Jones broke onto the festival circuit when she won first place at the American Film Institute National Student Festival, where Martin Scorsese was a judge, for her short documentary film A Weekend Home (1975). A year later Jones was struggling to make ends meet living in Boston due to a lack of funding for documentaries. After she read an article about Martin Scorsese beginning to produce another film, she reached out and called him asking "Do you remember this film? Would you advise me to move to New York?". Five days later he called her back and offered her a job as his assistant during the production of Taxi Driver. It was there that she met her husband cinematographer Michael Chapman. Martin Scorsese told Jones she was “too good to be an assistant” and got her in contact with film producer Roger Corman. She went on to work for Corman editing Joe Dante's first film, Hollywood Boulevard, when she was 22 years old. She edited American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince for Scorsese, Corvette Summer for MGM, and Second-Hand Hearts for Hal Ashby. Despite the film Second-Hand Hearts being critically panned Jones learned a lot about editing from Hal Ashby as he was an editing genius.
