Film Editing and Teaching
Fields' career as a film editor commenced in 1960, when the director Irving Lerner 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).
Read more about this topic: Verna Fields
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