Lora Hays

Lora Hays (Spindell) (1910–2009) was an American actress, film editor, and producer whose career spanned theater, documentary filmmaking, and television. The daughter of Arthur Garfield Hays, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, she built a professional life that moved across multiple disciplines over several decades.

Hays began her career in the theater, making her stage debut in Little Accident in 1929. Her Broadway work included appearances in two productions in 1931: the play I Love an Actress and the play An American Tragedy. She also worked as an actress in films made in Paris, appearing in L'Affaire est dans le sac (1932), directed by Jacques Prévert.

Her transition into film production came in 1933, when she sponsored Datelines, a series in which actors re-enacted human interest stories drawn from news headlines as humorous commentary on current events. She later served as assistant producer on Used Cars (1939), part of the consumer education film series Getting Your Money's Worth.

Hays entered film editing by working as an assistant to director Joris Ivens on Power and the Land (1940), where she trained alongside editor Helena van Dongen. Following Ivens' departure to his next project, she edited two short films under his long-distance supervision in 1941: Bip Goes to Town and Worst of Farm Disasters.

Her editorial work on television earned her a shared Emmy nomination in 1962 for Outstanding Achievement in Film Editing for the CBS program 20th Century. She co-edited King: A Filmed Record...Montgomery to Memphis (1970) with African-American film editor John Carter, a documentary that received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature and was later entered into the National Film Registry in 1999. Hays also contributed to Harlan County, USA (1976), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In her later years, she taught film editing at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.