Doran William Cannon (1937–2005) was born in Toledo, Ohio, and graduated from Columbia College. While working on his M.B.A. at Columbia University, which he received in 1962, he made his first film, Going Up. Several years later he wrote, produced, and directed his first feature, The Square Root of Zero (1964). In 1965 he left New York for Hollywood, where he wrote the original scripts for Skidoo (1968) and Brewster McCloud (1971). Cannon wrote Authorship: The Dynamic Principles of Writing Creatively and taught creative writing.