Jerry Ziesmer
Jerry Ziesmer is a director, born 1939.
Jerry Ziesmer's screen legacy is four words. In Apocalypse Now he plays Jerry, a civilian, sitting quietly at the briefing table while the mission is explained, and delivers the instruction that sends the film into the jungle: terminate with extreme prejudice. He is on screen for a fraction of the running time and the line has outlived almost everything else spoken in the picture.
The acting was a sideline. Ziesmer worked as an assistant director and production manager, the job that actually runs a set and almost never appears in a filmography like this one. Everything on the visible record here is small: an uncredited salesman in Rocky II, a pilot in Blue Thunder, a network man in The Bad News Bears Go to Japan, a U.S. Attorney in Say Anything..., and a 1962 television credit for Going My Way.
He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1939 and died in 2021, remembered for four words in a profession where his real work was keeping other people's films on schedule.
Movies (5)
TV (1)
Where to start with Jerry Ziesmer
Watch Apocalypse Now, obviously, and watch the briefing scene rather than waiting for the famous later material. It is a room full of men being polite about something appalling, and Ziesmer's contribution is the flattest delivery in it, which is exactly why the line landed hard enough to enter the language.
Say Anything... is the second stop, because it gives him an actual scene as a U.S. Attorney in a film that is far tougher than its reputation as a teen romance suggests.
After that, the pickings are honest bit parts. Blue Thunder is a solid piece of early eighties paranoia with helicopters, Rocky II is the sequel that had to justify the first film and mostly does, and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan is the third entry in a series that had already run out of road.