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SEE PAGE 61 formidable allies, including Thalberg. Margaret was on the front line when sound technology came in. She admitted to it being "a period you just suffered through." Frustrated by the process while working on MGM's first sound picture, "Broadway Melody" (1929), she threw up her hands shouting: "If it's not in sync I'll kill myself!" "I believe like writing, good cutting cannot be analyzed," Booth once said. "It is intangible, like all branches of show- manship or artistry. Instinctively you know whether or not a scene is coming out right. If it is not, there is no way to patch it up. There is nothing to do but start from the beginning." ANNE BAUCHENS (1882–1967) Anne Bauchens is credited with many firsts: She was the first woman editor to win an Oscar (for "Northwest Mounted Police" in 1940; she ended up winning three in total), the first person to start a secretarial department in Hollywood, and was appar- ently the inventor of the role of script girl. Like many women in early Hollywood, Bauchens started her career with a type- writer. She came to New York from St. Louis to try to find work as an actress. She ended up working as an assistant for William De- Mille, the New York playwright. But Anne's future would be most closely linked with William's brother, Cecil B. DeMille. When Cecil packed off to Hollywood, Anne (and William) followed him. So began a collaborative partnership between Anne and Cecil spanning 40 years and 42 films. De Mille insisted on Bauchens cutting all his films. Their relationship seemed to be extraor- dinarily close and aectionate, eventually joking about mutual hearing loss and other signs of aging. But there was no romantic element to the relationship. A biographer recounts a story in which, after a near-col- lision, their car ended up with two wheels over a precipice. Bauchens threw her arms around De Mille's neck and cried "Oh Cecil!" De Mille later said it was the only time in their relationship that he "roused her to passion." (She never married; DeMille was married to the same woman for more than 50 years.) It cannot have been easy being the editor for DeMille. For "The Ten Command- ments" (1956), he shot 100,000 feet of film, which Bauchens had to reduce to 12,000. That translated into 16-hour work days during post. But she earned the director's grati- tude, which he expressed in his own way. "There were times when, looking at certain completed scenes, I felt like running into the hills to hide," he said in an interview, referring to their work relationship. "But Annie says quietly, 'Go up to the ranch for a few days, I'll take care of this.' And she always does." ADRIENNE FAZAN (1906–1986) Fazan was the editor of the legendary musical "An American in Paris" (1951), but I suspect very little would be known about her had Donald Knox not written his 1972 book "The Magic Factory – How MGM Made 'An American In Paris'." That book offers some candid insight into MGM and what it meant to work for the formidable Margaret Booth. Fazan worked until the latter part of her career almost exclusively for MGM, with f ilmmakers such as Vincente Minelli, Arthur Freed and Gene Kelly. She was born in Germany to a French father and German mother, and had a varied early career. She got her break recutting talkies into silent films and then adding titles for movie theaters that had not yet installed sound equipment. She then worked on MGM's foreign-lan- guage films. At the time, the studio remade big pictures using foreign actors in four or five different languages. After this, she worked on shorts and documentaries for the studio and only broke into features during World War II, presumably when the studios lost many of their male editors to the armed forces. "I would normally be assigned to a picture a few days before they began to turn cameras. The head of the editorial department would mostly come in and say, "Here's a picture," and throw a script at me. That's how I first heard about 'An American In Paris'," she later said. Fazan was, according to one writer, known for her "noisy disagreements" about projects and showed a marked impatience with studio rules. Rather than argue about overtime, she would work late into the night without pay. She was also outspoken about the wages at MGM and the studio's pay structure. She was furious to discover that the top rate for editors was reserved for "relatives or favorite people" of studio boss Louis B. Mayer. "Mayer had THOUSANDS of relatives," she later said, disgustedly. "Good God!" The inequities remained even after she had won her two Oscars for "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) and "Gigi" (1958). Asked about Margaret Booth's involve- ment on "An American in Paris," Fazan replied: "None, thank God... Mr. Minnelli didn't want her on the picture... [T]here were many directors who didn't want her on their pictures, and there were some di- rectors who couldn't go to the toilet without her holding their hand." Fazan's brittle relationship with Booth ended in 1964, when by her own account, she got into "quite a deal with Miss Booth... a real war." According to Fazan, Booth re- neged on a promise to let her edit a feature, then added insult to injury by oering her work "helping out on a TV show." Fazan went "straight up through the roof" — and thus her 34 years at MGM came to an un- pleasant end. BARBARA MCLEAN (1903–1996) Barbara "Bobbie" McLean in many ways could be seen as Margaret Booth's opposite 28 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E For 'The Ten Commandments,' Bauchens had to cut 100,000 feet of film to 12,000.