Her résumé includes Freaks and Geeks, The Fresh Prince, The Office, Parks and Rec, Veep, Master of None, Ladybird, Eighth Grade, Booksmart*, Superbad, Spy, Bridesmaids, and Barbie.

If you’d like to learn more about her work, I highly recommend listening to her episode on the Armchair Expert** podcast.

Can you imagine if these productions had been cast differently?! Would they have been as successful? Would The Office have worked without Steve Carell? Or with a different Jim, Dwight, or Pam? What about Parks and Rec without Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman?

True, a film director or TV creator may have the vision for these roles and characters, but the casting director has to find the perfect cast to bring that vision to life.

That’s why I believe Allison Jones deserves collaborative creative credit for these productions — and especially considering her work with Judd Apatow.

Starting with Freaks and Geeks in the late 1990s (starring then-unknown actors Jason Segel, Seth Rogen, Linda Cardellini, Busy Philips, etc.), she cast Apatow’s defining run of comedies, including The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This Is 40, and Trainwreck.

So, the next time anyone mentions Apatow, mention Jones too. Directors get all the public credit, but the invisible women behind the scenes deserve creative credit, too.

*Fun Fact #1: My cousin’s band (Ra Ra Riot) has a song on the Booksmart soundtrack! “Can You Tell“ from their 2008 debut, The Rhumb Line. (I screamed out loud in the theater when I heard it. 🤣)

**Fun Fact #2: I was a guest on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Anonymous Podcast. I’m the third guest, Molly, from the “Betrayal” episode. (It’s about the most romantic night of my life on the back of a motorcycle with a soccer goalie in Italy.) The day after it aired, Dax published a related photo on his own Instagram page… and I died. ☠️

Alexis here: This is another perfect example of how female editors have helped co-create and co-author (or, as Patton Oswalt argues, “direct”) some of Hollywood’s best films and still remain largely invisible behind the scenes.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Marcia Lucas, Oscar-Winning Editor Behind ‘Star Wars,’ Dies at 80

Marcia Lucas earned the Oscar for one of Hollywood’s most beloved films, and her husband, George Lucas’s biggest hit: Star Wars. The 1977 Hollywood Reporter review of Star Wars made a special mention of the film’s editing, calling it “perfectly paced.”

In his biography of the director, Skywalking: The Life And Films Of George Lucas, writer Dale Pollock called the editor her husband’s “secret weapon.”

George credited the editor for the film’s final battle sequence, telling Rolling Stone in 1977, “My wife, Marcia, can normally cut a whole reel — all ten minutes of the film — in one week. I think it took her eight weeks to cut that battle. It was extremely complex and we had 40,000 feet of dialogue footage of pilots saying this and that. And she had to cull through all that, and put in all the fighting as well. Nobody really has ever tried to interweave an actual plot story into a dogfight.”

It was also Marcia Lucas who suggested to George that Darth Vader kill Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Alec Guinness. “The more I thought about Ben getting killed the more I liked the idea,” the filmmaker told Rolling Stone. “It made the threat of Vader greater and that tied in with The Force and the fact that he could use the dark side.”

Alexis here: Can you imagine if Star Wars had not been “perfectly paced?” Or if the 40,000 feet of dialogue weren’t meticulously woven into that final battle scene to build drama? Or if Darth Vader didn’t kill Obi-Wan Kenobi??!!! That’s what raised the emotional stakes! That surprising moment shocks the audience and solidifies Vader’s cruelty. It’s a crucial moment in the entire Star Wars franchise!

Would Star Wars have been as profound and impactful a film without these critical contributions? Without these unique creative decisions and artistic adjustments to the story?

I highly doubt it, and I bet you’d agree.

Editing isn’t just choosing which takes to use from any given film shoot. It’s the strategic and artistic craft of shaping the story into an emotionally satisfying narrative arc over time.

So, while she may not have the name recognition that her ex-husband does, we recognize her here.

Thank you, Marcia. We see you, and we’ll remember you. ❤️

The clip below highlights why the earliest films had no edits, how juxtaposing two clips begins to shape a story, and how the timing of a cut can elicit fear or laughter in an audience.

If you love film and want to learn more about editing, I highly recommend the entire documentary. I believe it’s available to stream on Starz and Vimeo.

*Note: the Jaws clip I posted last week is part of this longer segment.

Dissertation Overview:

Filmmaking is a collaborative art, but the director is still widely treated as the primary creative force behind a film’s success. Even within academia, film editing in Hollywood has received surprisingly little attention for several interconnected reasons.

First, classical Hollywood editing (an aesthetic developed in the early 1920s) is designed to go unnoticed. If it works well, the audience doesn’t notice the cut between shots, which means the editor’s contribution is largely invisible by design. (When was the last time you noticed a cut? Be honest.)

Second, it is difficult to determine exactly where or what an editor contributed during post-production on a major Hollywood film. To do this would require someone to sit in the room where it happens and eavesdrop on the director’s and the editor’s discussions. (This would be amazing, btw.) Plus, editing decisions are not always clearly documented or easily verified.*

And third, film editing has long been shaped by gendered assumptions about labor.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the majority of workers in Hollywood editing departments were women. This early association contributed to editing being perceived as a feminized practice within a commercial film industry that has otherwise been hierarchical and male-dominated. Cutting and splicing film was considered a non-technical, feminine task like sewing and, as a result, was devalued. In addition, editors worked in a private room (the private sphere), rather than in the open (the public sphere) like directors and cinematographers. It made/makes their artistic choices harder to spot (and credit) than the people who work on set.

This raises a practical problem: if the editor’s work is both invisible and historically marginalized, how can we identify their individual contributions to a film?

To explore this, I examined archival records from the films Bonnie and Clyde (1968), The Conversation (1974), Annie Hall (1977), and Raging Bull (1980)—films known for both their creative ambition and the close collaboration between directors and editors. (I specifically chose two male editors and two female editors as my case studies: Dede Allen, Walter Murch, Ralph Rosenblum, and Thelma Schoonmaker.**)

I compared the archival planning documents, such as scripts and storyboards, with the final versions of these films.*** These materials, a roadmap for the editors, outline how scenes were intended to be shot and assembled. When the finished films diverge from those plans, it often points to decisions made during the editing process.

I argue that these differences are not incidental. They are evidence of the editor’s artistic contributions to the films as a “co-author”* and of the creative collaboration between the director and editor during post-production.

More broadly, this approach shows how archival research can help us better understand where and how films are reshaped—and what role editing plays in that process.

*Fun Fact #1: One of the editors I studied claimed that he “authored” a particular moment in the editing room. However, based on the archival documents I found, it was written into the production script, and I refuted his claim.

**Fun Fact #2: The collaboration between Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese is one of the longest and most consistent director–editor partnerships in film history. She’s been instrumental to his success and her contributions to Raging Bull helped solidify her central role in his filmmaking process.

***Not So Fun Fact #3: To make these detailed comparisons, I studied certain scenes FRAME BY FRAME. (To put that into perspective, these directors were shooting 24 frames per second.) It was… a lot. 🤪

Here is the clip where he credits her with making the shark look realistic. Here’s a direct quote:

• “The shark would only look real in 36 frames, not 38 frames, and that two-frame difference was the difference between something really scary and something that looked like a great white floating turd.” ☠️ (OMG.) ☠️

It was HER decision to cut two frames earlier that made the movie realistic and scary. Think about that!

He was shooting 24 frames per second. Think of how much film that is in a 120-minute movie!

TWO FRAMES CAN MAKE OR BREAK A MOVIE!

So yes, while directors have a vision for a film and the editors are tasked with bringing that vision to light, the editors deserve credit when their effort fundamentally impacts the film’s narrative and success.*

#NotAllEditors — We can chat about this is a different post. But - quick note: different types of projects (indie, commercial, Hollywood, big budget, documentary, etc.) call for different types of editors and not all editors have power and agency over where to cut. Their decisions can, and often are, overruled by the directors, producers, studio, etc.

However, when the director trusts and respects their editor —→ magic like this can happen! This is why editors should be considered collaborative authors alongside the directors and what Patton Oswalt was referring to in his joke that started this whole thing. 😊

*Not So Fun Fact: Has anyone else heard this? Directors often get credit for the success of a movie and editors often get blamed for its failure?

It didn’t take me long to figure out that editors don’t get the credit they deserve. My boss (the director/producer) would often shoot 10 hours of footage for a 10 or 15-minute video. At the end of every shoot, he’d pass me the videotapes as if he were Michelangelo handing me David himself. In reality, however, it was just a slab of marble.

The marble isn’t the statue, and the recorded footage isn’t the story! A good editor has to cut and chip away to find the best possible story within the enormous amount of footage.

That’s why I studied editing in graduate school at UT-Austin. I was gobsmacked by how much attention directors received and how little credit editors (especially female editors) got. GOBSMACKED I SAY! So… I made it my mission to shine a light on their work and bring them out of the shadows.

So that’s why I’m here. What brought YOU here?

*Fun fact: my friend Candace Tomarken helped me get that first production job. She’s an Executive Producer on the documentary series Pee Wee As Himself, which recently won an Emmy, a Producer’s Guild, and a Peabody for Best Documentary. (Has anyone else seen it?) It’s funny, complicated, and I HIGHLY recommend it.

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The original 246-page dissertation itself is academic and VERY dry. The new, public version will be shorter, more dynamic, and easier to read.

PLUS - the updated version will include more detailed information about the historical contributions of female editors to the Hollywood film canon. I have all this research, but it didn’t make it into the 2010 publication. Historically, the editing room was one of the few places where women were allowed to work in Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s because “cutting” film was considered a delicate task, like sewing. AND, (this is key) the classical Hollywood aesthetic privileged the “invisible” cut (audiences aren’t supposed to see where the film was cut), so editors’ labor often went unnoticed and unrecognized.

I’m thrilled so many of you want to learn about the craft of film editing and shine a light on the technical artistry of female editors.

I’m glad you’re here. ❤️

*Here’s the original Instagram post, which now has almost 4M views.