John Travers, Well-Respected Documentary Writer and Editor, Dies at 57
The Hollywood Reporter
By Mike Barnes
11/2/2016
The half-brother of the late folk singer Mary Travers, he was still tweaking the World War II documentary 'Never Surrender: The Ed Ramsey Story' at the time of his death.
John Travers, a veteran editor, writer and director on feature documentaries, has died. He was 57.
Travers, a half-brother of the late folk singer Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, was found dead Tuesday in his apartment in San Francisco, fellow editor Kent Hagen told The Hollywood Reporter. No cause of death has been determined.
The tireless Travers most recently wrote and edited the documentary Never Surrender: The Ed Ramsey Story, about a military man who, during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in the early 1940s, led the last cavalry charge in U.S. Army history.
The film is based on a 1990 book co-written by Ramsey and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Stephen J. Rivele (Oliver Stone’s Nixon) and narrated by Josh Brolin.
"John's last hours on the planet were on the computer editing our film to make it as great as possible," said Steven Barber, president of Vanilla Fire Productions, the company behind Never Surrender. He said Travers worked "a 100 hours a week" on the project.
"Let's put it this way: He made amateurs look like professionals," said Hagen.
Never Surrender has played in New York and Los Angeles to qualify for Oscar consideration and will be shown during Veterans Day weekend on Nov. 13 at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
Travers also wrote and directed a 1991 film that documented a Peter, Paul and Mary reunion tour that took place a decade earlier. Mary Travers battled leukemia and died in 2009 at age 72.
While attending the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, Travers won a student Academy Award in 1986 for writing, directing, producing and editing the 44-minute film Jenny, about a high school girl who discovers a mirror that reflects her past.
His résumé also includes editing the 2010 feature Meeting Spencer, starring Jeffrey Tambor.
Travers is believed to have no survivors.
TRAVERS, John
Born:1959, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A.
Died: 11/2/2016, San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
John Travers’ western – negative cutter:
Rough Riders – 1997