Picture editor Don Zimmerman, ACE, had an abundant sense of humor. He had to. Over the course of a career that stretched back to the late 1960s and continued through the COVID pandemic, Zimmerman worked with a pretty funny cast of characters: a quarterback who is tapped for reincarnation in “Heaven Can Wait” (1978), a gardener prone to dispensing pieces of inadvertent wisdom in “Being There” (1979), the title characters in “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” (1994) and “The Nutty Professor” (1996), and a pair of supremely spaced-out dudes in “Bill & Ted Face the Music” (2020).
Zimmerman, who died on July 24 at age 81, worked in and appreciated all genres, but his good taste and equally good nature were especially well suited for comedic material.
“The dialogue with him was just fantastic in the edit room,” said director Dean Parisot, who worked with Zimmerman on four features beginning with “Galaxy Quest” (1999) and concluding with “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” the editor’s final credit.
“Beyond that, we all enjoyed each other’s company,” Parisot said. “I consider Don not an editor but a collaborator and a friend.”
Born in Culver City in 1944, Zimmerman grew up in a household with his grandmother, sister, and aunt; his father left the family when he was just a year old. “His sister was a major factor” in Zimmerman’s upbringing, said his widow, Donna Zimmerman. “She was nine years older than Don, and she really took care of him.”
His upbringing may have had its challenges, but he entered adulthood having settled on a vocation that reflected his warm, empathetic personality. After gaining experience working with horses on a high school friend’s ranch, he set his mind on becoming a veterinarian. “He loved animals,” Donna Zimmerman said. “Our dogs were most important, but he loved any kind of animal. We have three horses. He had them at a ranch near the Reagan museum.
The only thing he didn’t like was cats.”
Fate intervened in the form of the Air Force, which Zimmerman joined in time to see deployment during the Vietnam War. Upon completing his service, Zimmerman returned home without a clear career path. His introduction to post-production was a matter of happenstance: In search of work, Zimmerman followed the advice of one of his best friends, whose father happened to be music editor Lloyd Young. “His son, Jimmy, was Don’s best friend, and he found him a little job working with Frank Warner,” Donna Zimmerman said, referring to the noted sound editor.
Then came the most consequential collaboration of Zimmerman’s career: Hal Ashby, a newly minted director whose previous career as an editor included such highlights as the Oscar-winning “In the Heat of the Night” (1967). Ashby brought Zimmerman into the cutting room of his first directorial endeavor, the 1970 drama “The Landlord.” “Hal had moved from editorial to directorial on ‘The Landlord,’” Zimmerman told me when I interviewed him about Ashby for the DGA Quarterly in 2018. “So his assistant then became the editor. Everybody moved up, leaving a hole in the bottom end, and that’s where I came in. A friend of mine introduced me to him.”
Ashby used “The Landlord” as a springboard for a spate of classics and near-classics that included “Harold and Maude” (1971), “Shampoo” (1975), and “Bound for Glory” (1976) — each of which Zimmerman worked on, first as an apprentice and then as an assistant editor.
“It was a love-fest, for sure, with Hal,” Donna Zimmerman said. “I think they hit it off well because Don was a storyteller, and so was Hal. He really liked Don’s ideas about how to get from point A to point B.”
Zimmerman became a solo picture editor on “Coming Home” (1978), Ashby’s anguished portrait of Vietnam veterans and their kith and kin. The Oscar-winning film starred Jon Voight, Jane Fonda, and Bruce Dern. The director and editor continued their collaboration on the equally accomplished “Being There,” starring Peter Sellers as a bland, featureless gardener whose television-inspired sayings are misinterpreted by the cognoscenti in Washington, D.C.
“Hal would never talk to me about stuff,” Zimmerman told me in 2018. “He said, ‘I want to see your thoughts.’ Then we would just sit together and talk, and say, ‘Oh, let’s try this or that.’ Or, ‘That’s really a good idea.’. . . He wouldn’t say that you were wrong, but he would guide you in different avenues.”
Although he had built up a rapport with Ashby over the course of more than a decade, Zimmerman was equally at ease with the directors he came to work with in subsequent years, including such big personalities as Warren Beatty on “Heaven Can Wait” and Sylvester Stallone on “Rocky III” (1982), “Staying Alive” (1983), and “Rocky IV” (1985).
“He was super-easygoing and got along with everybody,” said his daughter, costumer Debi Zimmerman. “That was just my dad’s personality. He could hang with the best of them. I think that’s why everyone liked working with him — he was just so accommodating.”
A favorite project, Debi Zimmerman said, was Barbra Streisand’s acclaimed adaptation of Pat Conroy’s “The Prince of Tides” (1991), starring Nick Nolte, Streisand, and Blythe Danner. “It was a nice collaboration,” Debi Zimmerman said. “She really valued his opinion, and he loved being able to tell such a beautiful story.”
In her 2023 autobiography, “My Name Is Barbra,” Streisand described Zimmerman as “very supportive.” “One day as Don and I were color-correcting the print . . . and I have to say Stephen Goldblatt gave the film a beautiful look . . . he turned to me and said, ‘You’ve made a f—ing good movie.’ Don is not the kind of editor who gives casual compliments, so I felt this warm rush of pride,” Streisand wrote in her book.
After “The Prince of Tides,” Zimmerman increasingly focused on comedic material, including “The Nutty Professor,” “Liar Liar” (1997), and “The Cat in the Hat” (2003). One especially notable comedy was “Galaxy Quest.” For director Dean Parisot, whose second directorial outing this was, working with Zimmerman was a learning experience.
“He was so adept at performance and story and structure, having this giant body of work behind him, that for me, starting out, in a lot of ways there are things that got rewritten in post,” Parisot said. “He just had a gift. He was able to immediately see where something was headed — what was necessary, what wasn’t.”
For example, Zimmerman presented Parisot with an edit of “Galaxy Quest” that stripped away a lot of material the director had thought essential. “His editor’s assembly was done the day after we had wrapped,” Parisot said. “I go in and he said, ‘I cut out a lot of the exposition.’ I said, ‘What? What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I cut out a lot of the exposition. Don’t be shocked.’ I watched it, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, he cut out all this stuff,’ and then afterwards, I [realized] all of it was not necessary. He was totally right. He just cut for story and performance, and there was the movie.”
Zimmerman continued to work as an A-list editor on films including “Night at the Museum” (2006) and its sequel, “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian” (2009), “Marmaduke” (2010), and “Men in Black 3” (2012). Zimmerman also cut each of Parisot’s subsequent films: “Fun with Dick and Jane” (2005), “Red 2” (2013), and his last hurrah, the high-spirited sequel “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” for which he came out of retirement.
Donna Zimmerman said that her husband worked long hours, consumed prodigious quantities of coffee, and enjoyed every bit of it. “It was his whole life,” she said, comparing his career to a second childhood for him. “I was so happy to be able to be home with my kids and keep the house steady for him so when he came home, it was always a good place for him to be,” she said.
Zimmerman relished introducing his children to the business that had nurtured him. Each of his five children have entered filmmaking, including sons (and picture editors) Dan, Dean, and David. “He loved to teach,” Donna Zimmerman said. “No matter what it was — if we went water skiing, and it was a bunch of new people, he loved to teach them how to water ski.”
Five years ago, Zimmerman, who had survived a bout with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and told that he had no more than six months to a year to live. “He gave us an extra four-and-a-half years that we had not intended to have,” Donna Zimmerman said. For much of that time, Zimmerman lived and worked without worrying about the specter of the diagnosis, but in the summer, he quickly declined.
Zimmerman, who was nominated for an Academy Award for editing “Coming Home,” was honored with the ACE Career Achievement Award in 2023. “We’ve actually got his ashes here and his award right next to the ashes,” Donna Zimmerman said. “He was very proud of that.”
In addition to his wife, Zimmerman is survived by his five children, Dean, Dan, David, Debi, and Dana, and his seven grandchildren, Joseph, Sofia, Isabella, Gabriella, Kamryn, Amylia, and Madeline.
