Related Posts
Image Credit: College of Lake County
Women’s History Month is a great time to recognize some of the first women to enter the world of film production in early Hollywood. Some such women are American costume designer Edith Head, film editor Margaret Booth, and sound editor Kay Rose.
Edith Head (10/28/1897-10/24/1981), designed costumes for some of the first major Hollywood films. Head’s academic roots were at the University of California where she earned her B.A., Stanford University for her M.A., and an art school in LA. She was eventually hired by lead designer of Paramount Studios as a sketcher and worked her way to costume designer through apprenticeships. In 1938 she became chief designer at Paramount in charge of the costume department, becoming the first woman to head a design department at a major studio.
She became renowned for her range of designs and her ability to “placate” dramatic actors and directors.During her career, Head was nominated for 34 Academy Awards and won 8 of them for her work in The Heiress (1949), Samson and Delilah (1949), All About Eve (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954), The Facts of Life (1960), and The Sting (1973).
Margaret Booth (1/16/1898-10/28/2002) first began working as an editor when she was hired to work as a “patcher” editing silent films by D.W.Griffith in 1915. She eventually began work for Louis B. Mayer when he was an independent film producer. When Mayer merged with others, Booth became a director’s assistant at the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1924). In 1935, she was nominated for an Academy award for Mutiny on the Bounty. A few other films she has worked on are Wise Girls (1929), A Yank at Oxford (1938), The Way We Were (1973), The Sunshine Boys (1975), The Goodbye Girl (1977), The Cheap Detective (1978), and Seems Like Old Times (1980). In 1978 Booth was awarded an Honorary Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for film editing. She is the longest-lived person ever to have been given the award. In 1983, she was also awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award for her work opening the door for other women to enter careers in film editing.
Kay Rose (2/12/1922-12-11-2002) was one of the first women to work as a sound effects editor in Hollywood, Spending 54 years as a sound editor. Rose studied film at Hunter College in NY where she then became a civilian film apprentice for the Army Signal Corp in Astoria NY in WWII creating training films. In 1944, she moved to Hollywood and after having trouble finding work as a sound editor she decided to take a bus to Universal Studios and asked security if they would hire her as an assistant. She was able to secure a job and then eventually worked her way up to be in demand by directors like Sydney Pollack, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, Gene Kelly, Martin Scorcese, Alan Pakula, Blake Edwards, Robert Redford, and more.
Rose was also the first woman to win an Academy Award for sound editing for work on The River. In 1993, she won the Lifetime achievement award in 1993 from Motion Picture Sound Editors and in March 2002 she was awarded the Career Achievement Award from Cinema Audio Society.
