Film Editor Wisdom - words to inspire your edit

Margaret Booth, the legendary film editor, carved out an enviable career in Hollywood.  Booth initially known as a ‘joiner’ began editing for DW Griffith in 1915. With 44 film editing credits to her name, many of which featured the legendary Swedish actress Greta Garbo, this remarkable female film editor received an Academy award nomination for Mutiny on the Bounty and in 1978 received an Academy Honorary Award for “exceptional contributions to the art of film editing in the motion picture industry.” To date the only other film editor to receive this award was Anne V. Coates in 2016.

Towards the end of the 1930s Booth became a supervising editor and was regarded as one of the most powerful members of MGM Studios.  She apparently had the authority to order reshoots and controlled the dailies of every single film the studio produced.

In the Princeton published Edited By project an excerpt from “A Tedious Job – Women and Film Editing” by Sara Galvão describes how “Booth is considered one of the pioneers of the “invisible edit,” and though she learned a lot with Griffith, her main influence actually came from German expressionism. She would go as far as foreseeing the auteur theory, claiming that great directors have a distinctive rhythm of their own, and it was the job of the cutter to find it and bring it out in the editing.”

 An innovator of what became the classic Hollywood style, Booth readily embraced developments in sound, colour and wide-screen giving her a remarkable position at the forefront of cinematic history for over six decades. In an article published in the New York Times in 1936 it was mentioned that "Film editing is one of the few important functions in a studio in which women play a substantial part." Booth ensured she had a prime seat at the studio table to play that substantial part. The impressive life of an editing legend.