John F. Burnett, Film Editor on ‘Grease,’ ‘The Goodbye Girl’ and ‘The Way We Were,’ Dies at 90

John F. Burnett, Film Editor on ‘Grease,’ ‘The Goodbye Girl’ and ‘The Way We Were,’ Dies at 90

John F. Burnett, the veteran film editor who cut Grease, And Justice for All and Murder by Death and films for directors George Cukor, Blake Edwards and Sydney Pollack, has died. He was 90.

Burnett died Oct. 24 of natural causes in Lincoln, California, his son, cinematographer and producer John Earl Burnett, told The Hollywood Reporter. He said his father was a victim of elder abuse, and for legal reasons, the family could not disclose the news of his death until now.

Burnett also worked with directors Robert Ellis Miller on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), The Girl From Petrovka (1974) and Bed & Breakfast (1991) and with Herbert Ross on The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), The Sunshine Boys (1975) and The Goodbye Girl (1977).

He edited two sweeping ABC miniseries adapted from epic novels by Herman Wouk, 1983’s The Winds of War and 1990’s War and Remembrance, winning an Emmy (shared with Peter Zinner) for the latter.

Burnett got his start at Warner Bros., and after coming in on weekends to help Cukor on The Chapman Report (1962), he was hired by the famed director to edit My Fair Lady (1964), the Katharine Hepburn– and Laurence Olivier-starring 1975 ABC telefilm Love Among the Ruins and Rich and Famous (1981), Cukor’s final film.

Burnett also cut Edwards’ The Great Race (1965), Wild Rovers (1971) and A Fine Mess (1986); Pollack’s The Way We Were (1973); Norman Jewison’s And Justice for All (1979); Robert Moore’s Murder by Death (1976); Randal Kleiser’s Grease (1978); and Richard Pearce’s Leap of Faith (1992).

“He would take what a director gave him — and Cukor gave him thousands of thousands of feet a day because he did everything from the top — and he just had this way of putting it together,” his son told CineMontage magazine.

Burnett also served as president of the Motion Picture Editors Guild from 1975-76 and received a career achievement award from the American Cinema Editors in 2003.

John Forbes Burnett was born on March 5, 1934, in Kansas City, Missouri. When he was young, he and the family moved to Southern California, where his father, Gilbert, was an engineer at the Lockheed Corp.

After graduating from John Burroughs High School, Burnett landed a job as a messenger at Warner Bros., and following a 1952-54 stint in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he was hired as an assistant film editor on Billy Wilder’s The Spirit of St. Louis (1957).

He then worked on The Helen Morgan Story (1957), The FBI Story (1959), Mervyn LeRoy’s Gypsy (1962), The Music Man (1962) and Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) before getting his first (non-assistant) editor credit on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, starring Alan Arkin and Sondra Locke.

Miller signed him to a multi-picture deal but would release him from the contract so he could work for other filmmakers.

Burnett’s editing résumé included The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972), Can’t Stop the Music (1980), Grease 2 (1982) and Leviathan (1989). He also was an editor and producer on the 1995-97 syndicated TV series Baywatch Nights and a producer on the 1995 PTEN show Pointman, starring Jack Scalia.

As MPEG president, Burnett oversaw contract negotiations that resulted in what was at the time the largest wage increase in IATSE history, his son said. Those talks resulted in editors receiving single-card, up-front credits on features as well.

For the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he served on the board of governors from 1975-85 and as executive secretary from 1983-84. He also created a film editing course for the AFI and taught there for several years.

In 2000, Burnett retired from Hollywood and, after 43 years, as a reserve commander with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. In Lincoln, he owned a 20-acre ranch.

Survivors include another son, Stephen, and his brother, David. He was predeceased by wives Rosemarie in 1998 and Margie in 2018.