Doran William Cannon (1937–2005) was an American writer and producer for film and television.

Early life

He was born in

Toledo, Ohio Toledo ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Lucas County, Ohio, United States. A major Midwestern United States port city, Toledo is the fourth-most populous city in the state of Ohio, after Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, and according ...

, and graduated from Columbia College in 1959. While working on his

MBA A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master's in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accounti ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, which he received in 1962, he made his first film, ''Going Up''.

Career

Several years later he wrote, produced, and directed his first feature, ''The Square Root of Zero'' (1964). In 1965 he left

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

for Hollywood, where he wrote the original scripts for

Otto Preminger Otto Ludwig Preminger ( , ; 5 December 1905 – 23 April 1986) was an Austrian-American theatre and film director, film producer, and actor. He directed more than 35 feature films in a five-decade career after leaving the theatre. He first gai ...

's '' Skidoo'' (1968) and Robert Altman's ''

Brewster McCloud ''Brewster McCloud'' is a 1970 American black comedy film directed by Robert Altman. The film follows a young recluse (Bud Cort, as the title character) who lives in a fallout shelter of the Houston Astrodome, where he is building a pair of wing ...

'' (1970). The original story for the latter was set in New York City but it was decided to set the film in Houston. Although Cannon is credited for the screenplay, most of the film was rewritten by Altman and his close associates or improvised during filming. After the film's release, Cannon wrote a column for ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' detailing the frustrations of his experience. His career later shifted towards television, where Cannon wrote the screen adaptation of ''

Brave New World ''Brave New World'' is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hiera ...

''. Originally 4 hours long, it was cut down to three hours before being televised. ''Brave New World'' was directed by Burt Brinckerhoff for

Universal Television Universal Television LLC (abbreviated as UTV) is an American television production company that is a subsidiary of Universal Studio Group, a division of Comcast's NBCUniversal. It serves as the network television production arm of NBC; a prede ...

and first shown on

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters are l ...

on 7 March 1980. Cannon wrote ''Authorship: The Dynamic Principles of Writing Creatively'',Authorship: The Dynamic Principles of Writing Creatively
/ref> and taught

creative writing Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary ...

References

External links

*
Doran William Cannon on Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cannon, Doran William 1937 births 2005 deaths American male screenwriters Writers from Toledo, Ohio Columbia Business School alumni Screenwriters from Ohio Columbia College (New York) alumni 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American screenwriters