Her one major studio film, El Cid (1961), led to her only industry recognition in this phase of her career, which was the 1962 Golden Reel award for sound editing.

(1972), American Graffiti (1973), and Jaws (1975) brought Fields a level of recognition that was unique among film editors at the time.

Jaws in particular was enormously and unexpectedly profitable, and was part of the wave of films that ushered in the era of the "summer blockbuster".

She was the daughter of Selma (née Schwartz) and Samuel Hellman, who was then working as a journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Saturday Evening Post.

She then held several positions at 20th Century Fox, including being the assistant sound editor on Fritz Lang's film The Woman in the Window (1944).

[5][6] After her husband died, Fields began a career as a television sound editor working on such shows as Death Valley Days and the children's programs Sky King and Fury.

She installed a film editing lab in her home so that she could work at night while her children were young; she told them that she was the "Queen of Saturday morning".

She worked on the experimental documentary The Savage Eye (1959); the co-directors Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick and the other connections she made on this film were important to her subsequent career.

In 1962 Fields won the Motion Picture Sound Editors' Golden Reel Award for the film El Cid (directed by Anthony Mann).

Peter Bogdanovich's first, low-budget film Targets (1968) was one of her last sound-editing projects,[7] and represents her mature work.

The result is seamlessly realistic, from the scrape of the guns on the metal of the tanks, to the crack of the rifles, to the little gasps Bobby makes just before firing.

Douglas Gomery wrote of her time at USC that: "Her greatest impact came when she began to teach film editing to a generation of students at the University of Southern California.

"[9] Fields' students had included Matthew Robbins, Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz, John Milius and George Lucas.

[6] Fields left no written lectures from her USC years, but a transcript exists from a 1975 seminar that she gave at the American Film Institute.

In 1967, Fields had hired George Lucas to help edit Journey to the Pacific (1968), which was a documentary film written and directed by Gary Goldsmith for the USIA.

Over the first ten weeks of post-production, George and Marcia Lucas, along with Fields and Walter Murch (as sound editor), pieced together the original, 165-minute version of the film.

It took another six months of editing to create a shorter, 110-minute version of the film, but upon its release in 1973 American Graffiti was extremely successful both with critics and at the box office.

In its feeling for movement and music and the vitality of the night—and even in its vision in white—it is oddly closer to some early Fellini than to the recent American past of, say, The Last Picture Show or Summer of '42.

"[20] David Bordwell has used the second shark attack scene in Jaws as (literally) a textbook illustration of an editing innovation that occurred in the late 1960s.

What clinched it was that unbelievably brilliant sequence that begins with a high-angle shot of Roy Scheider dropping fish entrails in the water as shark bait.

Some insight into Universal's reasons for hiring her can be gleaned from the fact that during the filming of Jaws, in addition to her editing, Fields had been "omnipresent...at Spielberg's beck and call by means of a walkie-talkie.

Along with Brown, Zanuck, and Peter Benchley (the book's author), Fields helped promote Jaws on the "talk show circuit" in the eight months before its saturation release to 464 theaters on June 20, 1975.

Throughout her career, Fields had worked independently, but in 1976, and following the unexpected success of Jaws, she accepted a position as the Feature-Production Vice-President with Universal.

"[5] Of Fields' work at Universal, Joel Schumacher was quoted in 1982 as saying: "In the record business, you have Berry Gordy and Ahmet Ertegün.