they are put together. We carry around a living, growing movie in our imagination.”
Cybulski described her script supervision experience on the Michel Gondry-directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which featured a complex, nonlinear narrative written by Kaufman, as “life changing.”
And on Synecdoche, New York (2008), written as well as directed by Kaufman, Cybulski “was the calm, clear presence at the center of a confusing storm of warehouses within warehouses and characters playing actors playing characters,” Kaufman noted in a statement. “There was always a crowd of crew and cast around her asking, ‘What the hell is going on?’
“Mary even made an extraordinarily detailed map of the Matryoshka warehouses to guide us. At the end of production, she drew the map on a T-shirt for me. Mary helped me so much. She was brilliant and kind, and I loved her.”
Born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Cybulski attended the University of Michigan, where she was a competitive skier and self-described “art girl.” In college, she collaborated on experimental films with her future husband, John Tintori.
On 1988 features, she served as second assistant camera operator on Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line and as a camera loader on Sayles’ Eight Men Out. Two of her earliest script supervising jobs came on Frears’ The Grifters (1990) and Foster’s Little Man Tate (1991).
In 2010, Cybulski shifted gears to become a sought-after stills photographer. She worked with many of the same directors she did as a script supervisor as well as with Martin Scorsese, Judd Apatow, Todd Haynes, Jim Jarmusch, Terrence Malick and Stephen Soderbergh.
She collaborated with Lee on Ice Storm (1997), Taking Woodstock (2009) and Life of Pi (2012) as a script supervisor and on Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016) as a photographer.
“On the set of Ice Storm,” Lee recalled, “I felt she was mothering the whole thing. She’s like mother/courage, providing warmth and courage. I totally understand why she was a downhill ski racer. She’s a daredevil. So she’s two things together, warmth and courage, and, of course, talent.”
As a unit stills photographer, Lee added, “She knew not only what moment to capture but most of all I think she snapped the soul of the movie, she snapped the soul of the production.”
Cybulski also directed with Tintori the 1997 film drama Chicago Cab.
In addition to her husband, now a professor at the NYU film school, survivors include her son, Ray Tintori, also a filmmaker, and daughter Sophie Tintori, a molecular biologist and professor.
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