Hugh Wynn (1897-1936) was a respected MGM editor whose career was cut short by his tragically early and sudden death.
Wynn’s most prestigious assignment was The Big Parade (1925), after which he worked regularly with King Vidor, including on Hallelujah.
William Sylvester Gray (1896-1946) was an editor at MGM whose career-high was an Oscar nomination for The Great Ziegfeld.
Gray’s other musicals were The Hollywood Revue of 1929, In Gay Madrid and Everybody Sing.
Samuel S Zimbalist (1901-58) is the only producer to posthumously receive the Oscar for Best Picture, when it was awarded to Ben Hur (1959). This made him, at that time, the producer of the second and third highest-grossing pictures in history. The film placed third was Zimbalist’s Quo Vadis (1951), while first place was, of course, held by Gone With the Wind (1939).
This was a long way from Zimbalist’s beginnings in the industry, as an office boy at Metro Studios. He took up editing, becoming a full-fledged editor in 1925 with MGM’s first version of The Wizard of Oz.
In 1929, Zimbalist had his first brush with the Academy Awards when he edited The Broadway Melody.
Francis Starbuck Sullivan (1896-1972) worked in silent cinema as both cinematographer and editor, but restricted himself to the latter after 1928. Before retiring in 1962, he worked at various times with Fritz Lang, Josef Von Sternberg, Frank Borzage, George Cukor (Oscar nominated for The Philadelphia Story in 1940), George Stevens and Joseph H Lewis.
Sullivan’s MGM musical assignments were So This is College, It’s a Great Life, Going Hollywood and Babes in Arms.
Some sources also assert he contributed as a writer to Ziegfeld Follies, but this may have been the New Yorker humourist of the same name.
