Musser received a bi-centennial grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to make "An American Potter (1976)", on New Hampshire studio potter Gerry Williams. Although pottery is generally considered a traditional art–-and often a craft, Williams is shown to be not only a master of traditional techniques such as Chinese reds but an innovator who invented and developed the processes of “wet firing” and “photo resist” glazing. The documentary, an admiring portrait of his mentor, was awarded a Blue Ribbon in the Arts category from the American Film Festival, "Best in Category-Fine Arts" from the San Francisco Film Festival, as well as a CINE "Golden Eagle." Musser became interested in the origins of editing. From his research he soon realized that film editing was not "invented" but rather editing (the juxtaposition of one shot or scene to the next) and "post-production" were the domain of the exhibitor in the 1890s and were only centralized inside the production company in the early 1900s. Edwin S. Porter, an exhibitor who moved into production and became America's first "filmmaker," embodied this shift. Receiving the Society for Cinema Studies Student Award for Scholarly Writing for his essay "The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter," Musser soon garnered a New York State Council of the Arts grant to make the documentary "Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982)", which had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. Carrie Rickey of the "Village Voice" called it one of the year's best documentaries. It was subsequently shown at the London, Berlin, Sydney and Melbourne film festivals. Musser had less success getting grants for subsequent projects but continued to work as a film editor and researcher to make a living while pursuing research and writing. Musser published a trilogy of books on pre-1920 American cinema over an eight-month period in 1990-91, indexing them back to back. Previously Musser had published a variety of articles that challenged much of the revisionist historiography around “early cinema.” Such disagreements were generally relegated to the footnotes. The first to be published was "The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990)", the first of the trilogy to be published, garnered the Jay Leyda Prize from Anthology Film Archives (now suspended), the Theatre Library Association Award (now the Wall Award) from the Theatre Library Association, and the Katherine Kovacs Book Award in Cinema and Media Studies.