A DGA member since 1969, Ziesmer served six terms on the Western AD/UPM Council including serving two terms as Council Chair from 1993-1996, and as Second Vice Chair from 1996-1998. In recognition of his service to the industry and to the Guild, in 2006 Ziesmer was presented with the Frank Capra Achievement Award, the highest honor the DGA can bestow upon an Assistant Director or Unit Production Manager.
As Chair of the Council, Ziesmer decided to follow the example of his own mentors — like Capra Award Recipients Wallace Worsley (1982) and Francisco “Chico” Day (1981) — and worked towards the creation of a program where inexperienced DGA members could receive the same kind of assistance. The result was the Council’s Mentor Committee, which has been instrumental in helping women and ethnic minorities get off to a proper start in the industry.
After starting his career as an actor, Ziesmer changed course and became a graduate of one of the earliest classes of the newly-created Assistant Directors Training Program. After joining the Guild in 1969, he would go on to work with some of the industry’s biggest Directors, gathering forty feature film credits including: Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Brian DePalma’s Scarface, and Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire.
In an interview about his Capra Award win, Ziesmer was asked if he could think of any accolade better than receiving that honor and answered, “Yes, when one of the kids that I mentored becomes the recipient, I’ll be even prouder.”
