Peter Zinner, 88; Oscar-Winning Film Editor

Peter Zinner, a longtime Hollywood film editor who worked on the first two ‘Godfather’ movies and won an Oscar for the ‘The Deer Hunter,’ died on November 13, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. Zinner, 88, was a resident of Pacific Palisades since 1970. The cause of his death was complications from a five-year battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to his daughter, Katina Zinner. Born in Vienna in 1919, Zinner, who was Jewish, escaped the Nazis in 1938 with his family and found refuge in the Philippines. After two years, Zinner made his way to Los Angeles and found work as an editing apprentice with 20th Century Fox. He spent three years as an apprentice before becoming an assistant sound-effects editor at Universal. A year and a half later he found work as a music film editor at MCM. In 1960, he quit and with two other editors started a company, Post Production, Inc. During that time, Zinner worked on commercials, industrials and small independent films and gained experience in film editing, which had been his goal from the start. After working with director Richard Brooks on ‘Lord Jim,’ he was offered the editing job on Brooks’ next movie, ‘The Professionals,’ in 1964. Film editing on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 mobster drama, ‘The Godfather,’ earned Zinner and his co-editor, William Reynolds, an Academy Award nomination. ‘The Godfather,’ said Zinner, was ‘the most classic movie I ever worked on,’ He is credited with orchestrating the music and flow of the memorable baptism scene. ‘We experimented, and then Peter added the notion of the organ music and it immediately seemed to work,’ Coppola told the Palisadian-Post in 2003, when Zinner was featured in a full-page Lifestyle feature. He also worked on ‘The Godfather: Part II’ (1974). The Vietnam War film ‘The Deer Hunter’ (1978) brought Zinner an Oscar for editing, and also won an Academy Award for best picture. He was later nominated for an Oscar for his work on the 1982 romantic drama ‘An Officer and a Gentleman.’ Zinner worked on ‘In Cold Blood’ (1967) and with director Frank Pierson on ‘A Star Is Born’ (1976). Pierson called him “the absolute top echelon of film editors.” Zinner also won Emmy Awards in editing for ABC’s ‘War and Remembrance’ in 1989 (he earlier edited the equally lengthy and prestigious miniseries ‘The Winds of War’) and HBO’s ‘Citizen Cohn’ in 1993. He appeared once as an actor, playing an admiral in ‘The Hunt for Red October’ (1990), and directed one movie, ‘The Salamander,’ a 1981 political thriller set in Italy with Anthony Quinn. ‘Outside of writing, to me editing is the most creative process,’ Zinner told the Post in 2003. ‘You can achieve enormously different effects’dramatic or humor’that are not necessarily in the acting process. Conversely, you can have wonderful acting, wonderful scenes, and if you don’t know how to put it together, you can ruin it. ‘Timing in the end is the most important. Timing of a line, timing of a retort, timing of action, it’s all in the editor’s hands,’ Zinner said. Last year, Zinner collaborated with his daughter, also a film editor, on the documentary “Running With Arnold” about Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Zinner is survived by his wife Christa, 87, a German-born photographer and sculptor whom he married in 1959; his daughter Katina; and stepson Dr. Nicolas Nelken, a vascular surgeon in Honolulu.