Full name, Paul D. Zimmerman; born August 3, 1938, in New York, NY; died of colon cancer, March 2, 1993, in Princeton, NJ. Writer and film critic. After serving as a film critic for Newsweek from 1972 to 1977, Zimmerman collaborated with Burt Goldblatt on The Marx Brothers at the Movies, a retrospective ofthe film career of the Marx Brothers comedy team. He then worked with sportswriter Dick Schaap on The Open Man and The Year the Mets Lost Last Place, books which feature information on New York City sports teams. Turning to screenwriting in the 1980s, Zimmerman wrote The King of Comedy, a film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro as a pathetic and delusional comedian who convinces himself that he can achieve fame by appearing on a nationaltalk show. In 1983 Zimmerman received the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for the script.
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