Margaret Booth: Cutting Like Poetry

Posted by moirafinnie on March 4, 2009

Amid our recent hectic news cycles, the quieter news that the month of March is Women’s History Month probably seems pretty unimportant. I know it passed me by until a friend recently remarked that it seemed “quaint and irrelevant” to him. I must admit that I could see his point. Then I started to mull over the idea of the sometimes little known contributions of my foremothers to this world. Maybe some of the women who helped to make new pathways for all of their daughters, sisters and friends of the “female persuasion” deserve a bit of a nod.

So, during March I’ll be highlighting a few of the women in film history in front of and behind the camera who made a difference. The first of them is someone whose work you’re almost certain to have seen, though remarkably few people know her name or her story. She was Margaret Booth (1898-2002) and her influence as a pioneer film editor–for good and ill–on movies extends from her first formal credit of Orphans of the Storm (1921) to The Way We Were (1973) and beyond. In 1977, when she was in her ’70s, Film Comment magazine asked her fellow film editors (many of whom were half a century younger) to name the top editors in film history. She was Number Three and still playing an active role in the film world then. To help me place this pivotal figure’s career in some insider perspective, my friend Lynn Zook, who is a present day film editor and archivist has been of great help to me. Her comments will be laced throughout this brief look at Margaret Booth‘s career.

The year 1915 was before women had the vote, could own property in most states without their father or husband’s consent, and was a time when women’s choices were often the home, the sweatshop or the street. This is when Margaret Booth (seen in her prime, above left) began to work on silent pictures. It wasn’t a career choice for her, it was a matter of her family’s survival.

She never consciously chose her film career as she grew up in Los Angeles. The ill-fated Elmer Booth (foreground) with Harry Carey (background) in The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) Her 33 year old brother, Elmer Booth, was a promising young actor working for D.W. Griffith‘s Biograph Pictures. Elmer had appeared in several of D.W. Griffith‘s early movies, including The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), one of the first gangster movies, (he can be seen skulking at right in the foreground of one of the most famous early close ups in movies. That’s a young Harry Carey in the background). The actor was accidentally killed, along with fellow character actor George A. Seiggmann, while riding back from a bar in a car driven by director Tod Browning one night. The fog and the inebriated driver that night led to a collision with a freight train. To hold the family together, the compassionate Griffith gave Margaret a job as a “cutter or patcher” (also sometimes called a “film joiner” in those days), at the age of 17.
Getting Started as a Cutter

Miss Booth later recalled, “[i]n the old days, we had to cut negatives by eye. We matched the print without any edge numbers. We had to match the action. Sometimes, there’d be a tiny pinpoint on the negative, and then you knew you were right. But it was very tedious work. Lillian Gish, always ready for one of her "endless close-ups" Close-ups of Lillian Gish would go on for miles, and they’d be very similar, so we all had to help one another.” The work, which all had to be done by hand, since the moviola wasn’t introduced until 1924, required some instincts to be developed, and, part of that was practice, and a sense of musical timing. Booth explained that “If I was cutting a march of soldiers, or anything with a beat to it, and I wanted to change the angle, I would count one-two-three-four-five-six. I made a beat for myself…I used to count to get the rhythm. I made a beat for myself. That’s how I did it when I was cutting the film in the hand. I always cut to rhythm that way, while I was actually handling it in my hand. When Moviolas came in, you could count that way too. You watched the rhythm through the glass…When you worked in the silent days you learned about rhythm, and you learned to cut film like poetry. I think that’s one of the great accomplishments.”

___________________
MF: Why do you think that women were allowed to “infiltrate” this niche in the movie business?

LZ: Given the era that movies were invented, women were not common in the workforce outside of secretarial jobs, sewing factories and the like. There was no easy way for women to break into film making in terms of being a camera man or a director. Occasionally, a woman was deemed worthy enough to direct but the majority was held by men. Perhaps the thought the jobs too rigorous for women.

“However, editing was something different. Done indoors, usually seated at a bench. It required thought and an ability to concentrate on the task at hand. In the nickelodeon days, the job consisted of splicing pieces of film together. The myth is that one reason were accepted as editors as it was seen as skill job similar to sewing. Women were good at sewing, they could be good as editors!

“As film making grew more sophisticated, so did the job. Many women in the editing room were replaced by men as the job became creative. But women held there own and though many of them were ultimately muscled out there were a few who succeeded and made it possible, once sound arrived, for women like Margaret Booth and Blanche Sewell to get their foot in the doors.Today, luckily, it is more about being creative than it is about what sex you are.”

Coming Into Her Own
Margaret Booth believed that she personally started to come into her own as a cutter when she went to work for Louis B. Mayer at his Mission Road studios in Eastlake Park, then just outside of Los Angeles line and home of the Selig Zoo, where he set up shop as an independent producer and started to accumulate talent around him. Working at the slightly seedy offices next to the menagerie, Booth said that she “once went into the vault to get some film and there was a monkey jumping around and at night a trainer used to take one of those big apes out for a walk around our lot. It scared me to death.” Director John Stahl, Margaret Booth's mentor, in the 1920s

Director John Stahl, Margaret Booth's mentor, in the 1920s

Not much else seems to have daunted the young woman, who began to work closely with Mayer‘s leading director at the time, John M. Stahl (seen at right), who, she said, “taught me the dramatic values of cutting, he taught me about tempo – in fact he taught me how to edit.” At this stage, Mr. Mayer, whom she described as “an older man” who would occasionally pass through her office, asking quizzically if she “were working for Mr. Stahl“, would pause and inquire “How’s everything?” When Loew’s, Inc. merged with Metro in 1924, leading to the formation of MGM, Booth became an editor that same year after her mentor Stahl reviewed her impressive editing of his outtakes. John Stahl, best remembered today for Imitation of Life (1933) and Leave Her to Heaven (1943), saw that her attention to detail had uncovered a thread of dramatic quality from the cast off film she’d used to hone her editing skills in her spare time. “After a while, he started to look at these efforts of mine, and sometimes he’d take a whole sequence that I had cut and put it in the picture,” she recalled. “Then, gradually, I got around to making his first cut––and that’s how I got to be an editor.” While editing Stahl’s The Gay Deceiver (1926) and In Old Kentucky (1927), the youthful cutter refined her understanding of her task, learning from the director “the value of a scene … when [it] drops or doesn’t drop, and when it sustains.” As she later reflected on her what she learned in this period, “[Stahl] would tell me why he went to a close-up. He said, ‘Always play it in the long shot unless you want to punctuate something.’

Margaret Booth, who had an opportunity to remain John Stahl‘s personal editor when he left Metro, decided to stay, explaining that she felt that people could get tired of one another by the end of the movie and that MGM felt increasingly like home. Another possible reason for her decision to stay may have been the growing confidence that both Louis B. Mayer and young Irving Thalberg had in her deft cutting and her developing understanding of film narrative . “I started [at MGM] so young, I knew everybody there and never wanted to work any other place. Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg embarking on their honeymoon while being seen off by L. B. Mayer in 1928 I went on working at MGM, mostly with [Irving] Thalberg, the greatest man who was ever in pictures.” According to this pioneer, it was Thalberg, who was the first to use the term “film editor”, singling out Miss Booth, and working closely with her on numerous films. Her admiration for him was rooted in his work ethic (according to her, he worked many 19 hour days), his ability to face facts, even when it came to firing someone like Erich Von Stroheim or starting over with Ben-Hur (1925). He also believed in the value of previews, even having Booth edit films while on the way to such an event. On one such nerve-racking occasion, Booth “was still putting the titles into Clarence Brown‘s epic Trail of ’98 (1928) on the train taking the company to a preview. “I was handing them to an assistant so he could hand-patch them. The train was swaying and shaking, and I could hardly read them. I was very worried in case I handed them to him upside down. When we got to the theatre, I could barely bring myself to watch the picture in case a title came on the wrong way round . . .”

MF: Lynn, in light of the exacting work required, do women who are attracted to editing careers have certain qualities?
LZ: “I think so. You have a eye for attention to detail, for movement, for continuity. You also have to be willing to come at a problem edit from different angles and not just one certain way. In the days of actual film editing, it required a bit more multi-tasking as well. You had to remember which shots were where in the bin, what had numbered it, how many frames did you take out of the film and how many had to come out of the soundtrack to keep it in sync.”
Adapting to Sound
When sound came in, the film was still being edited without any numbers to match the pieces of celluloid together in sequence, and the added strain of trying to match sound carefully was described by Margaret Booth as “very nerve-wracking. I was frightened of it because it was very hard to get it in sync. We were still cutting like we were cutting in the silent days.” She would eventually master the demands of sound film editing as well. Near the end of her career, Booth named the following as the favorite movies she personally edited–all of them in the period of the first decade after the advent of sound:

The delightful Jean Harlow-Lee Tracy knockabout pre-code comedy about the chaotic life of a movie star, Bombshell (1933), directed by Victor Fleming, which, as you can see below in the opening sequence, never pauses to catch its breath while chronicling the saturation of a movie star’s presence at all levels of modern life. As can be seen here, Booth had a knack for stepping up the tempo of the scenes when a comic effect is the aim, and she also knew when to let the audience catch its breath, as felt in the latter part of the opening:

The other films named by Booth as her favorites, were the still dramatically powerful story of men against the sea (and each other) in the Clark Gable-Charles Laughton teaming in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) (for which the editor received her only Oscar nomination) and the Greta Garbo-Robert Taylor tribute to sublime, doomed romance directed by George Cukor, Camille (1936). "Normal girl" Greta Garbo in The Mysterious Lady (1928) with Conrad Nagel The editor and the elusive Garbo worked well together before this career height for both of them. Booth, who shared the star’s aversion publicity, had enough of a rapport with the actress to be allowed to be present for as long as needed on her closed sets. Booth described Garbo as “a very nice person”, who was uninterested in her dailies. Booth asserted that she was “very normal” and said that if you saw her “off-screen, you wouldn’t have thought she was a star, although she was a very pretty girl.”

Even before choosing these films as her signature pieces, Booth‘s skill as an editor was visible in such movies as Greta Garbo‘s silent spy story, The Mysterious Lady (1928), directed by Fred Niblo. As Kevin Brownlow, one of the few film historians to successfully interview Miss Booth, once pointed out, one stunning, rapidly paced sequence highlighting the intercutting between Garbo‘s murder of her lover (Gustav von Seyfferitz) and the dance of a Russian troupe outside their room is a highlight. Interestingly, the scene was not typical of the editor’s mature work, which was characterized by a more deliberate pace. It can be seen here:

It may be a testament to Booth‘s diplomatic skills and her canniness that during the years of tension between Thalberg and Mayer as their power seesawed, she managed to remain a confidante and respected co-worker for both men. With the death of Irving Thalberg in 1937, her position in the posh environs of MGM became that of supervising editor at MGM from 1939 through 1968. She saw, according to most of her contemporaries, every piece of every major film from MGM during that period. Significantly, this post came in the decade when the ranks of women editors in Hollywood, formerly a largely female corner of the burgeoning industry, came to be dominated by Booth the power player, the talented Barbara Maclean in a similar niche at 20th Century Fox with Darryl Zanuck and Anne Bauchens at Paramount with Cecil B. DeMille, who were three of the only 8 women film editors working in the 1930s, according to The Motion Picture Editors Guild.

MF: Have succeeding generations of editors been largely men? Was it simply sexism that led to males dominating editing, or do you see more of a seesaw effect over time?

LZ: “I think it goes in waves, in the early days you can see in shorts like ‘The MGM Studio Tour, 1925′ when they tour the cutting rooms, there are women hard at work. A lone female editor among the men in the sound era In archival interviews from Kevin Brownlow’s “Hollywood” series and Richard Schickel’s “Men Who Made the Movies” there are lots of talk of women in the editing rooms. But then comes the transition from silents to talkies and women are replaced by men because editing is now more thought to be more technical because sound is involved. As sound technology became more understood, the technical “magic” around it became less and more women were able to find work again in the cutting rooms. Then during World War II there were likely more women working in editing because of the war effort. Post-war it begins to ebb again because of the idea that women should be home raising families. But with the break-up of the studio system and the rising spotlight on feminism, women aren’t so easily shunted aside.”

Ascendency at MGM

Louis B. Mayer recognized Booth‘s skill and trustworthiness, and his need for someone he could rely on after the death of Thalberg. At that time Margaret Booth became a part of the retinue of women who surrounded Mayer in his fiefdom at his offices of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, along with his Executive Assistant Ida Koverman, (who was usually called an “executive secretary” in those days), screenwriter Frances Marion and script supervisor Kate Corbaley. Even Mayer‘s doctor was a woman. The mogul, often characterized as a “micromanager” favored Booth because a close alliance with her was one way to control the content of his studio’s films was to have direct access to the editing of them.With her own projection room and the power to stand next to any MGM director on the set and approve or disapprove of any scene she saw filmed, all editors were required to bring their work to her for evaluation. Margaret Booth in the 1930s Often presenting films as she saw fit to producers and directors, she made enemies, even though most of her co-workers, in time, came to respect and value her ability to cut–even when it hurt. Her ability and power blended with her decades long loyalty to not just a man such as Thalberg or Mayer or Schary or even MGM, but to her own perfectionism and professionalism. Margaret was never married–except to her job. She was not shy about asserting her opinion when she believed she was right. Surely, that tough exterior must have helped her to survive life at the top of the Hollywood studio system.One example of this flinty exterior was exhibited for director George Roy Hill. Booth, who was quite a small woman with a fiercely ladylike manner that id not prevent her from voicing her opinion was editing a movie with the much younger director. She became upset with a choice that Hill had made. “Mr. Hill, are you telling me you want that on a 60-foot screen?” she demanded.”I guess I don’t, do I?” he replied. “No, you don’t”, was her emphatic answer. Generally speaking, Miss Booth held the belief that director should stay out of her bailiwick. She regarded them mostly “as bad film editors.”

MF: Lynn, would you characterize Margaret Booth‘s editing style as influential in helping to create the “classical” look and feel of Hollywood movies of the studio era?

LZ: “I don’t know if it was her style as much as her influence as a supervising film editor. But it was working with Irving Thalberg that probably had the most influence on her and paved her way to becoming a supervising editor at MGM. In that role, she left the editing room. She watched the dailies of all the movies under production at the studio. She was careful to make sure that the movies were portraying the values that MGM was known for as well as how the picture was going to be cut together. Her opinion mattered a great deal as she could get a director taken off a film if she felt he wasn’t doing his job properly. After over thirty years at MGM, she realized in the late 1960s that the studio was in decline and she could see the writing on the wall. She met film makers such as Ray Stark and Herb Ross and began working with him. She went back into the editing room and worked on pictures including The Way We Were.“

Margaret Booth’s Power

One of those who may have felt her wrath at MGM at one time was John Huston, whose The Red Badge of Courage (1951) was, according to some, eviscerated by her, costing the director a chance to make a poetic masterpiece from Stephen Crane’s book by the consolidation of two battle scenes and the truncating of Royal Dano‘s performance as The Tattered Man, (which observers on the set believed was Oscar worthy). Mayer, at the end of his tenure at the studio, reportedly had told Huston, “It has no story and won’t make a cent.” Mayer and his successor, Dore Schary, who, as vice president in charge of production in 1950 had approved the project. Still, in one of Margaret Booth‘s few moments in the public spotlight, she came across as quite respected, feared, brusque and abrasive in Lillian Ross’ compelling book Picture on the studio at that time. The power she held to make cuts once Huston had moved on to film The African Queen (1951) has been a sore point for those who cherish the film. The Red Badge of Courage (1951) Director Huston did not appear to bear a grudge. Speaking at the American Film Institute years later, John HustonThe Red Badge of Courage they [MGM and Booth] cut the film and they didn’t do really a bad job as they were supposed to have done. I quite understood at the time why they took the steps they did. I was present at a preview when damn near a third of the audience got up and walked out of the theater…And they cut out one scene that was probably the best in the picture,in a way of anticlimax” which was the scene with a dying Royal Dano and Audie Murphy. Huston said that “it wouldn’t have made any difference so far as the audience was concerned. The picture didn’t enjoy any greater success because that scene was cut. They still walked out in the middle of the picture.”

This being Hollywood, Booth and Huston eventually worked together again, (mildly contentiously since they had both mellowed by this time) on Fat City (1972) and Annie(1982). The conflict over the editing of Stephen Crane’s masterpiece on screen gave way, with changing times, to later controversies over the editing of Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), (fortunately for economic reasons, cuts were not made), Roman Polanski’s said that “[w]ith The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and even altered the politically minded story of Arthur Laurents original screenplay in the Sydney Pollack directed love story, The Way We Were (1973). Despite the fact that Driving Miss Daisy was one of the few films Booth cited as being in the spirit of the great films, she did seem to adapt, somewhat to the changing times. Speaking in the 1970s she said that “[t]here has been no advance in technique since the silent days––except for one thing: They’re doing away with fades and dissolves,” she continued. “I like this much better than the old technique of lap dissolves, which slowed down the pace. There was a time when we made eight-to-ten-foot dissolves. We taught the audience for many years to recognize a time lapse through a lap dissolve. Now they’re educating them to direct cuts––a new technique brought about by a new generation of directors who can’t afford dissolves or fades. And I think it’s very good.” Booth still felt that despite these pacing changes, “[r]hythm counts so much; the pauses count so much. It’s the same as when people speak or dance––you can tell right away when it’s wrong. Everything has to be rhythmic.”

MF: Lynn, that run-in with Huston and Peckinpah and others makes me wonder. How do you think that Margaret Booth‘s management style and supervising editorial skills changed with the times, especially as director’s became more assertive over editing of their films? I’ve read that Miss Booth resisted Peckinpah’s efforts to depict action quickly and to include footage of the ambiance that she considered extraneous. While she worked until 1986, do you think that the ascension of newer, often television trained directors, was something that Booth’s “tradition” accepted?

LZ: “I think it was something that those who wanted to continue to work in the business adapted to. The late 1960s brought a lot of changes to the movies both in terms of the movies made and how they were made. After a generation of classy movies made under the care of major studios, the studio system was in its death throes, the Production Code was in shambles and Americans wanted movies that related to their lives.”

“Editors adapt to the changing times or they retire. From the sounds of things, Booth had her opinions about Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch but in the end Peckinpah was the one who was right because the ambiance of the film is one of the things that makes that film a masterpiece. The final violent montage heralded, among other things, a new way of achieving old goals.”

“Editors may not like change but they have to adapt if they want to keep working. When non-linear editing began to replace actual film editing, it was a major change in the way movies were edited.
No longer done on moviolas or flatbeds, it all became computer driven. Randolph Scott & Joel McCrea in Ride the High Country (1962) Old school editors who had spent years crafting their work by touching film and measuring shots in their hands now had to learn computer skills and give up the way films had been edited for almost sixty years. But they adapt, like Margaret Booth did in the waning days of MGM.”

Despite her 1935 nomination for editing Mutiny on the Bounty, Miss Booth waited until the 50th annual Academy Awards ceremony in 1978 to receive her only Oscar, an Honorary Academy Award for her contributions to the art of editing, when she was 80 years old. It was an overdue recognition from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Some, like producer Ray Stark, with whom Margaret Booth worked late in her career, described her as “a tough, unsentimental editor who read film like others would read a book.” Others complained because of her sometimes forcefully expressed opinions seemed to have an air of papal authority. Yet, Miss Booth was also regarded as consistent and fair, and when threatened, would protect those editors working under her. “They liked me because I was fast,” she once said. “And boy, was I tough.”

She had to be. In the last several decades, far more women have began to contribute their skills as editors in all phases of the film industry. Some of the best known are:

Dede Allen, who edited The Hustler, Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, Little Big Man and Wonder Boys. Anne Coates, who edited Tunes of Glory, Lawrence of Arabia, Becket, The Elephant Man and The Golden Compass.Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, and many more movies for Martin Scorsese. All belong on any list of all-time best editors along with Miss Booth.

Some resources related to this topic:

Margaret Booth Movies on TCM’s Upcoming Schedule

Women in Film : a non-profit organization dedicated to helping women achieve their highest potential within the global entertainment, communications and media industries and to preserving the legacy of women within those industries.

Lynn Zook‘s website, Classic Las Vegas and blog, dedicated to celebrating and preserving the history of Las Vegas. Thank you kindly, Lynn!

Sources:
Brownlow, Kevin, The Parade’s Gone By, University of California Press, 1976
Lewis, Kevin, The Moviola Mavens and the Moguls, Editor’s Guild Magazine, March-April, 2006.
Mahar, Karen Ward, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood, JHU Press, 2006
Rosenblum, Ralph and Karne, Robert, When the Shooting Stops, the Cutting Begins, Da Capo Press, 1986.
Ross, Lillian, Picture, Da Capo Press, 2002
Stevens, George, Jr., Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute, Knopf, 2006.

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7 Responses Margaret Booth: Cutting Like Poetry

Posted By suzidoll : March 5, 2009 11:23 am

Moirafinnie Morlock: This is my favorite piece that you have written so far. I had heard of Margaret Booth, and now I know why she is so important. Excellent research and information. I like your idea of spotlighting women in the film industry for March — especially in the current era, where they have been all but forced out by the boys’ club of studio execs who wouldn’t know good editing if it bit them in the behind. I will follow up on your suggestion and write my next post on a noteworthy woman of film history. You are so cool!

Posted By Sam : March 5, 2009 3:14 pm

Enjoyed read your article moirafinnie, I always respected women, who could show up the men in the movie business, after watching some silent movies, by Alice Guy-Blache, I gained more respect for women in other facets of movie making, but have not read to much of them, I will now research a little more, thanks to your well writtem blog on Margaret Booth. Keep on Margaret.

Sam

Posted By Sam : March 5, 2009 3:21 pm

Re: My last comment, last line, should read; keep on Moira, Not Margaret oops!!

Sam

Posted By medusamorlock : March 5, 2009 11:21 pm

I recall being thrilled and amazed, as a teen, when I fell in love with “Bonnie and Clyde” and saw that it was a female film editor who had helped craft that incredible film.

Thanks for this great article on a talented and hardworking pioneer!

Posted By Joe aka Mongo : March 8, 2009 10:13 am

Moira, your piece on the essential Margaret Booth is a gem. This woman should be remembered, thanks to you.

Posted By Andrew : March 10, 2009 10:24 am

I am sorry to say I never heard of this woman before reading this piece. It would be interesting to see a month’s worth of films on TCM featuring the work of great editors such as Booth, the other men and women mentioned who create the seamless experience of a film. Excellent spotlight, Moira.

Posted By Judy : March 16, 2009 3:43 pm

This is a truly fascinating article – an insight both into Margaret Booth and into the art of editing. Thank you!

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