A funeral mass was held Wednesday for video/videotape pioneer and postproduction leader, Doyle Kaniff, who Sept. 3 of a heart condition at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston.
Mr. Kaniff, 69, had undergone a quadruple bypass in 2006 and thereafter led a healthy and comfortable lifestyle. “A week ago, he was clear as a bell,” said his daughter, Patty Kaniff.
A week earlier Mr. Kaniff was getting ready to leave his health club after a workout when he had a heart attack. As he fell, his head hit the hard edge of a countertop which caused serious brain damage, she said.
Although he had worked in television production and later owned or co-owned related businesses, Mr. Kaniff, was best known — and took the greatest pride ? in being president of Editel Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
Editel was the city’s oldest and largest full-service postproduction companies, having been in existence for 25 years during the glory years of Chicago production/post, located in three-quarters of the building at 301 E. Erie. Many current industry leaders learned their craft as they came up through the Editel ranks.
George Ricci, Mr. Kaniff’s best and closest friend since they met in the seventh grade in a Portage Park Catholic school, recalled how Mr. Kaniff started his television career as a stagehand at WGN-TV. From there he went into WGN sales, leaving the station to join his friend Ricci in the first of several business ventures.
“We started a rep company called Ricci Kaniff and Associates in the early 1970s,” Ricci recalls. “From there, Doyle was hired by Catholic Television in sales. He was a super salesman, very successful, because he knew how to listen and satisfy the client’s needs.”
When Mr. Kaniff joined Editel as an executive vice-president in the mid-?70s, it was owned by Bell & Howell, makers of 16mm film projectors. Columbia Pictures bought and operated Editel for several years until the mid-1980s, when it sold the company to a large Wisconsin printing company.
Not knowing what to do with a company so foreign to its basic business, the printers sold it shortly thereafter to Scanline of San Francisco. The new owners replaced Mr. Kaniff with a new management team.
Following his Editel years, Mr. Kaniff became a sole entrepreneur. He bought Video Dub Illinois from Ricci and folded it into a new entity, Chicago Post and Graphics. That company was run for a decade by his two daughters, Patty, an editor, and Lynn, who left to become a teacher.
In addition to his daughters, Mr. Kaniff is survived by his long-time companion, Elke Zeman, sons Matt (Lisa) and Michael (Chuang Jing), their mother Meg Kaniff, and a grandson, Doyle and three brothers.
Patty Kaniff said her father was a great fan of the work of Deborah’s Place and suggests donations in lieu of flowers. See
