Lillian Benson, ACE, is one of those rare breeds of editors who is able to seamlessly weave through documentaries, movies, procedurals, specials and shorts with equal aplomb. Last year marked her 30 years as a member of American Cinema Editors, for which she is the first woman of color and second African-American editor to be bestowed the honorary distinction.

She has served on its Board of Directors for over two decades and helped the society expand and diversify its reach. One would be hard-pressed to find an editor more respected and beloved among her colleagues. Her origin story was set on the East Coast where her affinity for creative expression first bloomed.

“I was a working-class kid. Second in my family to go to college. My sister was first. My father was an elevator operator [who] worked in a hotel and my mother was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 10. Then, she got a part-time job as a school aide,” relates Benson, who got her first taste of filmmaking in college. “They didn’t have film courses at this school so I took photography classes instead my junior and senior year. We had an assignment called ‘First Hour of the Morning.’ You had to photograph yourself seven consecutive days, whatever you did the first thing in the morning; and you had to develop the negatives each night, look at them and then make a decision to go forward with whatever you wanted to do next. So, I did this one series with the timer when I was getting dressed. Out of that, I chose two sections. My photography teacher saw them said, ‘Are you in film?’ and I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, you should be. You have the best sense of sequence I have ever seen.’ That was the seed, although I didn’t know what to do with it. I was a fine arts major with an education minor, so I thought I would teach art in public
school. I did that for about three years.”

During her first year teaching, Benson met a woman named Pat Powell, a documentarian, who would be the gateway she didn’t know she needed. “She told me if I ever decided to leave teaching, I should call her. So, when I had the epiphany standing in front of my classroom at the high school, I realized I was never going to be a great teacher … so I might as well try this film thing.

How I got that in my head I don’t know, but I’d always wanted to be a cinematographer.” That record scratch you just heard is correct. Benson had her sights on becoming a cinematographer when she left education. She’d purchased a 16mm Bolex camera while in college. However, that vision quickly became muddled and she tried editing.

“I started working on a 16mm Steenbeck on a film with [director] Claudia Weill. Then, [I moved on to] a 35mm Steenbeck (Cutting Loose), then 16mm and 35mm upright Moviolas, and 16mm Moviola flatbeds, which were new when I worked at Staton Film Service. Later on, I learned the 35mm/16mm Kem while assisting John Carter [ACE]. All of his projects were on film.” It would be working as an assistant editor on an educational anthology series where Benson felt like she had found her true métier.

“Vegetable Soup was the job that grounded me,” Benson saysof when she met Joe Staton, “and that man was my mentor for therest of my life. Joe let me cut scenes or short pieces even though I only had two years of experience. That’s the kind of guy he was.

He got me into the union in 1975 right away, and, at the time, I had no idea how important that was.” Benson found a home from 1977 to 1983 on The Big Blue Marble, a magazine-style documentary series that focused on children from around the world and their daily routines. She even got to moonlight as a director on two segments, which served as an interesting break from her editing duties. She became a full editor on this series.

After that, she began delving into some more fictional fare assistant editing PBS’ American Playhouse, the miniseries Hemingway and movies like Zombie Island Massacre for director-editor John Carter, ACE, the first African-American member of ACE. She learned the fundamentals of fiction editing with Carter.

The years 1988-1990 would be a major turning point in Benson’s career. With 15 years of experience under her belt, she was ready to move to higher-profile documentaries. Benson was one of the editors of the eight-hour documentary series Eyes on the Prize II, the follow-up to the original six-hour series Eyes on the Prize I.

The searing documentary series centered around the American Civil Rights Movement beginning in the ‘50s and ending in the ‘80s with actual accounts from the likes of Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte and Andrew Young, among others. The series received numerous Emmys and other accolades including the Peabody Award. Benson earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Editing – Informational/News for her episode of Eyes II about the last year of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., directed by Jackie Shearer. That same yearshe was the editor of an episode of the documentary series  The Infinite Voyage.

Benson’s work on Eyes on the Prize II, for which she was Emmy-nominated, led to her ACE membership. The attention the documentary received shifted the trajectory of Benson’s career and she also started giving back through teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

In 1993, Benson moved to L.A. “Within that first year I took a big financial hit because nobody really knew me [out here]. I knew two directors, one of whom hired me. Then I reconnected with my former editor Joe Staton, who had moved out here years before. He had left editing, gone into camera, and was a cinematographer now.”

To add to the confusion of being in a new city, editing was undergoing a digital revolution. “When I got out [to L.A.], somebody told me about a producer who was doing a music video and they were editing it on the Avid. So I took an Avid tutorial both days that weekend. I didn’t get the gig, but I did learn the basics of how to use the Avid.”

Regardless of the technology or the genre, the goal is ultimately the same – to tell the best story. Benson shares, “The good artists bring their sensibility, their passion and maybe even their sense of justice to the chair. I have a few friends, one of whom is a post-super, who can tell that an episode is mine before the credits come up. How do they know that? I have no idea. They’re never wrong. We can’t hide. Overall, I think the hardest thing for me is the politics of the room. It has always been the hardest thing for me. I forget what my face looks like, sometimes.”

The rest of the ‘90s saw a proliferation of vibrant documentary work like A Job at Ford’s, directed by John Else, Prospecting for Planets, Crimes in Time, Motown 40: The Music Is Forever, Out at Work and A Century of Living. “The kinds of documentaries I did were about telling the truth. Many were historical or issue oriented. Often, they were Afro-centric or feminist, but sometimes they were about cultures that were not mine, like Conscience andthe Constitution which is about the Japanese internment  camps and the people who refused to be drafted from the camps during the Second World War,” details Benson.

In the aughts, Benson returned to the fiction realm to flex her creative muscles. She edited four episodes of the Showtime series Soul Food and the movie All About You. The latter co-starred Debbie Allen who would select Benson to edit her PBS movie The Old Settler, which Allen directed. The movie also featured Allen headlining with her sister Phylicia Rashad. “Debbie Allen hired me for fiction when other people weren’t willing to do so,” says Benson. “She hired me for a movie of the week when I had never done one. She knew I could do it. She’d seen other things I [had done]. She understood that the skills were transferable. She wasn’t standing on ceremony.”

This trend of editing documentaries and fiction continued throughout the decade with notable pieces like Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, All Chicago Med editing rooms.E. Our Sons: Fallen Heroes of 9/11 and Beyond the Steps: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She also left her creative thumbprints all over PBS institutions like Independent Lens, American Masters, Great Performances and American Experience.

The last decade saw Benson’s career reach new creative, personal and professional heights. In 2016, she edited the documentary Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise about the American poet’s resiliency in life and her impact on America. That same year she took on representation from Grant, Savic, Kopaloff & Associates. With help from her agency, she secured a spot on the TV Series Greenleaf for OWN. She also became a member of the Academyof Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Shortly thereafter, she worked on what may go down as her favorite single experience on any project. John Lewis: Get in the Way centers on the life of the American civil rights activist and U.S. Representative. Benson shares, “[This documentary] is the thing I love the most of anything I’ve ever done. I feel I was born to cut it. It was a gift from God, that movie, and the director Kathleen Dowdey is wonderful. We released it a couple of years before he died. It was the first film that came out about him. I love Lewis because he has been a warrior for his entire life. He never wavered. He did what he could. He forgave people; people I couldn’t forgive. He always had the bigger picture in mind. That was one of the last few documentaries I did.”

“[Director Kathleen Dowdey] worked on it off and on for many years and had all these different editors. She said, ‘I’m going to do a Kickstarter campaign to raise your salary.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And that’s what she did. She raised my salary on Kickstarter. She asked me very kindly whether my rate was still the same. And I said, ‘For John Lewis, it’s still the same.’ I worked on Final Cut Pro because that’s what she had at her home. I didn’t get a chance to look at all the footage, but if I asked her for something – if I felt the sequence wasn’t working – she would go to her computer, look at the footage, give me a low-res QuickTime thatshe thought would work. The  assistant would hi-res it and send it to me. Periodically, I would go down to Santa Monica and work on her system so we could actually work together.”

She continues, “It was great. It was an honor and I got to meet him. I saw him at the Oscars, my first Oscars. He was there, and I was over the moon. Of course, he didn’t remember me. That’s okay. I reminded him and I got a picture,” she laughs. Those highs that come with a career as storied as Lillian Benson’s also come with some lows that often stymie and sometimes make you want to throw in the towel altogether. Benson confides, “I tell this story to young people because there will be a time when you want to quit. There’s always some dark point where you think, ‘Is this stuff worth it?’ You don’t know what good is coming. You have to have faith in yourself so you can make it. You’ve got to have friends and family to lean on to help you up when you struggle because we all struggle.

I remember I was on an EditFest panel with Carol Littleton, ACE, and Andrew Seklir, ACE. The subject of the panel was longevity. Carol said, ‘Well, you know, I’ve been fired.’ And I actually turned to her and I said, ‘You’ve been fired?!’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ AndAndy said, ‘I’ve been fired.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve been fired.’

So, all of the editors on the panel had been fired at one point. You think these rock stars never get fired. Who would fire Carol Littleton, you know? An amazing person and artist. Some fool, I guess. Or maybe they asked her to do something she wasn’t willing to do, you know?”

As liberal as Hollywood may seem today, Benson points out that issues such as representation and sexism continue to exist, and she has had to deal with her share of sexist and racist comments and passive-aggressive treatment while on the job. In most cases, she left or was terminated. “Most of the time, when I’ve been fired it’s been over a racial issue,” admits Benson. Usually, when I wouldn’t put something in a documentary. [One time] I said,

‘No, I’m not putting that in. It’s racist.” I didn’t say it like that, but I did say I would get some other footage that I thought would serve the purpose and be better. I knew the director was going to fire me if I didn’t put in the footage. But as a Black person, I could not bring myself to do it. He ended up buying my contract out because he didn’t give me any notice. I got another job. A better job. And I wouldn’t have done anything differently. There are some things I just won’t do.”

It’s this, too, that Benson tries to impart to her editing team and even her students. In recent years, she’s been teaching at the University of Southern California and has also taught at Columbia College Hollywood. “There are people who are going to bully you in the cutting room or on the set,” confesses Benson.

“They’re looking for somebody they think they can get away with it with. It’s sad that we, that we have to even think about that. ‘Oh, is this director going to be a bully? Or this supervisor?’ Sometimes people fool you. I’ve been fooled. Ooh, I’ve been bullied. Now I try to be calmer. If they’re raising the tension, I try to fall back to keep that pressure in the room the same. Especially with assistants in the room. But sometimes I’ll say things a more sensible person wouldn’t.”

Fortunately, what comes with the territory has not discouraged all of her protégés. Benson explains, “As a freelancer, I havehad many different assistants; some of them  have gone on to become editors. Not as many as you hope, but only one is ACE: Sandra Christie. Other people, you just encourage them until they can get their success.”

“A lot of people help you along the way. I wouldn’t have goneto college if I didn’t live at home. I had a part-time job but I didn’t have to work. I did a little bit of housework. Food was always on the table. I didn’t have to think about that. I just sat down and ate. [My parents] gave me as much peace and quiet as they could. I couldn’t have gotten through school without their support.”

Nowadays, Benson has found a home among the ‘Wolf Pack’ at Wolf Entertainment, Dick Wolf’s production company, editing Chicago Med. Procedurals offer their own set of challenges that she’s been enthusiastic about taking on. “I love words, so Chicago Med is a good show for me,” says Benson. “This is my sixth season. It’s the longest I’ve been anywhere in 40 years. It’s all dialogue, not a lot of action. The only action sequences we have are the intakes where they bring the patient who’s in trauma. Sometimes they have hostage situations, car crashes, or stuff like that. It’s very different from the longer documentary projects. Reallydifferent, [but you use] the  same skills. You’re the same person.

You have the same heart. You have the same backstory basically. You bring everything you’ve experienced with you to the seat. In documentaries, you’re constantly working with words. People telling their stories. Plus, it’s great working in the same [‘Wolf Den’] with my fellow editors, David Siegel, ACE, and Nick Berrisford. “They’re just lovely.”

It’s the people along the way and the work one gets to share that really make all the difference in the end. Lillian Benson keeps adding to her long list of professional firsts. She just cut her first pilot – At That Age – for Universal Television, another score for her agent, Ivana Savic. “Every experience adds to what you bring to the next project,” reflects Benson. “I remember when I first came to L.A. in the ‘90s, I related that thought to a woman who was interviewing me for a job. I saw on her face that she related to what I was saying. Every experience is totally different. We each bring the personal stuff to the table. I think they helped me get the job.”

I’m sure it was that same warm sensibility that caught the attention of Joe Staton, Pat Powell, Jackie Shearer, Jon Else, Debbie Allen, Kathleen Dowdey and many others.