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Who The Hell Is Mo Henry?

05/21/07

  06:47:05 pm, by Nimble   , 291 words  
Categories: Distractions

Who The Hell Is Mo Henry?

We just watched Spider-Man 3 a day after watching Shrek 3, and we're credit-watchers (though I must say that we have been very disappointed in the lack of after-credit easter eggs these days), and one name keeps cropping up as recognizable: the negative cutter, Mo Henry.

I've no idea who Mo Henry is, but the name is familiar for, it turns out, good reason. IMDb lists over 320 movies for which Mo Henry was the negative cutter, everything from Apocalypse Now to Twister to Sin City to Serenity to Shrek 3.

The enigma and ubiquity of Mo Henry has started a very small fan page and a Yahoo! fan club

It takes a little bit of digging to find out that Mo Henry is the daughter of the late Mike Henry, MGM's chief negative cutter, from a blurb in Los Angeles Magazine:

LAST NOVEMBER, WHEN MO Henry, perhaps the most respected negative cutter in Hollywood, pried open a canister holding How the West Was Won, she discovered a family connection. "There was some old paperwork inside it," she says, "and I saw my dad's handwriting." Mo couldn't remember her late father, Mike Henry; who was MGM's chief negative cutter, having worked on the 1962 blockbuster. But a call to her mother confirmed it. "Here I was," says Henry; "basically getting ready to dismantle the work that my dad did 40 years ago."

Warner Bros., which now owns How the West Was Won, had retained Henry to restore it. The movie was the last spectacular filmed in Cinerama, the grandiose, unwieldy film format...

It's hard to remember repeats in the names of many of the credited jobs, so in that sense, Mo is highly unusual.

I think I'll make a point of Mo-watching at the end of movies :)

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