- She was reportedly the first "cutter" to be called a "film editor.".
- Sister of actor Elmer Booth.
- Was Editor-in-Chief at MGM.
- Began as a film joiner for D.W. Griffith, 1915 to 1920. Had a spell at First National (1924-25). Worked at MGM from 1926, and, as supervising editor, from 1939 to 1968. Latterly worked for producer Ray Stark, at Rastar, until her retirement in 1986. She was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1977 for "62 years of exceptionally distinguished service to the motion picture industry as film editor".
- When Margaret Booth died at the age of 104 in 2002, her lifetime had spanned three centuries.
- Buried in the Booth family plot at Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, CA, Sequoia section, Division A, Lot 164, Grave 7.
- If the film was a comedy, she stepped up the tempo. If it was a musical, she cut on the downbeats. "Otherwise, you get a jarring cut and it throws things off," she said.
- Until Booth came along, film editors, many of them women, had little status in the industry.
- From the beginning, she said, she tried to find the rhythm of a movie, to craft a film "like poetry.".
- In 1983, she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.
- In 1990, Booth was also honored with the American Cinema Editors Career Achievement Award.
- "When I cut silent films, I used to count to get the rhythm," she told writer Kevin Brownlow in "The Parade's Gone By," a 1968 book about silent movies. "If I was cutting a march of soldiers, or anything with a beat to it, and I wanted to change the angle, I would count one-two-three-four-five-six. I made a beat for myself.".
- Her list of official credits, represents only a fraction of her film work.
- The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1978 presented her an Academy Honorary Award for her work in film editing.
- Booth edited such diverse films as Wise Girls (1929), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award), A Yank at Oxford (1938), The Way We Were (1973), The Sunshine Boys (1975), The Goodbye Girl (1977), The Cheap Detective (1978), Seems Like Old Times (1980), and Annie (1982). She was supervising editor and associate producer on several films for producer Ray Stark, culminating with executive producer credit on The Slugger's Wife (1985) when she was 87.
- Booth was at MGM from 1937 to 1968 before working for Ray Stark at Rastar from the mid-1970s until her retirement in 1986.
- In its 1982 article about Booth's long tenure as MGM's supervising film editor, the Village Voice describes her as "the final authority of every picture the studio made for 30 years.".
- Booth, at age 104, died in 2002 from complications after suffering a stroke. She is interred at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood California.
- She edited several films starring Greta Garbo, including Camille (1936).
- She was the second longest-lived person (after Luise Rainer) to have been given an Oscar.
- D.W. Griffith gave her a job just out of high school after her brother was killed in an automobile accident and she needed to help out her family. She made $10 a week.
- In its obituary for Booth, the British newspaper The Guardian states, "All the filmmakers had to go through her in order to have a final editing of sound and vision approved," while describing her approach: 'She was a pioneer of the classic editing style, the so-called "invisible cutting", the aim of which was to make the transition from one image to another as seamless as possible, so the audience was almost unaware of the flow of shots within a sequence. Narrative was dominant, maintaining a continuity of time and space, and matching cuts to action.'.
- She worked for Louis B. Mayer when he was an independent film producer. When Mayer merged with others to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924, she worked as a director's assistant with that company.
- She started her Hollywood career as a "patcher", editing films by D. W. Griffith, around 1915.
- Within a few years, she was working for Louis B. Mayer at the old Mission Road studios, where she learned the editing ropes from director John M. Stahl. She credits Stahl, for whom she edited "The Gay Deceiver" (1926) and "In Old Kentucky" (1927), with telling her "the value of a scene ... when [drops or doesn't drop, and when it sustains." "He would tell me why he went to a close-up," Booth said of the director in a 1976 interview for Films in Focus. "He said, 'Always play it in the long shot unless you want to punctuate something.' He told me the different techniques of cutting.".
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