Controlling the Cut

Despite being a founding member of her union, Barbara McLean worked sixty-hour weeks. She supervised her male colleagues, had more Academy Award nominations than anyone, and was known as “Hollywood’s Editor-in-Chief.” But McLean—who arguably had more control over her studio’s feature output than all of Twentieth Century-Fox’s directors—was not alone. During the studio system, Hollywood’s top female editors were formidable auteurs, and were unafraid of acknowledging, as Anne Bauchens did in 1941, “Women are better at editing motion pictures than men.” Regardless of their fame within the industry and the syndicated press in the 1930s and 1940s, studio-era Hollywood’s top female editors have become obscure footnotes in Hollywood history. As women and as editors, they are doubly “invisible” in the director-driven agendas of contemporary film criticism. But during the studio system, they were at the creative center of Hollywood filmmaking. This chapter puts them back where they belong.