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.