Dennis C. Jakob was born in Irvington New Jersey.
Moving to Southern California, he attended elementary
and high schools in Pasadena, later, receiving his BA
from the motion picture division of Theatre Arts at
UCLA, where his 1st novel The Undiscovered Country
earned first honorable mention in the Samuel Goldwyn
literary competition.
Graduate studies in the UCLA School Of Cinema Arts
was followed by seminal recognition for his first film
project: The Invaders.
After sporadic mentoring experience with the likes of
Arthur Ripley, Roger Corman and Francis Ford Coppola,
his first film editing assignments were for the Corman Company.
They included montage sequences in The Trip, Devil's Angels
and The Young Racers.
He began working as a story editor and creative consultant
for Coppola at Zoetrope culminating in his choice assignment as
one of the principal editors on the 1979 movie: Apocalypse Now.
Interestingly, it was D.C. Jakob who advised Coppola to use
Joseph Conrad's novel Heart Of Darkness as a template for the
basic Apocalypse Now story line.
That assignment was preceded by being invited by Bobby
Darin to be a film cutter on his production entitled The Dealer,
the undertaking of which found Dennis literally cutting film in
Sandra Dee's kitchen,
In the ensuing decades, Jakob has been involved in a hermetically
sealed career which has produced, not only the autobiographic tome
you now hold, but two novels: The Coast Watchers and The Sand Painter;
plus the thoroughly enchanting memoir: Going to Goethe as well as two
evocative screenplays: a noir detective story Stella and the vicious and
violent Unknown Soldier.
He currently resides in Northern California's Napa Valley.