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William W. Hornbeck was a film editor from the late '20s through the late '50s. He began his career as a lab assistant at Keystone when he was 15; there he worked his way up to supervising editor of Mack Sennett's comedies. He went to England in 1934 where he was in charge of editing Alexander Korda productions such as The Four Feathers (1939) and The Thief of Baghdad (1940). When WW II erupted, he returned to the States and joined the U.S. Army Pictorial Service of the signal Corps as a lieutenant colonel; among his many duties was the supervision of the editing of the Why We Fight series which were made by such illustrious Hollywood filmmakers as Capra and Litvak. Following the war, he began editing prestigious Hollywood films. For his work on George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951), he received an Academy Award. In 1960, he became an executive at Universal; six years later he was appointed vice president.