Biography
John F. Burnett was an American film editor. Born John Forbes Burnett on 5 March 1934 in Kansas City, Missouri, he began his career at Warner Bros. as a messenger and later worked as an assistant editor on films including My Fair Lady (1964). His first lead editing credit came with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968).
Burnett edited numerous feature films, including The Way We Were (1973), Murder by Death (1976), The Goodbye Girl (1977), Grease (1978), ...And Justice for All (1979), Grease 2 (1982) and Leviathan (1989). He collaborated repeatedly with directors such as Herbert Ross, Blake Edwards and George Cukor.
He served as president of the Motion Picture Editors Guild from 1975 to 1976 and shared a Primetime Emmy Award for editing the miniseries War and Remembrance (1988–1989). Burnett died on 24 October 2024 in Lincoln, California.
