Landing a job on the second season of Peabody- and Emmy-winning civil rights documentary series Eyes on the Prize was a turning point in the career of Lillian E. Benson, the first woman of color to be inducted into American Cinema Editors, which is honoring her with its career achievement award. “It was my first PBS hourlong documentary,” she says, reflecting on the project and the people who mentored and supported her during her career. “Producer Jackie Shearer believed I could do it, and she wanted to hire me. Other people felt — as sometimes happens in this industry — if you’ve never done it, you can’t do it. She had to lobby hard for me, and I got the job, and it transformed me.
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“I’m a beneficiary of the civil rights movement,” Benson adds. “My family is from the South, and so I had firsthand knowledge through their experience of all the Jim Crow laws and all the evil that existed in those times. [Working on Eyes on the Prize] was an opportunity to explore the history further, but also to pay homage to people who had really struggled and fought so that I could have something better — so I could sit in a chair as an editor and do something that most Black women did not do at the time.”
Benson edited episodes (directed by Shearer and Paul Stekler) titled “Promised Land,” about the last year in the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (earning her an Emmy nomination), and “The Keys to the Kingdom,” which explores legal remedies to segregation. “There were three segments in ‘The Keys to the Kingdom.’ The first one was about Boston busing in 1974,” Benson says. “Because Jackie was the daughter of an activist in Boston, she decided she wanted to tell the story of Boston busing from the perspective of the mothers, both Black and white. That was one of the main reasons she wanted a female editor, and she felt that she hit the jackpot when she got an African American female editor who also had been bused. I was bringing my personal experience to it, as well as the artistic sensibilities that develop over time — the more you cut, the more you find your voice.”
Benson has served on ACE’s board of directors for more than two decades and currently holds the office of secretary. She’s a co-chair of the ACE Diversity in Editing Mentorship Committee, and additionally co-chairs the Motion Picture Editors Guild (Local 700) diversity program.
Benson also has taught film editing at USC, Columbia College Hollywood and the School of Visual Arts. Her documentary credits include Beyond the Steps: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, All Our Sons: Fallen Heroes of 9/11, Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise and John Lewis: Get in the Way. She’s in her sixth season editing Dick Wolf’s Chicago Med. Of cutting fiction, she says it requires finding “the truth of the spirit and the emotions of the people.”
Reflecting on her career, Benson says, “The most important thing is you have to be true to the self that you know at the time, because we learn about ourselves as we grow. But you can’t be somebody else and you can’t be something for somebody else, because you lose yourself. And if you lose yourself, you can’t do the work, and money is not everything. Some people chase the dollar and chase fame. That’s not me.”
This story first appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
