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P icture 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 fun- ny 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 ti- tle 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 na- ture 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 con- cluding 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 edi- tor but a collaborator and a friend." Born in Culver City in 1944, Zimmerman grew up in a household with his grand- mother, 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 Zimmer- man. "She was nine years older than Don, and she really took care of him." His upbringing may have had its chal- lenges, but he entered adulthood having settled on a vocation that reflected his warm, empathetic personality. After gain- ing experience working with horses on a high school friend's ranch, he set his mind on becoming a veterinarian. "He loved an- imals," 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 direc- torial 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 Quar- terly in 2018. "So his assistant then became the editor. Every- body 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." Z i m m e r m a n b e ca m e a s o l o p i c t u re 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 con- tinued their collaboration on the equally accomplished "Being There," starring Peter Sellers as a bland, featureless gar- dener whose television-inspired sayings are misinterpreted by the cognoscenti in 65 W I N T E R Q 4 I S S U E I N M E M O R I A M DON ZIMMERMAN JUNE 15, 1944 – JULY 24, 2025