Cutting Through the Celluloid Ceiling
From ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ to ‘Force Awakens,’ 12 female film editors who have made their mark on modern movies
Beware that pesky Celluloid Ceiling.
In 2015, Best Supporting Actress Academy Award-winner Patricia Arquette called the moviegoing public’s attention to gender equality in Hollywood with a passionate, Meryl Streep-approved speech calling for pay equity, delivered mere months after the Sony Pictures hack had laid bare the significant disparity between its female actors’ and employees’ salaries and that of their male counterparts. Since then, numerous high-profile Hollywood players, including Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain, Kerry Washington, and most recently, Natalie Portman, have spoken out concerning the issue. (Beyoncé, of course, had already gotten around to publicly proclaiming “gender equality a myth” a year before them all. Always ahead of her time, that Bey.)
But the crux of the disparity, like most things, lies behind the scenes — and the numbers behind the scenes are so disparate that at right around the time Ms. Arquette took the stage, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began officially investigating the major studios for systematically discriminating against female directors (the case reportedly just moved into settlement talks).
Despite the recent spark of public attention, in many areas, the ratios are moving backwards: According to San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film’s annual Celluloid Ceiling Report released this January, women constituted just 17% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2016 — that’s two percent less than last year, and about even with 1998 (a.k.a. the year Bill Clinton told the world that he “did not have sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky — surely we’re better than that now? Oh, wait. Damn it, patriarchy, you are pervasive.)
The ratios are particularly bad for directors, where women account for only 7%, and cinematographers, where that percentage point falls to 5. But while women are dramatically outnumbered in pretty much every movie-making discipline, despite being equally represented at top film schools like NYU and USC, where LA Weekly reports that 51 and 46 percent of graduate students are female, respectively, there are two areas where they fair comparatively better: producing, where women accounted for 24% of positions, and editing, where the arguably fairer gender slotted in 17% of the time.
“17? You really expect me to appreciate 17%?!” you ask incredulously. Yes. Yes, I do. Take some solace that in the U.K., that number is even higher, with women representing 40% of editor roles across film and television. And while the first female director didn’t take home an Academy Award for directing until Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker in 2010, females have been dominating the editing world from the very beginning: When the Academy Awards for Film Editing were introduced in 1934, a woman — Anne Bauchens (more on her later), for Cleopatra — was included among the three nominees. (She would become the first female to win the award seven years later.)
Back in 1926, the Los Angeles Times declared that “one of the most important positions in the motion-picture industry is held almost entirely by women,” referring to the almost exclusively female “cutters,” as they were then known, whose job it was to assemble “thousands of feet of film so that it tells an interesting story in the most straightforward manner.”
“Women have always fared well in the editing category,” Lizzie Francke, senior development and production executive at the BFI Film Fund, told Little White Lies’ writer Thomas Hobbs. “When women got pushed out of directing back in the late 1920s with the development of the studio system, editing—along with screenwriting — remained a field that women could flourish in. I think the perception prevailed that editing was like sewing — it was more akin to ‘women’s work.’”
And once women found their way through the cutting room door, they stayed there, and they thrived, in many cases painstakingly piecing together the cinematic masterpieces of director’s who remain predominantly male. Why, exactly?
“There’s a lot of joking among editors about our willingness to be alone in a room with a computer, not seeing the sunlight,” Emmy-winning editor Kim Roberts, whose work includes the critically acclaimed feature documentaries Food Inc. and Waiting for Superman, told The New York Times. “But there’s something in my personality that wanted something more secure, where I didn’t have to hustle and I could have a family and go home and have dinner with them every night.”
Or, maybe it’s simply a self-fulfilling prophecy. “A lot of women go into editing because women go into editing,” editor Mary Jo Markey, a frequent collaborator of J. J. Abrams, argued. People come out of film school wanting to be directors, and the odds of that actually happening are slim. Thus, “it makes sense to me that women would see what a viable option editing is, and it’s one that women are succeeding in.”
“Filmmaking is a collaboration,” Thelma Schoonmaker, the Academy Award-winning editor who has collaborated with Martin Scorsese on no less than 23 films, explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “People have to learn how to deal with their own egos and work as partners. And I think women are probably better at that [than men].”
Whatever the reason, it’s undeniable: Woman have cut together some of the most iconic films in cinema history, and many of the most beloved films from male “auteurs” have been, in fact, pieced together behind the scenes by the women with whom those men have had long, [hopefully] mutually-fulfilling working relationships. Here, we present a dozen female “cutters” without whom modern movies wouldn’t be the same.
Margaret Booth
In many ways, it all begins with one Margaret Booth, one of old Hollywood’s first film cutters and the person for whom the very term “film editor” was itself coined. A self-taught talent, Booth started at D. W. Griffith’s Los Angeles studio following her graduation from Los Angeles High School (it never hurts to be local) in 1915; she worked briefly at Paramount before landing what would become a career-defining gig at Louis B. Mayer’s then-small studio.
Mayer would of course go on to merge with Metro-Goldwyn to become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a.k.a. MGM, in 1924, and Booth would go on to become so invaluable to the studio’s young head of production Irving Thalberg that he would create that aforementioned new title of “film editor” — thought to carry more “gravitas” than “cutter” — out of respect for her talent. She would ultimately become MGM’s editor-in-chief, supervising the assembly of hundreds of movies during her tenure there, which lasted until 1968, receiving an honorary Oscar in recognition of her work a decade later. Her last credit was as supervising editor for the musical Annie in 1982.
Anne Bauchens
If you’re familiar with Cecil B. DeMille, you’re familiar with Anne Bauchens, that first female film editor to both be nominated and to win an Academy Award (in 1941 for her work on the Gary Cooper starring North West Mounted Police). Bauchens set out in her early twenties with aspirations to become an actor, but fate had other ideas: she spent five years making ends meet in New York as a stenographer for William DeMille, when she headed west to help his brother, the aforementioned Cecil, edit We Can’t Have Everything in 1918, and the rest is cinema history. Bauchens quickly became the only editor the famed Cecil would work with and went on to edit the prolific filmmaker’s next 40 films, including his final epic, 1956’s The Ten Commandments.
Dorothy Spencer
Dorothy Spencer has 75 feature film credits and four Academy Award nominations to her name, but it is her three-time collaboration with director John Ford for which she is perhaps most readily known. Though Spencer would work twice with no less a visionary than Alfred Hitchcock, it was on Ford’s classic westerns, Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and What Price Glory (1952), where she would prove herself a master of subtle suspense.
Dede Allen
Dede Allen edited classics including The Hustler, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Reds and The Breakfast Club, and pioneered the use of audio overlapping between two scenes (helps with narrative continuity, you see), but it’s the famously bloody, staccato-style shootout scene at the end of frequent collaborator Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde for which she’ll go down in cinema history. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Allen was initially fired by Jack Warner for her uniquely paced take on the scene, but producer/lead actor/Clyde himself, Warren Beatty, so admired her unconventional approach that he paid to keep her on the job out of his own pocket. In the end, she became the first film editor to receive a solo mention in the opening credits of a film for her efforts.
Verna Fields
If you were a director looking to break through the cinematic noise of the early to mid-70s, you would have been wise to call upon master editor Verna Fields. The former USC professor established close ties with the directors Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg early in their careers and subsequently worked on each of their respective breakout films — Paper Moon, American Graffiti, and Jaws — ultimately earning the affectionate nickname of “Mother Cutter” for her invaluable help and warm management style. But she didn’t stop there. After taking home an Oscar for her work on that little shark movie that could, Jaws, Fields became one of the first women to enter upper-level management at a major studio when she was appointed VP of feature production at Universal.
Thelma Schoonmaker
According to The Hollywood Reporter, today’s female filmmakers regard the aforementioned Schoonmaker as “the profession’s reigning god,” and for good reason. Schoonmaker’s deft hand can be seen on every single one of Martin Scorsese’s films since 1980s Raging Bull. She first met the now-iconic director during a 1963 NYU summer course where she helped salvage one of his student films and won his career-long loyalty in the process, beginning with his debut feature, 1967’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door. She went on to receive seven Academy Award nominations for film editing, and took home the Oscar three times, for Raging Bull, The Aviator, and The Departed.
“Very early on, a certain kind of trust developed between us which really is the basis of our relationship,” she told THR of their decades long partnership. “I think he knows that I will do everything I can to carry out his vision on every film I work on with him and I will work ’til I drop to do it.”
Alisa Lepselter
If you like 21st century Woody Allen, you like Alisa Lepselter. After working as Schoonmaker’s assistant on Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation of The Age of Innocence and earning her first solo editing credit on first-time director Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking in 1996, she fell in with that pinnacle of beguiling neuroticism, Woody Allen, in 1999 and has edited every single one of his subsequent films, including Match Point, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris, and Blue Jasmine.
Sally Menke
Similarly, if you’re familiar with the stylishly ultraviolent oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino, you’re familiar with Sally Menke, the editor who worked on all of his feature films prior to her tragic death in 2010. That iconic, suited strut in Reservoir Dogs? Her. The intricate swordplay in Kill Bill? Also her.
Tarantino dedicated Django Unchained, his first film since Menke’s sudden death during a hiking accident, to his longtime collaborator, and later told The Huffington Post that he hung a sign reading “WWSD” — “What Would Sally Do” — in the film’s editing room. “I just miss her,” he explained. Especially “in the last stages of the journey. Because those were kind of like the stages — you know, the mix and the color timing and everything — where I would recede just a little bit, because I was pretty tired of the process by that time. And she would take one step forward and I would take one tiny step back. And she’d kind of lead the way.”
Dana Glauberman
Director Jason Reitman described his longtime editorial collaborator Dana Glauberman to The Hollywood Reporter as “one of the key reasons why I have a career today.” Glauberman first met Reitman when she was working as an assistant to the film editor of his father, Ivan Reitman, and she has since edited all five of his feature films, including Best Picture nominees Juno and Up In The Air.
“You spend more months editing than you do shooting and you do it in a tiny room sitting a few feet from each other. There are very few people on earth that you want to share that sort of proximity and time with, so you better have good chemistry,” Reitman explained. “I’ll probably end up spending more time with Dana, all added up, than any other human being I’ll ever meet. So she’s my life partner and the movies we make are our children.”
As for Glauberman? “I couldn’t agree with Jason more,” she confirmed to the publication. “Occasionally we don’t agree with each other’s viewpoints, but we make it work and it’s a true collaboration. We complement each other.”
Dody Dorn
Emmy and Academy Award-nominated editor Dody Dorn cut her cutting teeth, so to speak, on James Cameron’s 1991 action epic, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and has since worked with notable directors like Ridley Scott (Kingdom of Heaven, Matchstick Men), Baz Luhrmann (Australia), and David Ayer (Fury). But it’s her work on Christopher Nolan’s career-making story-in-reverse about a man suffering from short-term amnesia, Memento, that proved her ability to create a tight, tense narrative viewers won’t soon forget.
How does she do it? “So much of my role as editor is about relying on gut instincts, and then decisions, but it is also about relying on the technology I use on a daily basis,” she explained to Avid Blogs back in 2014. “One thing I do know is that indecision is death—you have to make choices, and even if there are changes and adjustments, or even major restructuring, this work will inevitably take the movie in the direction your director and you feel is right.”
Margaret Sixel
When director George Miller wrapped shooting on Mad Max: Fury Road, he turned the 480 plus hours of film he’d accumulated over to his capable wife, editor Margaret Sixel, and her precise, pulse-poundingly intense approach to putting the post-apocalyptic movie together earned her the Academy Award just last year.
“I said, ‘You have to edit this movie, because it won’t look like every other action movie,” Miller told Vanity Fair of his decision to work on the project with his wife. “She has a super brain and can solve a problem like a Rubik’s Cube,” he told The Hollywood Reporter after Sixel became the 12th women to take home the Oscar for editing.
Mary Jo Markey & MaryAnn Brandon
Sure, their partnership with director and all-around industry wunderkind J.J. Abrams began with television (that whole LOST thing), but the pair has also — separately or together — edited all of Abrams’ feature films since 2006, including Mission Impossible III, both Star Trek movies, and yes, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. And the hardworking duo definitely appreciates the prevalence of female talent in the editing bay.
“One advantage that women have had in editing is that women were editors from the beginning of the film business,” Markey recently told NPR. “It was considered women’s work at one point, and not so much in a very artistic way — certainly not the way that we talk about filmmaking now. It was considered, like, knitting … And I do think that one of the reasons that young women coming out of film school choose to go into editorial is that they believe they have a chance to succeed in that field.”
“I think that, you know, women succeed in the cutting room or they’re allowed into the cutting room because it’s not a very on-display job,” added Brandon. “I mean, we’re behind the scenes. We kind of whisper in your ear.”
It’s an impressive whisper.
To see more of the work of women in editing, click any film below (all edited by women!) to stream.
