26 Facts About Verna Fields

Verna Fields was an American film editor, film and television sound editor, educator, and entertainment industry executive.

Verna Fields was the sound editor for several television shows in the 1950s.

Verna Fields came into prominence as a film editor and industry executive during the 'New Hollywood' era.

Verna Fields received an Academy Award and an American Cinema Editors Award for best editing for the film.

Verna Fields was thus among the first women to enter upper-level management in the entertainment industry.

Verna Fields was the daughter of Selma and Samuel Hellman, who was then working as a journalist for the St Louis Post-Dispatch and the Saturday Evening Post.

Verna Fields then held several positions at 20th Century Fox, including being the assistant sound editor on Fritz Lang's film The Woman in the Window.

In 1946, she married the film editor Sam Verna Fields and stopped working.

In 1954, Sam Verna Fields died of a heart attack at the age of 38.

Verna Fields 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".

Verna Fields worked on the experimental documentary The Savage Eye ; 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 Verna Fields won the Motion Picture Sound Editors' Golden Reel Award for the film El Cid.

Verna Fields made documentaries funded by the United States government through the Office of Economic Opportunity, the United States Information Agency, and the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Verna Fields then operated on the fringes of the film business, for a time making documentaries for the Office of Economic Opportunity.

Verna 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.

Verna Fields subsequently edited Bogdanovich's final golden period film, Paper Moon, as well as his less successful film Daisy Miller.

In 1967, Verna Fields had hired George Lucas to help edit Journey to the Pacific, which was a documentary film written and directed by Gary Goldsmith for the USIA.

Verna Fields had hired Marcia Griffin for the job, and introduced Griffin and George Lucas; the couple subsequently married.

Verna Fields edited Steven Spielberg's first major film, The Sugarland Express.

Verna Fields became widely celebrated for her work as the film editor on Spielberg's next film, Jaws, for which she won both the Academy Award for Film Editing and the American Cinema Editors Eddie Award in 1976.

The innovation, which Verna Fields herself named the "wipe by cut", can be used when a character is filmed from a distance using a telephoto lens.

Shortly after the completion of Jaws in 1975, Verna Fields was hired by Universal as an executive consultant.

Verna Fields had plainly earned the confidence of the producers and of the studio executives at Universal.

Verna Fields was thus among the first women to hold high executive positions with the major studios.

Verna Fields had come "up from the cutting room floor" and out of the customary, near-anonymity of film editors.

Verna Fields held her position as a vice president at Universal until her death in 1982.