Verna Fields
Encyclopedia
Verna Fields was an American film editor, film and television sound editor, educator, and entertainment industry executive. In the first phase of her career, from 1954 through to about 1970, Fields mostly worked on smaller projects that gained little recognition. She was the sound editor for several television shows in the 1950s. She worked on independent films (including The Savage Eye
(1959)), on the government-supported documentaries of the 1960s, and on some minor studio films such as Peter Bogdanovich
's first film, Targets
(1968). For several years in the late 1960s, she was a film instructor at the University of Southern California
. Her one major studio film, El Cid
, led to her only industry recognition in this phase of her career, which was the 1962 Golden Reel award for sound editing.
Fields came into prominence as a film editor and industry executive during the 'New Hollywood
' era (1968–1982). She had established close ties with the directors Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas
, and Steven Spielberg
early in their careers, and became known as their "mother cutter"; the term "cutter" is an informal variation of "film editor". The critical and commercial success of the films What's up, Doc?
(1972), American Graffiti
(1973), and Jaws
(1975) brought Fields a level of recognition that appears to be unique among film editors. Jaws in particular was enormously and unexpectedly profitable, and ushered in the era of the "summer blockbuster
" film. Fields' contributions to this success were widely acknowledged. She received an Academy Award
and an American Cinema Editors
Award for best editing for the film. Within a year of the film's release, she had been appointed as Vice-President for Feature Production at Universal Studios
. She was thus among the first women to enter upper-level management in the entertainment industry. Her career as an executive at Universal continued until her death in 1982 at age 64.
. She was the daughter of Selma (née Schwartz) and Samuel Hellman, who was then working as a journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
and the Saturday Evening Post. Sam Hellman subsequently moved his family to Hollywood
, where he became a prolific screenwriter. Verna Hellman graduated from the University of Southern California
with a B.A. in journalism. She then held several positions at 20th Century Fox
, including being the assistant sound editor on Fritz Lang
's 1944 film The Woman in the Window
. In 1946, she married the film editor Sam Fields and stopped working. The Fields had two sons; one of them, Richard Fields, became a film editor. In 1954, Sam Fields died of a heart attack at the age of 38.
and the children's programs Sky King
and Fury
. She installed a film editing lab in her home so that she could work at night while her children were young; she told them that she was the "Queen of Saturday morning".
By 1956, she was working on films as well. Her first credit as a sound editor was for Fritz Lang
's While the City Sleeps. She worked on the experimental documentary The Savage Eye
(1959); the co-directors Ben Maddow
, Sidney Meyers
, and Joseph Strick
and the other connections she made on this film were important to her subsequent career. In 1962 Fields won the Motion Picture Sound Editors
' Golden Reel Award for the film El Cid
(directed by Anthony Mann
).
Following El Cid, Fields was the sound editor on several lesser-known films, including the experimental film The Balcony
(1963) with her Savage Eye colleagues Strick and Maddow. Peter Bogdanovich
's first, low-budget film Targets
(1968) was one of her last sound-editing projects, and represents her mature work. Bill Warren
has described the scene in which the character Bobby starts sniping at freeway drivers from the top of a large oil storage tank: "The sound is mono, and brilliantly mixed -- the entire sequence of Bobby shooting from the tanks was shot without sound. Verna Fields, then a sound editor, added all the sound effects. The result is seamlessly realistic, from the scrape of the guns on the metal of the tanks, to the crack of the rifles, to the little gasps Bobby makes just before firing."
recruited her to be the editor of the film Studs Lonigan
; Fields and Lerner had both worked on The Savage Eye. In 1963 she edited An Affair of the Skin
, which was directed by Ben Maddow (another Savage Eye contact). Over the next five years, Fields edited several other independent films; the best known is The Legend of the Boy and the Eagle
(1967), which was shown on the television program Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. She also made documentaries funded by the United States government through the Office of Economic Opportunity
(OEO), the United States Information Agency
(USIA), and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).
Starting in the mid-1960s, Fields taught film editing at the University of Southern California
(USC). Douglas Gomery
wrote of her time at USC that: "Her greatest impact came when she began to teach film editing to a generation of students at the University of Southern California. She then operated on the fringes of the film business, for a time making documentaries for the Office of Economic Opportunity. The end of that Federal Agency pushed her back into mainstream Hollywood then being overrun by her former USC students." Fields' students had included Matthew Robbins
, Willard Huyck
, Gloria Katz
, John Milius
, and George Lucas
.
Fields left no written lectures from her USC years, but a transcript exists from a 1975 seminar that she gave at the American Film Institute
. In one characteristic excerpt she said that, "There's a feeling of movement in telling a story and there is a flow. A cut that is off-rhythm will be disturbing and you will feel it, unless you want it to be like that. On Jaws, each time I wanted to cut I didn't, so that it would have an anticipatory feeling — and it worked."
In 1971 Peter Bogdanovich
, with whom Fields had worked on Targets, recruited her to edit What's Up Doc?
(1972); Bogdanovich had edited his previous films himself. The film was very successful, and is now considered as the second of Bogdanovich's 'golden period' that commenced with The Last Picture Show
(1971). What's Up, Doc? established Fields as an editor on studio films. She subsequently edited Bogdanovich's final golden period film, Paper Moon
(1973), as well as his less successful film Daisy Miller
(1974).
to help edit Journey to the Pacific (1968), which was a documentary film that she'd directed for the USIA. She had also hired Marcia Griffin
for the job, and introduced Griffin and George Lucas
; they subsequently married. In 1972, Lucas was directing American Graffiti
. While Lucas had intended that his wife would edit the film, Universal Studios
asked him to add Verna Fields to the editing team. Over the first ten weeks of post-production, George and Marcia Lucas, along with Fields and Walter Murch
(as sound editor), pieced together the original, 165 minute version of the film. Each of more than 40 scenes in the film had a continuously playing background song that had been popular around 1962, when the film's story was set. Michael Sragow
has characterized the effect as "using rock 'n roll as a Greek chorus
with a beat".
Fields then left American Graffiti. It took another six months of editing to create a shorter, 110 minute version of the film, but upon its release in 1973 American Graffiti was extremely successful both with critics and at the box office. Shortly after its release, Roger Greenspun described the film and its editing: "American Graffiti exists not so much in its individual stories as in its orchestration of many stories, its sense of time and place. Although it is full of the material of fashionable nostalgia, it never exploits nostalgia. In its feeling for movement and music and the vitality of the night—and even in its vision in white—it is oddly closer to some early Fellini
than to the recent American past of, say, The Last Picture Show
or Summer of '42
."
Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas were nominated for an Academy Award for Film Editing
in 1974 for their work on American Graffiti; while the film won no Academy Awards, both of the Lucases, Murch, and Fields all won Academy Awards for later work. The commercial success of the film gave George Lucas the opportunity to direct his next film, Star Wars
.
's first major film, The Sugarland Express
(1974). She became widely celebrated for her work as the film editor on Spielberg's next film, Jaws
(1975), for which she won both the Academy Award for Film Editing
and the American Cinema Editors
Eddie Award in 1976. Leonard Maltin
has characterized her editing as "sensational". Gerald Peary
, who interviewed Fields in 1980, wrote that, "Jaws scared the world, brought in a fortune for Universal
, and made Verna Fields, who won an Academy Award, about as famous 'overnight' as an editor ever gets." He then quoted Fields as saying that, "Steven told me it was because I had cut the first picture that was a monumental success in which you can really see the editing. And people discovered that it was a woman who edited Jaws."
The editing of Jaws has been intensely studied for over thirty years. In film editor Susan Korda's 2005 lecture, "We'll Fix It In the Edit!?", at the Berlinale Talent Campus, she broadly explained the contribution of editing to the film: "What is fascinating in Jaws is that the shark has a personality, the shark has an intelligence, indeed sometimes I think the shark has a sense of humor, morbid as it might be. And that was all achieved in the first two acts of the film before you see the shark. So the cutting was very essential for that." David Bordwell
has used the second shark attack scene in Jaws as (literally) a textbook illustration of an editing innovation that occurred in the late 1960s. The innovation, which Fields herself named the "wipe by cut", can be used when a character is filmed from a distance using a telephoto lens. The cut to a different framing of the character occurs during the interruption by a figure who passes between the camera and the character. The cut thus masks itself, and avoids drawing the viewer's attention away from the narrative of the scene.
The critic David Edelstein
's affectionate comments on Jaws and its editing are also a good indication of the film's lasting influence 30 years after its release:
as an executive consultant. Some insight into Universal's reasons for hiring her can be gleaned from the fact that during the filming of Jaws, in addition to her editing, Fields had been "omnipresent...at Spielberg's beck and call by means of a walkie-talkie. Often she would shuttle back and forth on her bike between the producers in town and Spielberg at the dock for last-minute decisions". The producers of Jaws were David Brown
and Richard Zanuck
. Along with Brown, Zanuck, and Peter Benchley
(the book's author), Fields helped promote Jaws on the "talk show circuit" in the eight months before its saturation release to 464 theaters on 20 June 1975 Fields had plainly earned the confidence of the producers and of the studio executives at Universal.
Throughout her career, Fields had worked independently, but in 1976, and following the unexpected success of Jaws, she accepted a position as the Feature-Production Vice-President with Universal. She was thus among the first women to hold high executive positions with the major studios. In a 1982 interview, Fields was quoted as saying, "I got a lot of credit for Jaws, rightly or wrongly."
Fields had come "up from the cutting room floor" and out of the customary, near-anonymity of film editors. Regarding this change in her career path, Fields told Peary in 1980 that "All these young filmmakers are possessive. They feel I belong to them, and they feel a certain resentment - that I went to the other side. In calmer moments, of course, they know it isn't true, that I can do more for them now." Of Fields' work at Universal, Joel Schumacher
was quoted in 1982 as saying: "In the record business, you have Berry Gordy
and Ahmet Ertegün
. They're executives who actually made records. In the movie business, as an executive who's worked with film, you have only Verna. She saves Universal a fortune...every day."
Fields held her position as a Vice-President at Universal until her death in 1982. Jaws was the last film that she edited. There had apparently been some discussion that Fields might edit Spielberg's next film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977), but Michael Kahn
edited that film, and went on to edit all but one of Spielberg's films for the next thirty years. After John Hancock, the initial director of Jaws 2
, was sacked, it was suggested that Fields co-direct it with Joe Alves
. Jeannot Szwarc
, however, was hired to complete the film.
Fields died of cancer in Encino, California in 1982. In her honor, Universal Studios
named a building at its Universal City, California
lot the "Verna Fields Building"; it lies immediately across from the Alfred Hitchcock
Building. The Motion Picture Sound Editors
(MPSE) sponsor an annual Verna Fields Award
for Student Sound Editing. The Women in Film Foundation, which honored Fields with its Crystal Award in 1981, presently administers the Verna Fields Memorial Fellowship for women film students at UCLA
.
The Savage Eye
The Savage Eye is a "dramatized documentary" film that superposes a dramatic narration of the life of a divorced woman with documentary camera footage of an unspecified 1950s city. In a 1960 review, A. H...
(1959)), on the government-supported documentaries of the 1960s, and on some minor studio films such as Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich is an American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, and critic. He was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors, which included William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino, and Francis Ford Coppola...
's first film, Targets
Targets
Targets is a thriller film written, produced and directed by Peter Bogdanovich.-Plot summary:The story concerns a quiet insurance agent / Vietnam veteran, played by Tim O'Kelly, who murders his young wife, his mother and a grocery delivery boy at home and then initiates an afternoon shooting...
(1968). For several years in the late 1960s, she was a film instructor at the University of Southern California
USC School of Cinematic Arts
The USC School of Cinematic Arts, until 2006 named the School of Cinema-Television , is a film school within the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. It is the oldest and largest such school in the United States, established in 1929 as a joint venture with the Academy of...
. Her one major studio film, El Cid
El Cid (film)
El Cid is a historical epic film, a romanticized story of the life of the Christian Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called "El Cid" who in the 11th century fought the North African Almoravides and ultimately contributed to the unification of Spain.Made by Samuel Bronston Productions in...
, led to her only industry recognition in this phase of her career, which was the 1962 Golden Reel award for sound editing.
Fields came into prominence as a film editor and industry executive during the 'New Hollywood
New Hollywood
New Hollywood or post-classical Hollywood, sometimes referred to as the "American New Wave", refers to the time from roughly the late-1960s to the early 1980s when a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in America, influencing the types of films produced, their production and...
' era (1968–1982). She had established close ties with the directors Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...
, and Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
early in their careers, and became known as their "mother cutter"; the term "cutter" is an informal variation of "film editor". The critical and commercial success of the films What's up, Doc?
What's Up, Doc? (1972 film)
What's Up, Doc? is a 1972 screwball comedy film released by Warner Bros., directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, and Madeline Kahn...
(1972), American Graffiti
American Graffiti
American Graffiti is a 1973 coming of age film co-written/directed by George Lucas starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips and Harrison Ford...
(1973), and Jaws
Jaws (film)
Jaws is a 1975 American horror-thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name. In the story, the police chief of Amity Island, a fictional summer resort town, tries to protect beachgoers from a giant man-eating great white shark by closing the beach,...
(1975) brought Fields a level of recognition that appears to be unique among film editors. Jaws in particular was enormously and unexpectedly profitable, and ushered in the era of the "summer blockbuster
Blockbuster (entertainment)
Blockbuster, as applied to film or theatre, denotes a very popular or successful production. The entertainment industry use was originally theatrical slang referring to a particularly successful play but is now used primarily by the film industry...
" film. Fields' contributions to this success were widely acknowledged. She received an Academy Award
Academy Award for Film Editing
The Academy Award for Film Editing is one of the annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Nominations for this award are closely correlated with the Academy Award for Best Picture. Since 1981, every film selected as Best Picture has also been nominated for the Film Editing...
and an American Cinema Editors
American Cinema Editors
Founded in 1950, American Cinema Editors is an honorary society of film editors that are voted in based on the qualities of professional achievements, their education of others, and their dedication to editing itself. The society is not to be confused with an industry union, such as the I.A.T.S.E...
Award for best editing for the film. Within a year of the film's release, she had been appointed as Vice-President for Feature Production at Universal Studios
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
. She was thus among the first women to enter upper-level management in the entertainment industry. Her career as an executive at Universal continued until her death in 1982 at age 64.
Early life, education, and training
Verna Hellman was born in St. Louis, MissouriSt. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States. With a population of 319,294, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Greater St...
. She was the daughter of Selma (née Schwartz) and Samuel Hellman, who was then working as a journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is the major city-wide newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri. Although written to serve Greater St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch is one of the largest newspapers in the Midwestern United States, and is available and read as far west as Kansas City, Missouri, as far south as...
and the Saturday Evening Post. Sam Hellman subsequently moved his family to Hollywood
Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
Hollywood is a famous district in Los Angeles, California, United States situated west-northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word Hollywood is often used as a metonym of American cinema...
, where he became a prolific screenwriter. Verna Hellman graduated from the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
with a B.A. in journalism. She then held several positions at 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
, including being the assistant sound editor on Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
's 1944 film The Woman in the Window
The Woman in the Window
The Woman in the Window is a film noir directed by Fritz Lang that tells the story of psychology professor Richard Wanley who meets and becomes enamored with a young femme fatale....
. In 1946, she married the film editor Sam Fields and stopped working. The Fields had two sons; one of them, Richard Fields, became a film editor. In 1954, Sam Fields died of a heart attack at the age of 38.
Career in sound editing
Following her husband's death, Fields began a career as a television sound editor working on such shows as Death Valley DaysDeath Valley Days
Death Valley Days is an American radio and television anthology series featuring true stories of the old American West, particularly the Death Valley area. Created in 1930 by Ruth Woodman, the program was broadcast on radio until 1945. It continued from 1952 to 1975 as a syndicated television series...
and the children's programs Sky King
Sky King
Sky King is a 1940s and 1950s American radio and television adventure series. The title character is Arizona rancher and aircraft pilot Schuyler "Sky" King...
and Fury
Fury (TV series)
Fury is an American Western television series that aired on NBC from 1955–1960, starring Peter Graves as Jim Newton , Bobby Diamond as Jim's adopted son, Joey Clark Newton, and William Fawcett as ranch hand Pete Wilkey...
. She installed a film editing lab in her home so that she could work at night while her children were young; she told them that she was the "Queen of Saturday morning".
By 1956, she was working on films as well. Her first credit as a sound editor was for Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
's While the City Sleeps. She worked on the experimental documentary The Savage Eye
The Savage Eye
The Savage Eye is a "dramatized documentary" film that superposes a dramatic narration of the life of a divorced woman with documentary camera footage of an unspecified 1950s city. In a 1960 review, A. H...
(1959); the co-directors Ben Maddow
Ben Maddow
Ben Maddow was a prolific screenwriter and documentarian from the 1930s through the 70s. Educated at Columbia University, Maddow began his career working within the American documentary movement in the 30s.In 1936 he co-founded the short-lived left-wing newsreel The World Today...
, Sidney Meyers
Sidney Meyers
Sidney Meyers was an American film director and editor.Sidney Meyers is best known for two documentary films: The Quiet One, which he wrote and directed, and for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay; and British Academy of Film and Television Arts winner The Savage Eye,...
, and Joseph Strick
Joseph Strick
Joseph Strick was an American director, producer and screenwriter.Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Strick briefly attended UCLA before enrolling in the Army during World War II. In the Army, he served as a cameraman in the Army Air Forces.In 1948, he and Irving Lerner produced Muscle Beach...
and the other connections she made on this film were important to her subsequent career. In 1962 Fields won the Motion Picture Sound Editors
Motion Picture Sound Editors
Founded in 1953, Motion Picture Sound Editors is an honorary society of motion picture sound editors. The society's goals are to educate others about and increase the recognition of the sound editors, show the artistic merit of the soundtracks, and improve the professional relationship of its...
' Golden Reel Award for the film El Cid
El Cid (film)
El Cid is a historical epic film, a romanticized story of the life of the Christian Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called "El Cid" who in the 11th century fought the North African Almoravides and ultimately contributed to the unification of Spain.Made by Samuel Bronston Productions in...
(directed by Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann was an American actor and film director, most notably of film noirs and Westerns. As a director, he often collaborated with the cinematographer John Alton and with James Stewart in his Westerns.-Biography:...
).
Following El Cid, Fields was the sound editor on several lesser-known films, including the experimental film The Balcony
The Balcony (film)
The Balcony is a 1963 cinematic adaptation of Jean Genet's play The Balcony, directed by Joseph Strick. It starred Shelley Winters, Peter Falk, Lee Grant and Leonard Nimoy. George J. Folsey was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Ben Maddow was nominated for a Writers Guild of...
(1963) with her Savage Eye colleagues Strick and Maddow. Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich is an American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, and critic. He was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors, which included William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino, and Francis Ford Coppola...
's first, low-budget film Targets
Targets
Targets is a thriller film written, produced and directed by Peter Bogdanovich.-Plot summary:The story concerns a quiet insurance agent / Vietnam veteran, played by Tim O'Kelly, who murders his young wife, his mother and a grocery delivery boy at home and then initiates an afternoon shooting...
(1968) was one of her last sound-editing projects, and represents her mature work. Bill Warren
Bill Warren
William Bond Warren , better known as Bill Warren, is an American film historian and critic generally regarded as one of the leading authorities on science fiction, horror and fantasy films....
has described the scene in which the character Bobby starts sniping at freeway drivers from the top of a large oil storage tank: "The sound is mono, and brilliantly mixed -- the entire sequence of Bobby shooting from the tanks was shot without sound. Verna Fields, then a sound editor, added all the sound effects. The result is seamlessly realistic, from the scrape of the guns on the metal of the tanks, to the crack of the rifles, to the little gasps Bobby makes just before firing."
Film editing and teaching
Fields' career as a film editor commenced in 1960, when the director Irving LernerIrving Lerner
Irving Lerner Before becoming a filmmaker, Lerner was a research editor for Columbia University's Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, getting his start in film by making documentaries for the anthropology department. In the early 1930s, he was a member of the Workers Film and Photo League, and later,...
recruited her to be the editor of the film Studs Lonigan
Studs Lonigan
Studs Lonigan is the title of a novel trilogy by American author James T. Farrell: Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked the Studs Lonigan trilogy at 29th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.The...
; Fields and Lerner had both worked on The Savage Eye. In 1963 she edited An Affair of the Skin
An Affair of the Skin
An Affair of the Skin is a 1963 film written and directed by Ben Maddow. It is a complex story of the romantic entanglements of its several characters as seen through the eyes of a black woman photographer. Shortly after its release, the film was harshly reviewed in Time Magazine and The New York...
, which was directed by Ben Maddow (another Savage Eye contact). Over the next five years, Fields edited several other independent films; the best known is The Legend of the Boy and the Eagle
The Legend of the Boy and the Eagle
The Legend of the Boy and the Eagle is a 1967 American live-action Walt Disney film. A Hopi Indian boy is banished from his village after he defies tribal law and frees a sacred, sacrificial eagle. After surviving in the wilderness he returns to his village where he is again rejected. Fleeing the...
(1967), which was shown on the television program Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. She also made documentaries funded by the United States government through the Office of Economic Opportunity
Office of Economic Opportunity
The Office of Economic Opportunity was the agency responsible for administering most of the War on Poverty programs created as part of United States President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society legislative agenda.- History :...
(OEO), the United States Information Agency
United States Information Agency
The United States Information Agency , which existed from 1953 to 1999, was a United States agency devoted to "public diplomacy". In 1999, USIA's broadcasting functions were moved to the newly created Broadcasting Board of Governors, and its exchange and non-broadcasting information functions were...
(USIA), and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).
Starting in the mid-1960s, Fields taught film editing at the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
(USC). Douglas Gomery
Douglas Gomery
Douglas Gomery is Professor Emeritus at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland in College Park. He holds a doctorate in Communications from the University of Wisconsin and has taught mass media history at the University of Wisconsin, Northwestern University, New...
wrote of her time at USC that: "Her greatest impact came when she began to teach film editing to a generation of students at the University of Southern California. She then operated on the fringes of the film business, for a time making documentaries for the Office of Economic Opportunity. The end of that Federal Agency pushed her back into mainstream Hollywood then being overrun by her former USC students." Fields' students had included Matthew Robbins
Matthew Robbins (screenwriter)
Matthew Robbins is an American screenwriter, film producer and director. He is good friends with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Guillermo Del Toro and Walter Murch and has had cameo appearances in THX 1138 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
, Willard Huyck
Willard Huyck
Willard Huyck is an American screenwriter, director and producer, best known for his association with George Lucas. They met as students at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and along with others, they became members of a renowned group of amateur filmmakers called The Dirty Dozen...
, Gloria Katz
Gloria Katz
Gloria Katz is an American screenwriter and film producer, best known for her association with George Lucas. Along with her husband Willard Huyck, Katz has created the screenplays of films including American Graffiti, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the notorious Howard the Duck.-...
, John Milius
John Milius
John Frederick Milius is an American screenwriter, director, and producer of motion pictures.-Early life:Milius was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Elizabeth and William Styx Milius, who was a shoe manufacturer. Milius attempted to join the Marine Corps in the late 1960s, but was rejected...
, and George Lucas
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...
.
Fields left no written lectures from her USC years, but a transcript exists from a 1975 seminar that she gave at the American Film Institute
American Film Institute
The American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...
. In one characteristic excerpt she said that, "There's a feeling of movement in telling a story and there is a flow. A cut that is off-rhythm will be disturbing and you will feel it, unless you want it to be like that. On Jaws, each time I wanted to cut I didn't, so that it would have an anticipatory feeling — and it worked."
In 1971 Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich is an American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, and critic. He was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors, which included William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino, and Francis Ford Coppola...
, with whom Fields had worked on Targets, recruited her to edit What's Up Doc?
What's Up, Doc? (1972 film)
What's Up, Doc? is a 1972 screwball comedy film released by Warner Bros., directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, and Madeline Kahn...
(1972); Bogdanovich had edited his previous films himself. The film was very successful, and is now considered as the second of Bogdanovich's 'golden period' that commenced with The Last Picture Show
The Last Picture Show
The Last Picture Show is a 1971 American drama film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, adapted from a semi-autobiographical 1966 novel of the same name by Larry McMurtry....
(1971). What's Up, Doc? established Fields as an editor on studio films. She subsequently edited Bogdanovich's final golden period film, Paper Moon
Paper Moon (film)
Paper Moon is a 1973 American comedy film directed by Peter Bogdanovich and released by Paramount Pictures. The screenplay was adapted from the novel Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, and the film was shot in black-and-white. The film is set during the Great Depression in the U.S. states of Kansas and...
(1973), as well as his less successful film Daisy Miller
Daisy Miller (1974 film)
Daisy Miller is a 1974 American drama film directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The screenplay by Frederic Raphael is based on the 1878 novella of the same title by Henry James.-Plot synopsis:...
(1974).
George Lucas and American Graffiti
In 1967, Fields had hired George LucasGeorge Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...
to help edit Journey to the Pacific (1968), which was a documentary film that she'd directed for the USIA. She had also hired Marcia Griffin
Marcia Lucas
Marcia Lucas is an American film editor.In 1974, Lucas and Verna Fields were nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing for their work on American Graffiti...
for the job, and introduced Griffin and George Lucas
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...
; they subsequently married. In 1972, Lucas was directing American Graffiti
American Graffiti
American Graffiti is a 1973 coming of age film co-written/directed by George Lucas starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips and Harrison Ford...
. While Lucas had intended that his wife would edit the film, Universal Studios
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
asked him to add Verna Fields to the editing team. Over the first ten weeks of post-production, George and Marcia Lucas, along with Fields and Walter Murch
Walter Murch
Walter Scott Murch is an American film editor and sound designer.-Early life:Murch was born in New York City, New York, the son of Katharine and Canadian-born Walter Tandy Murch , a painter. He went to The Collegiate School, a private preparatory school in Manhattan, from 1949 to 1961...
(as sound editor), pieced together the original, 165 minute version of the film. Each of more than 40 scenes in the film had a continuously playing background song that had been popular around 1962, when the film's story was set. Michael Sragow
Michael Sragow
Michael Sragow is a film critic and columnist who has written for The Baltimore Sun, The New Times, The New Yorker , The Atlantic and salon.com...
has characterized the effect as "using rock 'n roll as a Greek chorus
Greek chorus
A Greek chorus is a homogenous, non-individualised group of performers in the plays of classical Greece, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action....
with a beat".
Fields then left American Graffiti. It took another six months of editing to create a shorter, 110 minute version of the film, but upon its release in 1973 American Graffiti was extremely successful both with critics and at the box office. Shortly after its release, Roger Greenspun described the film and its editing: "American Graffiti exists not so much in its individual stories as in its orchestration of many stories, its sense of time and place. Although it is full of the material of fashionable nostalgia, it never exploits nostalgia. In its feeling for movement and music and the vitality of the night—and even in its vision in white—it is oddly closer to some early Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
than to the recent American past of, say, The Last Picture Show
The Last Picture Show
The Last Picture Show is a 1971 American drama film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, adapted from a semi-autobiographical 1966 novel of the same name by Larry McMurtry....
or Summer of '42
Summer of '42
Summer of '42 is a 1971 American coming-of-age drama film based on the memoirs of screenwriter Herman Raucher. It tells the story of how Raucher, in his early teens on his 1942 summer vacation on Nantucket Island, off the coast of New England, embarked on a one-sided romance with a woman, Dorothy,...
."
Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas were nominated for an Academy Award for Film Editing
Academy Award for Film Editing
The Academy Award for Film Editing is one of the annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Nominations for this award are closely correlated with the Academy Award for Best Picture. Since 1981, every film selected as Best Picture has also been nominated for the Film Editing...
in 1974 for their work on American Graffiti; while the film won no Academy Awards, both of the Lucases, Murch, and Fields all won Academy Awards for later work. The commercial success of the film gave George Lucas the opportunity to direct his next film, Star Wars
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, originally released as Star Wars, is a 1977 American epic space opera film, written and directed by George Lucas. It is the first of six films released in the Star Wars saga: two subsequent films complete the original trilogy, while a prequel trilogy completes the...
.
Steven Spielberg and Jaws
Fields edited Steven SpielbergSteven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
's first major film, The Sugarland Express
The Sugarland Express
The Sugarland Express is a 1974 American drama film starring Goldie Hawn, Ben Johnson, William Atherton, and Michael Sacks. It was directed by Steven Spielberg, his first film to be intended as a theatrical release .It is about a husband and wife trying to outrun the law and was based on a...
(1974). She became widely celebrated for her work as the film editor on Spielberg's next film, Jaws
Jaws (film)
Jaws is a 1975 American horror-thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name. In the story, the police chief of Amity Island, a fictional summer resort town, tries to protect beachgoers from a giant man-eating great white shark by closing the beach,...
(1975), for which she won both the Academy Award for Film Editing
Academy Award for Film Editing
The Academy Award for Film Editing is one of the annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Nominations for this award are closely correlated with the Academy Award for Best Picture. Since 1981, every film selected as Best Picture has also been nominated for the Film Editing...
and the American Cinema Editors
American Cinema Editors
Founded in 1950, American Cinema Editors is an honorary society of film editors that are voted in based on the qualities of professional achievements, their education of others, and their dedication to editing itself. The society is not to be confused with an industry union, such as the I.A.T.S.E...
Eddie Award in 1976. Leonard Maltin
Leonard Maltin
Leonard Maltin is an American film and animated film critic and historian, author of several mainstream books on cinema, focusing on nostalgic, celebratory narratives.-Personal life:...
has characterized her editing as "sensational". Gerald Peary
Gerald Peary
Gerald Peary is an American film critic, who has been a reviewer and columnist for the Boston Phoenix since 1996. He was formerly the Acting Curator of the Harvard Film Archive and is currently the General Editor of the University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Filmmakers Series...
, who interviewed Fields in 1980, wrote that, "Jaws scared the world, brought in a fortune for Universal
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
, and made Verna Fields, who won an Academy Award, about as famous 'overnight' as an editor ever gets." He then quoted Fields as saying that, "Steven told me it was because I had cut the first picture that was a monumental success in which you can really see the editing. And people discovered that it was a woman who edited Jaws."
The editing of Jaws has been intensely studied for over thirty years. In film editor Susan Korda's 2005 lecture, "We'll Fix It In the Edit!?", at the Berlinale Talent Campus, she broadly explained the contribution of editing to the film: "What is fascinating in Jaws is that the shark has a personality, the shark has an intelligence, indeed sometimes I think the shark has a sense of humor, morbid as it might be. And that was all achieved in the first two acts of the film before you see the shark. So the cutting was very essential for that." David Bordwell
David Bordwell
David Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film , Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema , Making Meaning , and On the...
has used the second shark attack scene in Jaws as (literally) a textbook illustration of an editing innovation that occurred in the late 1960s. The innovation, which Fields herself named the "wipe by cut", can be used when a character is filmed from a distance using a telephoto lens. The cut to a different framing of the character occurs during the interruption by a figure who passes between the camera and the character. The cut thus masks itself, and avoids drawing the viewer's attention away from the narrative of the scene.
The critic David Edelstein
David Edelstein
David Edelstein is the chief film critic for New York Magazine, as well as the film critic for NPR's Fresh Air and CBS Sunday Morning. He lives in Brooklyn, New York....
's affectionate comments on Jaws and its editing are also a good indication of the film's lasting influence 30 years after its release:
Management for Universal Studios
Shortly after the completion of Jaws in 1975, Fields was hired by Universal StudiosUniversal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
as an executive consultant. Some insight into Universal's reasons for hiring her can be gleaned from the fact that during the filming of Jaws, in addition to her editing, Fields had been "omnipresent...at Spielberg's beck and call by means of a walkie-talkie. Often she would shuttle back and forth on her bike between the producers in town and Spielberg at the dock for last-minute decisions". The producers of Jaws were David Brown
David Brown (producer)
David Brown was an American film producer.-Early life and career:Brown was born in New York City, the son of Lillian and Edward Fisher Brown. He was best known as the producing partner of Richard D. Zanuck. They were jointly awarded the Irving G...
and Richard Zanuck
Richard D. Zanuck
Richard Darryl Zanuck is an American film producer. He iscredited for producing famous movies of the 1970's, 80's, 90's and the 21 century.-Life and career:...
. Along with Brown, Zanuck, and Peter Benchley
Peter Benchley
Peter Bradford Benchley was an American author, best known for his novel Jaws and its subsequent film adaptation, the latter co-written by Benchley and directed by Steven Spielberg...
(the book's author), Fields helped promote Jaws on the "talk show circuit" in the eight months before its saturation release to 464 theaters on 20 June 1975 Fields had plainly earned the confidence of the producers and of the studio executives at Universal.
Throughout her career, Fields had worked independently, but in 1976, and following the unexpected success of Jaws, she accepted a position as the Feature-Production Vice-President with Universal. She was thus among the first women to hold high executive positions with the major studios. In a 1982 interview, Fields was quoted as saying, "I got a lot of credit for Jaws, rightly or wrongly."
Fields had come "up from the cutting room floor" and out of the customary, near-anonymity of film editors. Regarding this change in her career path, Fields told Peary in 1980 that "All these young filmmakers are possessive. They feel I belong to them, and they feel a certain resentment - that I went to the other side. In calmer moments, of course, they know it isn't true, that I can do more for them now." Of Fields' work at Universal, Joel Schumacher
Joel Schumacher
Joel T. Schumacher is an American film director, screenwriter and producer.-Early life:Schumacher was born in New York City, the son of Marian and Francis Schumacher. His mother was a Swedish Jew, and his father was a Baptist from Knoxville, Tennessee, who died when Joel was four years old...
was quoted in 1982 as saying: "In the record business, you have Berry Gordy
Berry Gordy
Berry Gordy, Jr. is an American record producer, and the founder of the Motown record label, as well as its many subsidiaries.-Early years:...
and Ahmet Ertegün
Ahmet Ertegun
Ahmet Ertegün was a Turkish American musician and businessman, best known as the founder and president of Atlantic Records. He also wrote classic blues and pop songs and served as Chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and museum...
. They're executives who actually made records. In the movie business, as an executive who's worked with film, you have only Verna. She saves Universal a fortune...every day."
Final cuts
In 1981, she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.Fields held her position as a Vice-President at Universal until her death in 1982. Jaws was the last film that she edited. There had apparently been some discussion that Fields might edit Spielberg's next film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 science fiction film written and directed by Steven Spielberg. The film stars Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, and Cary Guffey...
(1977), but Michael Kahn
Michael Kahn (film editor)
Michael Kahn is an American film editor. His credits range from TV's Hogan's Heroes to feature films directed by George C. Scott and Steven Spielberg, with whom he has had an extended, notable collaboration over more than thirty years.Kahn is a member of the American Cinema Editors...
edited that film, and went on to edit all but one of Spielberg's films for the next thirty years. After John Hancock, the initial director of Jaws 2
Jaws 2
Jaws 2 is a 1978 thriller film and the first sequel to Steven Spielberg's Jaws , which is based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name...
, was sacked, it was suggested that Fields co-direct it with Joe Alves
Joe Alves
Joe Alves is an American film production designer, perhaps best known for his work on three of the Jaws films. He directed Jaws 3-D....
. Jeannot Szwarc
Jeannot Szwarc
Jeannot Szwarc is a French Film/TV Director.Szwarc was born in Paris. He began working as a director in American television during the 1960s, in particular on Ironside...
, however, was hired to complete the film.
Fields died of cancer in Encino, California in 1982. In her honor, Universal Studios
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
named a building at its Universal City, California
Universal City, California
Universal City is a community in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles County, California, that encompasses the 415 acre property of Universal Studios...
lot the "Verna Fields Building"; it lies immediately across from the Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
Building. The Motion Picture Sound Editors
Motion Picture Sound Editors
Founded in 1953, Motion Picture Sound Editors is an honorary society of motion picture sound editors. The society's goals are to educate others about and increase the recognition of the sound editors, show the artistic merit of the soundtracks, and improve the professional relationship of its...
(MPSE) sponsor an annual Verna Fields Award
Verna Fields Award
The Verna Fields Award is the Golden Reel Award which is annually presented by Motion Picture Sound Editors to a filmmaking student in order to recognize the excellence of their sound editing work. Luke Dunn Gielmuda of the Australian Film Television and Radio School won the 1998 award for his work...
for Student Sound Editing. The Women in Film Foundation, which honored Fields with its Crystal Award in 1981, presently administers the Verna Fields Memorial Fellowship for women film students at UCLA
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
.
Selected Filmography (Editor)
| Year | Film | Director | Other notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1975 | Jaws Jaws (film) Jaws is a 1975 American horror-thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name. In the story, the police chief of Amity Island, a fictional summer resort town, tries to protect beachgoers from a giant man-eating great white shark by closing the beach,... |
Steven Spielberg Steven Spielberg Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an... |
Best Editing Oscar |
| 1974 | Memory of Us | H. Kaye Dyal | |
| Daisy Miller | Peter Bogdanovich Peter Bogdanovich Peter Bogdanovich is an American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, and critic. He was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors, which included William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino, and Francis Ford Coppola... |
||
| The Sugarland Express The Sugarland Express The Sugarland Express is a 1974 American drama film starring Goldie Hawn, Ben Johnson, William Atherton, and Michael Sacks. It was directed by Steven Spielberg, his first film to be intended as a theatrical release .It is about a husband and wife trying to outrun the law and was based on a... |
Steven Spielberg | ||
| 1973 | American Graffiti American Graffiti American Graffiti is a 1973 coming of age film co-written/directed by George Lucas starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips and Harrison Ford... |
George Lucas George Lucas George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones... |
Best Editing Oscar nomination (with Marcia Lucas Marcia Lucas Marcia Lucas is an American film editor.In 1974, Lucas and Verna Fields were nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing for their work on American Graffiti... ) |
| Paper Moon Paper Moon (film) Paper Moon is a 1973 American comedy film directed by Peter Bogdanovich and released by Paramount Pictures. The screenplay was adapted from the novel Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, and the film was shot in black-and-white. The film is set during the Great Depression in the U.S. states of Kansas and... |
Peter Bogdanovich | ||
| Sing a Country Song | Jack McCallum | ||
| 1972 | What's Up, Doc? What's Up, Doc? (1972 film) What's Up, Doc? is a 1972 screwball comedy film released by Warner Bros., directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, and Madeline Kahn... |
Peter Bogdanovich | |
| 1969 | Medium Cool Medium Cool Medium Cool is an American film written and directed by Haskell Wexler and starring Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill and Harold Blankenship. It takes place in Chicago in the summer of 1968... |
Haskell Wexler Haskell Wexler Haskell Wexler, A.S.C. is an American cinematographer, film producer, and director. Wexler was judged to be one of film history's ten most influential cinematographers in a survey of the members of the International Cinematographers Guild.-Early life and education:Wexler was born to a Jewish... |
Paul Golding was apparently the principal cutter. |
External links
- Cutting For Impact: A Conversation With Verna Fields From: American Film InstituteAmerican Film InstituteThe American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...