The Bearded Trio

Today she would have turned 97, Verna Fields, one of the key figures responsible for (the huge success of) Jaws, as we know it, but this powerful lady has done so much more in and with  her life… Verna Fields was born on this day, March 21, in 1918 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA as Verna Hellman, daughter of Selma and Samuel Hellman. Father Samuel worked as a journalist for the St. Louis Dispatch and the Saturday Evening Post , until he took  his family and  moved to Hollywood, where he became a screenwriter. Verna graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.A. in journalism, and started working at 20 th Century Fox in several positions, among them the assistant sound editor on Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window in 1944. In 1946 she married film editor Sam Fields and stopped working in the entertainment industry, until her husband’s death in 1954 (he died of a heart attack at the very young age of 38). Sound Editing ...