Kill the Dancing Accordion Players!: My Life Filming Travelogues

by Doug Jones

Overview

This is an amazing story of a by-gone era of entertainment. 

Before the Internet, cable television, and video, people packed auditoriums to see travelogue films hoping to learn about places they wanted to visit and relive memories of past trips abroad. At its peak, there were thousands of live-lecture travelogue film series in the United States and Doug Jones was one of the stars. He gave over six thousand travelogue lectures and he got to his shows by flying a twin-engine Cessna, logging over three thousand hours in the air and sixty coast-to-coast flights.

Growing up in Kansas City, he traveled the world on his father’s flight privileges as a Trans World Airlines engine inspector.  College trips took him to Bangkok, Bombay, London, Cairo, Honolulu, Paris, Hong Kong; all the destinations TWA flew. He put himself through university playing banjo in Kansas City jazz clubs. 

He shot film in sixty-eight countries, sailed around the world on the Queen Elizabeth 2, and traveled on every form of transportation. His film The Great Canadian Train Ride drew sell-out crowds in auditoriums and theaters and sold over 1,000,000 copies on home video and DVD. 

This very personal memoir is filled with fascinating stories of filming around the world and includes an array of observations about everything from travel to aviation to show business. 

Grab your passport, sit back, relax, and come along with Doug Jones as he travels the world, camera in hand, filming travelogues.

“The quality of the Doug Jones travelogues is first-rate.” The Los Angeles Times
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780997963243
Publisher:	International Travel Films Publishing
Publication date:	10/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	287
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Doug Jones has been producing travel films since 1968. He was born and raised in Kansas City and graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City with a degree in Radio and Television Broadcasting. Today he lives in Los Angeles and New York City. His personal travels have taken him around the world and into sixty-eight countries on six continents. He has produced twenty-two feature-length travel films and has appeared on every important auditorium travelogue-lecture series in the United States and Canada including the National Geographic Society series at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Doug Jones' films have been released on home video and DVD and include "The Great Canadian Train Ride" with over one million copies sold worldwide. He operates an active stock footage business and his material is regularly seen in prime time television shows and national commercials. In addition to his work in producing travel films, he is an avid pilot having made over sixty coast-to-coast flights in his twin Cessna airplane to show his travelogues in every state of the nation. He is past president of the International Travel Film Guild and the International Motion Picture and Lecturers Association. He is listed in Who's Who in Entertainment and he was given the "Film Lecturer of the Year" award by the International Platform Association for his outstanding work in the field of travelogue production.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter 1   A Boy From Kansas City

Chapter 2   New York and the World’s Fair

Chapter 3   The Travelogue Business

Chapter 4   Trans World Airlines to London

Chapter 5   24 Hours to Bombay

Chapter 6   The Clock Was Ticking

Chapter 7   College Days

Chapter 8   My First Camera, a Super 8

Chapter 9   Filming Belgium

Chapter 10 My Big Break in Travelogues

Chapter 11 Paris and The Parisians

Chapter 12 New York, Hawaii, and Venice

Chapter 13 Royal London

Chapter 14 Off to Egypt

Chapter 15 Filming the National Parks

Chapter 16 San Francisco

Chapter 17 The World Cruise of the QE2

Chapter 18 Sailing Down Under on the QE2

Chapter 19 Filming Great Cities of Europe

Chapter 20 North to Alaska

Chapter 21 Learning to Fly

Chapter 22 The Canadian Train Ride

Chapter 23 New Technology

Chapter 24 Bermuda & American Trains

Chapter 25 Flying the Cessna 310

Chapter 26 Shooting Stock Footage

Chapter 27 Mother Russia

Chapter 28 Sailing Down to Rio

Chapter 29 One Last Film

Postscript

Travelogue Makers of Another Time

Doug Jones Travelogue Filmography

Acknowledgements