Edgar Burcksen Dies: Emmy-Winning Editor, ILM Alum & Former ACE Board Member Was 76

Edgar Burcksen, a veteran TV and film editor who won an Emmy for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, worked at Industrial Light & Magic and was a longtime American Cinema Editors board member, has died. He was 76. 

Innovative Artists said he died April 7 in Los Angeles from complications of a heart attack.

A Holland native, Burcksen began his career editing features in Amsterdam and won the Golden Calf at the Nederlands Film Festival. He moved to California in 1985 and was supervising editor for more than 50 episodes of Seabert, a cartoon series that aired Saturday mornings in France and later aired on HBO.

Burcksen then was hired at Colossal Pictures in San Francisco, where he worked on commercials for the likes of Disney and Budweiser and on music videos for Thomas Dolby and the Grateful Dead, during the legendary band’s late-’80s commercial resurgence.

An early backer of non-linear editing, Burcksen then joined Industrial Light & Magic, where founder George Lucas selected him to consult on the user interface of the EditDroid, a precursor to the Avid.

While at ILM, he served as effects editor on Die Hard 2: Die Harder and The Hunt for Red October. He went on to serve as VFX editor on features including Chasing Mavericks and Parental Guidance along with the TV series A Series of Unfortunate Events.

In 1992, Lucas tapped Burcksen to work on postproduction and serve as an editor on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which starred Sean Patrick Flanery in the title role. He won an editing Emmy for the pilot episode that year.

Burcksen later worked on 500 Nations, an eight-hour docuseries hosted and produced by Kevin Costner. His nonfiction credits also include Oscar nominee and NAACP Image Award winner Colors Straight Up, Darfur Now, No Salida, In Search of Peace, The Bituminous Coal Queens of Pennsylvania and Borrowing Time.

He also worked on several features including Disney’s Burt Reynolds-Tom Berenger-Rod Steiger pic The Hollywood Sign (2001) Santa Who? (2000), starring Leslie Nielsen. Other film credits include Purple Heart (2005), School of Life (2005), The Tillamook Treasure (2006), Road House 2, Brothers Three, An American Gothic (2007).

Burcksen also was a longtime ACE board member and former writer and editor-in-chief of its magazine Cinema Editor and taught Advanced Film Editing at the Academy of Art University of San Francisco. An ultramarathon cyclist, he completing 25 double centuries.

He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Jana, and their two children.

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