Tag: The Big House

SIXEL, MARGARET

Margaret Sixel, ACE

No birth date available.

Margaret Sixel, ACE is best known as an editor on feature films (Happy Feet; Babe: Pig in the City). She won the Oscar and BAFTA in 2015 for Mad Max: Fury Road, which also won thirteen other Best Editing awards.  Her work extends across numerous genres including fiction & documentary features, live-action short films and animated comedies.

“You know, I had a lot of terrific guys in the cutting room and a few of them would say, ‘Maggie, it’s great that you’re doing it because, you know, we would have stopped ages ago with the explosions, and that would have been cool, and we would have been happy.’ But, you know, it wasn’t enough for me. I really had to feel that it was an emotional content to a lot of the stunts and try to keep the characters in there, so, you know, maybe I did bring that quality to the film.”
— “You Bite Off a Little Bit: ‘Mad Max’ Editor on How to Shape a Film” interview by Ari Shapiro. The full text can be found in the Appendix.  

SEWELL, BLANCHE

Blanche Sewell

1898 – 1949

Blanche Sewell had hoped to work as an actress in Hollywood, but became a negative cutter and then an editor under the mentorship of Viola Lawrence. She started working at MGM in the early 1920s and remained there until her death in 1949. She has sixty-three credits. Sewell edited numerous notable films for MGM including Goulding’s Grand Hotel, Mamoulian’s Queen Christina, and The Wizard of Oz.

“[Producer] Mervyn LeRoy’s choice of Blanche Sewell to edit The Wizard of Oz was not by random selection. Skilled as she was, Sewell was also Walt Disney’s sister-in-law by marriage. (Blanche’s brother, Glenn Sewell, was married to Hazel Bounds, and Hazel’s sister was Disney’s wife, Lillian.) According to John Stanley Donaldson,* Disney surreptitiously consulted Sewell after hours from MGM while Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was edited. Sewell possessed, in Donaldson’s language, an infallible grasp of the emotion picture—an intuitive ability for cinematic pacing to strike the proper tempo and temperament. It was her insightful whittling that coalesced the best of Snow White’s artistic triumphs and shaped them into an instantly acclaimed motion picture masterpiece. LeRoy was hopeful Sewell would work such wizardry a second time.”
—“The Road to Oz: The Evolution, Creation and Legacy of a Motion Picture Masterpiece” by Jay Scarfone and William Stillman

* Donaldson was a protégé of Herb Ryman, one of Disney’s lead artists.