26 research outputs found
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Irene Morra
Irene Morra worked as a negative cutter at D. W. Griffith’s Los Angeles studios before becoming a cutter for Jackie Coogan Productions and Fox Films. She worked as an editor until her retirement in 1958
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Anne Bauchens
Anne Bauchens was a St. Louis, Missouri native who, at the age of twenty, moved to New York City in the hope of becoming an actor and was hired by William de Mille as a typist and stenographer in 1912. Five years later, she traveled to Hollywood to help William’s brother, producer-director Cecil B. De Mille, edit We Can’t Have Everything (1918). DeMille is quoted in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner as saying about her that “though a gentle person, professionally she is as firm as a stone wall . . . We argue over virtually every picture” (III 3). Nonetheless, she was the only person the director would permit to edit his films and continued working with him until his death in 1959
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Rose Smith
Rose Smith edited a number of D.W. Griffith’s films. According to the Los Angeles Times in 1925, Rose Smith had “been a cutter for D.W. Griffith since her little-girl days,” joining Griffith’s Biograph studio in New York and traveling with him to California (C2). Her husband, James Smith, became Griffith’s cutter at Biograph, and Rose appears to have joined him in the cutting room during the editing of Birth of a Nation (1915). Later sources often mention Jimmie Smith but not his wife Rose
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Blanche Sewell
Blanche Sewell entered the ranks of negative cutters shortly after graduating from Inglewood High School in 1918. She assisted cutter Viola Lawrence on Man, Woman, Marriage (1921) and became a cutter in her own right at MGM in the early 1920s. She remained an editor there until her death in 1949
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Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors
In 1926, the Los Angeles Times informed readers that “one of the most important positions in the motion-picture industry is held almost entirely by women” whose job it was to assemble “thousands of feet of film so that it tells an interesting story in the most straightforward manner” (B7). Assembling reels and cutting negatives was tedious work that often fell to young working-class women. However, out of the ranks of these film joiners and negative cutters emerged a handful of women who would help to develop the editing techniques that would become the hallmark of Hollywood’s visual style
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Jane Loring
A Denver native, Loring edited movie trailers before becoming a film cutter for Paramount-Famous Players Lasky in 1927. She would remain with Paramount until the early 1930s, when she moved to RKO as an assistant director
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Margaret Booth
Margaret Booth began work as a negative cutter for D. W. Griffith in 1915. After Griffith closed down his Los Angeles offices, she worked briefly at Paramount before joining Louis B. Mayer’s studio in 1919. There she began to work closely with John Stahl, who tutored her in the art of film cutting. When Mayer merged with Metro-Goldwyn, Booth joined a staff of about two dozen cutters, including Blanche Sewell. At MGM, Booth eventually became the supervising editor, where she remained until 1969
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Viola Lawrence
Viola Lawrence is often credited as Hollywood’s first female film cutter. She began working in film at the age of twelve when she held title cards at the Vitagraph studio in Flatbush. Six years later, she edited her first film, a Vitagraph three-reeler, O’Henry (1912). In 1917, Lawrence moved to Hollywood, where she worked at Universal, First National, and Gloria Swanson Productions before arriving at Columbia Pictures, where in 1925 she became the supervising editor, and where she was still editing until the late 1950s
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Katharine Hilliker
Katharine Hilliker, best known for her work as a team with her husband, Harry H. Caldwell, began her career writing silent motion picture titles and shaping European films for release in the United States before becoming a freelance production editor for Samuel Goldwyn, United Artists, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Fox Film Corporation. As a production editor, her responsibilities, she states in her resume, involved “consultation on story and cast and the supervising of scripts before production to the job of preparing the picture, after it was shot, for theater presentation.” Hilliker’s papers, which include a number of personal letters, are a rich source of information on the films she edited and titled and the people she worked with, including producers Harry Rapf, Irving Thalberg, and Samuel Goldwyn; director F. W. Murnau; and Fox studio head Winfield Sheehan