Yahoo Finance 'My first day with Hollywood legend Margaret Booth was like no other'
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Emmy award winning director and producer Daniel Sackheim is best known for his work on a multitude of television series such as Game of Thrones, Better Call Saul, Ozark and X Files.
Los Angeles-based Sackheim is also one of 15 legendary photographers chosen to take part in a current exhibition ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ with Iconic Gallery, London.
Margaret Booth, one of Hollywood’s great film editors, unexpectedly guided me towards a future that I hadn't suspected or even had a motivation to pursue.
I simply wouldn’t have the career longevity if I hadn’t met someone like Margaret. She was revered and feared at the same time, even for an 83-year-old woman who stood around 5ft 4in tall in heels.
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I was studying electrical engineering in college and I could not have been more poorly suited to it. I enjoyed process and how things worked, but I flunked out by the end of the year and ended up taking a role that put me around editors.
In 1981, an introduction was made with Margaret. She had been at the helm of a golden age of movies at MGM Studios and had edited Mutiny on the Bounty, which got her an Oscar nomination.
She was also promoted to become an executive at MGM; this was the 1930s when there were no female executives. She broke a glass ceiling when people didn’t know what a glass ceiling was.
Unbeknown to me she was interviewing for an apprentice film editor. She took a liking to me, even though I had little film education. My first assignment was helping cut a retrospective of John Houston’s films and it was unlike most first days in jobs when you feel the consequences of what you do.
I sat in a screening room with her for a week and watched five Houston films every day so she could select clips to use. I couldn’t believe she was paying me to do this.
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She was a little hard of hearing and would crank the volume up and yell her notes to me. It was nerve racking and eventually up comes The Maltese Falcon and Asphalt Jungle. Both noir films, I immediately fell in love with them and didn't realise then the impact they would have on my life moving forwards.
Margaret was a seismic, eccentric character. She had hung out at Hearst Castle, knew everyone who had gone to those parties and would regale stories of the early debauched Hollywood.
As a film editor you’re a gun for hire and I did four movies with her, learning the editing process over the next four years.
Later on, in 2008, there was a Writers Guild of America strike. I was a busy working director and everything came to a screeching halt. I was looking for a creative outlet and went back to the ArtCenter College of Design in California and studied photography for four years.
It was only when I went on a trip to Tokyo that all these memories from my first day on the job with Margaret came flooding back.
I had caught sight of a local in a noodle bar, sneaked up behind him and felt all this tension that he could turn around and start yelling at me. But as I started taking the pictures, I realised they had this noirish aesthetic to it.
It was then that I set upon collating my first solo project, Unseen and Vacancy, for a noir homage to Los Angeles.
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My work explores a facet of life in a city known as the birthplace of film noir and my obsessive curiosity is rooted in a need to discover secrets that remain hidden just beneath even the most forbidding corners of the city.
'Don’t settle' was what I learned from working with Margaret all those years ago. She held her work to a very high bar and it was a great influence on me.
Editing is effectively a final re-write and you never completely feel done. And when you are done, you feel like it’s not yours anymore.
‘Bright Lights, Big City’ exhibition is on at Iconic Images in London until 25 May
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