Verna Fields (née Hellman; March 21, 1918 – November 30, 1982) 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 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 (1961), 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 was unique among film editors at the time. Jaws in particular was enormously and unexpectedly profitable, and was part of the wave of films that ushered in the era of the "summer blockbuster".Shone, Tom (2004). Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Simon and Schuster), pp. 36-38. .Buckland, Warren (2006). Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster (Continuum, New York). . 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 Pictures. 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, Missouri. 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."St. Louis Writers' Guild History", webpage of the St. Louis Writers' Guild, archived by WebCite from the original on February 26, 2008.
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 film The Woman in the Window (1944). In 1946, she married the film editor Sam Fields and stopped working. The Fieldses 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.Peary, Gerald (1980). , The Real Paper, October 23, 1980. Archived by WebCite from the on February 26, 2008.
Career in sound editing After her husband died, Fields began a career as a television sound editor working on such shows as Death Valley Days 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 (1956). 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 (1961), 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,Irving Lerner had recommended her to Bogdanovich; see "Film Editors' Forum", Editors Guild Magazine Vol. 27, No. 3 (May–June 2006). Online version retrieved January 6, 2008. 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."Warren, Bill (undated). "Review of Targets DVD", webpage of "Audio/Video Revolution", archived by WebCite from the original February 26, 2008. The DVD was released on August 12, 2003.
Film editing and teaching Fields' career as a film editor commenced when the director Irving Lerner recruited her to be the editor of the film Studs Lonigan (1960); 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, but her best known work was on the Disney film The Legend of the Boy and the Eagle (1967). 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.Donn Cambern is credited as the editor for The Last Picture Show. According to Bogdanovich's commentary on the film's DVD release, this credit was nominal; Bogdanovich had edited the film himself, as he had done for Targets. 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).
George Lucas and American Graffiti In 1967, Fields had hired George Lucas to help edit Journey to the Pacific (1968), which was a documentary film written and directed by Gary Goldsmith for the USIA. She had also hired Marcia Griffin for the job, and introduced Griffin and George Lucas; the couple subsequently married. In 1972, Lucas was directing American Graffiti. While Lucas had intended that his wife would edit the film, Universal 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, with songs that had been popular around 1962, when the film's story was set.Pollock, Dale (1999). Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas: Updated Edition (DaCapo Press), pp. 116–117. . This book is an updated version of Pollock, Dale (1983). Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas (Harmony Books). . Michael Sragow has characterized the effect as "using rock 'n roll as a Greek chorus with a beat".Lucas, George (1998). George Lucas refers to the sound track as acting as a Greek chorus in his interview in Laurent Bouzereau, The Making of American Graffiti (supplement to the 1998 DVD release of American Graffiti).
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, Marcia Lucas, Murch, and Fields all won Academy Awards for later work.
Steven Spielberg and Jaws Fields edited Steven Spielberg'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".Maltin, Leonard (ed.) (2003). Leonard Maltin's 2004 Movie and Video Guide (Penguin), p. 715. 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. Bordwell illustrates the "wipe-by" cut using the scene in Jaws of Brody, who is fearful of a second shark attack, anxiously surveying the waters crowded with swimmers. Bordwell attributes the name "wipe by cut" to Verna Fields. Lecture transcript posted at the website of the Berlinale Talent Campus.