Peter Zinner, Oscar-winning film editor; 88
LOS ANGELES - Peter Zinner, who won an Academy Award for editing the 1978 Vietnam War film "The Deer Hunter" and coedited the first two "Godfather" films, has died. He was 88.
Mr. Zinner died Tuesday at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica after a long illness, said his stepson, Dr. Nicolas Nelken.
The Austrian-born Mr. Zinner's numerous credits as a film editor since the early 1960s include "The Professionals," "In Cold Blood," "Darling Lili," "Crazy Joe," the 1976 version of "A Star Is Born " and "An Officer and a Gentleman," for which he received an Oscar nomination .
Mr. Zinner also edited a number of television productions, including coediting the TV miniseries "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance."
His work on the latter miniseries earned him an Emmy Award in 1989. He won a second Emmy in 1993 for editing the HBO movie "Citizen Cohn."
Mr. Zinner already had shared an Academy Award nomination for editing Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film "The Godfather" when he picked up his Oscar for "The Deer Hunter." The film won five Oscars, including best picture and best director (Michael Cimino).
"Peter is definitely in the top rank of editors of two or three generations," said screenwriter-director Frank Pierson, whose "A Star Is Born" and four other movies were edited by Mr. Zinner. "I think the one distinguishing characteristic of Peter is that he had a great sense of music. Musical rhythm is really an essential part of the motion-picture language."
He said, for example, that Mr. Zinner edited the famous sequence in "The Godfather" in which the murders of Mafia family leaders is intercut with the christening of a baby, by cutting it to organ music and the priest's voice.
"That's the kind of thing that he was brilliant at, and it's become a classic sequence in movie history," Pierson said.
Mr. Zinner considered "The Godfather" to be "the most classic movie" he worked on.
His most recent credit was "Running With Arnold," a 2006 documentary about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
