Millie Moore

In her one-and-a-half-hour interview, Millie Moore (1928-2015) talks about her background in still photography and her introduction to documentary filmmaking, on a profile of England's Teddy Boy subculture in the 1950s. She describes her first work in television - working on the travelogue documentaries of Jack Douglas. She explains how her duties screening footage and evaluating it for both its content and technical quality led to her interest in working in the editorial department. She speaks about her difficulties in being accepted as a woman editor and in joining the editors union. Moore then discusses her first two jobs as a full editor on the feature films Johnny Got His Gun (on which she worked with Dalton Trumbo), and the Oscar-winning feature documentary The Man Who Skied Down Everest (on which she crafted the story by creating an antagonist in the mountain itself). She comments on many of her subsequent television projects including: Hey, I'm Alive! (discussing the challenges of the two-character piece), Cagney & Lacey (and how she came to edit the last episode of season three), The Rape of Richard Beck (detailing its subject matter), Geronimo (which marked her transition to editing on the Avid), and Collected Stories (working with Gil Cates). Throughout the interview, she comments on her editing technique in relation to her fidelity to the writer's intent, the importance of music, and cutting to highlight the believability in the actors' performances. Finally, she talks about receiving the 2008 A.C.E. Lifetime Achievement Award. Karen Herman conducted the interview in a joint venture with American Cinema Editors (ACE) on July 15, 2008 in Los Angeles, CA.