My Life Filming Travelogues

A memoir by Doug Jones, one of America's best-known travel film producers.

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 and he put himself through university and made money to travel by 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 imaginable. 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, movie camera in hand, recording his adventures and filming travelogues.

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