First a writer,
As a child I read fiction voraciously, including the dirty books I found on my Uncle Bruno’s bookshelf and I wrote journals and stories and sketched and collaged, listened to Billie Holliday alot and played the piano badly. My first major in college was journalism for which I hed no talent. As a writer, other than in my journals, I was not brave.
Then falling in love with the movies,
While I was in college I spent a lot of time watching French New Wave movies at an old theatre on the upper west side, and at sometime reailzed that I wanted to work in the movies. Not having any idea what jobs even existed in the movie business, I took a course my first year after college, circa 1980, at a feminiest collective on West 52nd Street called the Women’s Interart Center.1 My teachers were four female film editors who were already famous and who taught us fillmaking and most importantly made me realize what the different jobs were – Muffie Meyers2, Jill Gdomilow3Susan Fanshel4, and Ellen Hovde.5 I was too young and arrogant to be properly grateful for the influence of these women, and still somewhat afraid, but I knew I wanted to be an editor.
Then the studio years,
Jill Godmilow, , Susan Fanshell, and Ellen Hovde. ↩︎
Women’s Interart Center 549 West 52nd Street New York City 1970-2016 included a gallery and a theatre, held exhibitions, theatrical and musical events, poetry readings, film screenings, panel discussions, lectures, and video performances. Co-founder Jacqueline Skiles served as co-director. Dorothy Gillespie was an artist-in-residence and, later, a member of the board of directors. ↩︎
Muffie Meyers was an assistant editor on Woodstock (1970), editor on Lords of Flatbush (1974) a co-director (with Albert and David Maysles) and editor of Grey Gardens (1975), editor (with Lynzee Klingman) of Gilda Live (1980). In 1978, Muffie and Ellen Hovde formed Middlemarch Films Inc and went on to produce films for PBS, winning a Peabody Award for the miniseries Liberty The American REvolution. ↩︎
Jill Godmillow got her first Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature in 1974 for Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman about female conductor Antonia Brico (now in the film registry of the Library of Congress). She was won best feature film at Sundance in 1987 for Waiting for the Moon, a biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. toklas played by actresses Linda Hunt and Linda Basset. In 2022, she published what she called “a manifesto” called Kill the documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars and is a professor emiritus at Notre Dame University. ↩︎
Susan Fanshel’s career was only just starting when she was my teacher, having edited a short about LLouise Nevelson called Nevelson in Process in 1977. She would go on to edit many television movies and mini-series, ↩︎