While this episode was recorded over a year ago, it is just as relevant now (if not moreso). I am honored to welcome the brilliant and wonderful Professor Shelley Stamp to Archivist’s Alley. A former professor of mine at UC Santa Cruz, she has been a major inspiration and she remains one of my mentors. Please join us as we discuss the intricacies of silent film restoration, the history of women in film, media access and much more!
As usual, bio is below the podcast link. Links to various subjects from our conversation are embedded in the bio so be sure to click on those and check’em out!!
I wish you all could meet her and hang out with her! I hope that you get a good sense of how cool she is from this episode because she really is one of the most fun-to-hang-out-with women I have ever met.
If you had told me that we would end up being friends when I first saw her talk about her work on The Other Side of the Wind, I would’ve doubted you. She’s genuinely amazing, inspirational and….well, we could have gone on for a few hours more with other stories…
So I hope you enjoy this conversation and I hope that you read all the articles that I’m including here because they are AWESOME. Much like the magnificent Mo!
Bio:
Mo Henry is a film negative cutter acclaimed by many as one of the greatest in her field. Her works include franchise film series such as Spiderman, Batman, The Matrix, and Harry Potter, cult classics such as Mulholland Drive, The Big Lebowski, El Mariachi (uncredited) and Apocalypse Now Redux. Mo worked exclusively for many years on Clint Eastwood’s films and on all of Frances Ford Coppola’s restoration projects. More recently, she cut several of Christopher Nolan’s films such as The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Inception. According to The Internet Movie Database, she has been a negative cutter on over 300 films, although Mo claims IMDB has many inaccuracies, missing many films that she has cut and including her on films on which she was not involved, and her ultimate total far exceeds 300. In addition, she cut a fair number of adult films under the alias Ruby Diamond. Despite her low profile she has amassed a fan base over the years, and many fans are knownto stay during the final credits to see if Mo’s name appears.
She is a fourth generation Henry negative cutter, starting at Universal at 19. Her first cut feature film (uncredited) was Jaws, a film she was told (by her boss/father) was likely to be a flop, so he allowed her to train on it as a novice. She took a break from negative cutting to be a real estate agent in Beverly Hills in the eighties (with, as she describes it, “Big Hair and Big Shoulder pads”), and as a production coordinator on television commercials and rock videos.
She is left-handed, which initially made it harder for her to learn to cut negative, however, she says her obsessive-compulsive disorder works to her advantage, as it allows her to remember numbers and because she checks everything repeatedly, she has rarely made a mistake.
Mo is a Los Angeles native and a first generation American on her father’s side of the family, the Henrys having immigrated from Ireland.
