Film editor, and erstwhile music supervisor, Peter Zinner died 13 November 2007 after a long illness. Born in Vienna, Austria, on 24 July 1919, he won the Academy Award for Editing in 1979 for The Deer Hunter, and was nominated for his work on The Godfather and An Officer and a Gentleman.
His only genre editing work was of ¡Tintorera! (1977). However, before becoming an editor, he was music supervisor for several genre films, including The Madmen of Mandoras (1963), They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1963), Varan the Unbelievable (1962), and Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (he was the music supervisor for the American version, King Kong versus Godzilla [1962]).
He directed one film, The Salamander (1981), and acted in one, The Hunt for Red October (1990).
As a child, he studied piano, composition, and theory before fleeing the Nazis with his parents in 1938. He arrived in Los Angeles from the Philippines in 1940 with dreams of working in motion pictures. He worked as a taxi driver, and played piano to silent movies before apprenticing as a film editor at 20th Century Fox in 1943.
His most recent credit was Running With Arnold, a 2006 documentary about California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, which Zinner worked on with his daughter, film editor Katina Zinner.
In addition to his stepson, Dr. Nicolas Nelken (who announced his death) and daughter, Zinner is survived by his wife, Christa, a former fashion photographer.