Don McKenzie's film background started off with a film on Robert Kennedy in Humboldt County. This adventure in documentary film making would last a life time of work and investigation.
Within two years McKenzie found himself in the ABC newsroom in San Francisco cutting film on Patricia Hearst, the SLA and Angela Davis one hot summer. At this time the Network worked out of KGO so the news stories went live out of KGO to the ABC News Network Shows.
Following this McKenzie moved to Los Angeles and moved from film to video editing at KTTV Channel Eleven and KTLA Channel Five. Here, besides cutting the nightly news, he worked on a continuous production of documentaries in Los Angeles. Writing and cutting for George Slaughters Real People, one of the first magazine shows to go network, he was drafted onto Entertainment Tonight as one of the first six editors that edited all segments of the production.
When not cutting documentaries McKenzie could be found cutting rushes for Roger Coreman or working on commercials.
"In those days," McKenzie said, " we took any job that came our way. You had to have a couple of things going all the time to be able to make it, but I always found myself back in the editing rooms. With three union cards attached to his name he started to move up in the industry.
McKenzie soon found himself in Tokyo, Japan where he wrote, directed and edited a number of films for Sony and other major corporations. Covering Lady Di and Prince Charles plus a host of other "visitors" kept him active and busy in the largest city in the world.
Returning to his routes of what he calls "pure" documentary he continuous to plan several films in to be put into production in the next couple of years.
An active screenwriter McKenzie always has a script that needs to be produced. "You always got to be ready," he said. "You never know what is going to happen."
Monday, August 25, 2008
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