Dale Allan Pelton grew up in the country, attended Cherokee School in Turley Oklahoma, near Tulsa, a member of Future Farmers of America, a collegiate wrestler for Oklahoma State and University of Nebraska, hitchhiked for 20,000 miles through the U.S., Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador in the manner of the Beat Generation writers, organized concerts for jazz organist Baby Face Willette and jazz singer, Odetta, and was one of the few white journalists covering Martin Luther King’s Selma to Montgomery march for a black newspaper, The Oklahoma Eagle. After receiving his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Tulsa and MFA from the UCLA film school, he became a Hollywood production designer with work in cinema, TV and music videos, including Battlestar Galactica, Miami Vice, Perry Mason, Lethal Weapon 3, When Hell Was in Session, Return to Mayberry, Hollowman, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and working with Steven Spielberg designing the pirate ship for The Goonies. Pelton’s pioneering film in Cinemascope with laser graphics, Death of the Red Planet, was invited to the Cannes Film Festival, played in 600 theaters, and was on the cover of American Cinematographer. Currently, Pelton lives and writes at his home in the boulders of the Joshua Tree National Park in California.
