Personal Background & Early Career 

Education

Rosalini attended Highland Park High School in the Chicago Northshore suburb of Highland Park, IL. He was its first student to create his own independent study course (architectural drafting), received varsity letters and all-state recognition in baseball and football and was a Norte Dame Club of Chicago ‘Knute Rockne Award’ nominee, but turned down the college football offers because of indelible memories of badly bruised ribs. 

Rosalini attended the University of Iowa on loans where, and by the time freshman fall arrived, decided to play football as a ‘walk-on.’ After a week of punishment, however, he wisely decided to walk off with all of his limbs still attached and, instead, sold programs for the team’s home games instead.  

Rosalini pursued the University’s Bachelor of General Studies degree program—a customized, liberal arts curriculum on steroids that for Dugan included economics, engineering descriptive geometry, urban and regional planning, philosophy, piano, law, several areas of design (graphic, architectural, industrial and interior) along with sculpture in the School of Fine Arts, and eventually a course he had to use a dictionary in order to choose: Introduction to Cinematography.  He earned semester hours credit by passing the College Board (CLEP) test in chemistry and teaching a fellow student how to swim who had been afraid to wade into water over his ankles; worked part-time for the Med School’s video unit; and in his senior year, earned hours as an assistant instructor for (live) Television Production 101.  

Earliest Film Employment

Rosalini’s first film job was as an editor and all-around production assistant for Goldberg-Werrenrath Productions, a small, Chicago-area company headed by a husband and wife team. They produced a broad range of nationally-distributed, classroom educational films serving grades K–12. He worked hand-in-hand with the company’s founder, Reinald Werrenrath, Jr., one of the handful of pioneering creators of the American television industry. This was the pivotal opportunity that began a lifelong career for Rosalini, and it wasn’t just a job: like his father, grandfather, high-school football coach, and college design professor, Reinald Werrenrath was an important role model and mentor to Dugan.  (See Endnote below.)  

Following this first experience, Rosalini worked freelance in Chicago and New York City in prac­tically every below-the-line production role known to film production (from ‘gofer,’ dolly grip, mike boom operator, and assistant cameraman to unit pro­duc­tion manager, second-unit cameraman, and hand model) for the production of documentaries, medical training films, TV commercials, PBS shows (e.g., American Masters) and low-budget features, filmed in locations such as the basement morgue of Lower Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital, the catacombs of Fort Jay on Governors Island, aboard WWII-vintage submarines berthed in historic Brooklyn Navy Yard, and in a McDonald’s for a training film on making Egg McMuffins.  

After those stints, Rosalini took a year sabbatical from film to work on a farm back in Iowa and take a crack at teaching Title I elementary school classes, then relocated to Chicago to become a staff editor and segment lead-in director for ‘The American Outdoors.’ The show was a nationally-syndicated tele­vi­sion series about every outdoor sport and recrea­tion imaginable, hosted by naturalist, adventurer and former outdoor edi­tor for the Denver Post, Wally Taber.  There, he also directed, edited, and co-wrote the theatri­cal featurette, ‘The Restless Spirit,’ which served as the warm up movie for a double-bill show featuring the company’s East African adventure, ‘The Elephant Poachers.’  In this job he earned enough to (proudly) repay his college loans in full.

First Independent Film as Company Startup

At age 25, Rosalini launched his own shop, Dugan Rosalini Film Associates, with his first independent film: the hour-long documentary ‘Otto: Zoo Gorilla,’ a primetime national Public Television special filmed at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.  

The film re­ceived high audience ratings and was recognized with more than a dozen honors, including an Emmy nomina­tion and invitation to the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.  Subse­quently, he made a total of 8 films in association with Lincoln Park Zoo, including 5 for television broadcast, and two serving as AV center­pieces for capital campaigns raising nearly $250 million. 

For a portfolio of Rosalini’s work, additional background information, and client/sponsor recommendations, see www.RosaliniFilms.com

Non-career Interests & Pursuits

• Restored/remodeled two condo apartments; his mother’s and a friend’s homes; a Chicago landmark house; and a vintage 40-foot, 1983 trawler yacht powered by twin Ford diesels…

• Served on Little City Foundation’s Board of Advisors; is a Life Member of Lincoln Park Zoological Society; several other educational/social welfare organizations; and is currently on the executive committees of two neighborhood civic groups, Francis Parker Neighbors and East Lincoln Park Neighbors.

• Pitched in to help raise as surrogate father a total of 4 wonderful children of two amazing women, and rescued, raised, and for 14 years shared life with a 12-pound, female canine named ‘Kiddo’. The love of his life is now ‘Lolli Bear,’ a 13-pound Havanese.

• Played a lifetime of amateur baseball until reaching his 50th-consecutive-year mark, including college ball; a semi-pro, national touring team during his 20’s; and being named to the ASA’s 40-and-Over All-American Team.

• Member of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) and has attended in a number of capacities more than a dozen EAA international AirVenture events…

• For 5+ years and until her (recent) passing, cared for and made fun road trips with his spirited and ever-curious mother …

• Continues to enjoy the travel, history and cultural adventures of filmmaking, not to mention the ‘thrill rides,’ including being launched and recovered by the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Childhood & Name “Dugan”

Dugan Rosalini came into this world in Highland Park, Illinois, as Adolph John Rosalini, Jr., the first-born child of electric utility lineman and former World War II Pacific Theater combat infantry­man, Adolph John (“Doc”) Rosalini, Sr. (here), and homemaker/part-time country club waitress, Betty Calzia Rosalini (here).  It was the post-War 1950’s and because of Highland Park’s substantial Jewish community, little “Adolph” (like his father) needed a nickname in a hurry.  He’s been “Dugan” ever since he could swallow solid food.

As a child, Dugan threw rocks, played Little League, became a Cub Scout, built Estes model rockets, and attended public school.  His immediate family of 5 shared a duplex home with his maternal grandparents. He’d spend a few weeks ‘downstate’ each summer in a tiny, former coal-mining town, living with his maternal great grandparents, who as turn-of-the-century immigrants from Northern Italy, spoke only broken English, cared for their huge garden and chickens, crushed their own grapes for wine, and made out just fine with the backyard outhouse.  

His uncle Pete would take him squirrel hunting every fall, and in the summer fishing with his cousins in their homebuilt boat.  Sled­ding with his brother, sister, and the family collie was winter fun, but wooden skis without metal edges were not.  His mother signed him up for weekly, torturous accordion lessons, and his dad—a member of an amateur dance band—encour­aged him to eventually do the same with the gift of a drum set.  

In grammar school and junior-high library periods, he’d spend the en­tire hour either immersed in outdoor magazines and Boy’s Life, or day-dreaming about how to dedicate every hour of his life out of school to explore, catch crayfish, and build forts in the meadows, marshes and timber of a 300-acre abandoned farm located a stone’s throw from his home.  One day after the next, his childhood was yet another National Geographic expedi­tion. 

At age 12, and having the back seat of a Chevy Impala all to himself, he embarked with his grandparents on a summer road trip along the venerable, two-lane Lincoln Highway to San Francisco, then along the coast to L.A. and San Diego and back home again in what became the most pivotal, personality-shaping event of his young life.

Employment-wise, Dugan got himself hired, then fired, as a caddy earlier that same summer, having been ‘discovered’ as an obviously ambi­tious, but underaged, caddy—this in two tries at two different country clubs.  After dragging huge golf bags for a second year, but once again being sent packing for failing to meet a caddy’s age and strength requirements, he managed to succeed in employment: first, as a dishwasher and busboy, then a gas pump jockey and pizza deliveryman, and eventually as a proud, union ditch digger for the gas company. In these occupations he earned enough money to buy sharkskin pants, a 100-mph racing go-kart (yes, 100 miles per hour!), tanks of gas to put in his dad’s car for a date or two, but then eventually began stowing the paychecks away for ‘walking money’ during his college years.  

A final, notable credit is that, somehow along the way, Dugan stayed just enough out of mischief, and managed to attend just enough after-school Catechism classes, to earn the holy sacraments of Communion and then Confirmation. Adopting for this the saint’s name, “Michael,” (a ritual for Confirmation), he assumes the Vatican has known him ever since as “Adolph John Michael ‘Dugan’ Rosalini, Jr.

 ________________

ENDNOTE   

Reinald Werrenrath, Jr. - Dugan’s first film employer and major mentor

Born and raised in the Bronx, and working in the 1930’s as tour guide at the NBC radio studios in Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building, young Werrenrath was introduced to the handful of pioneering engineers and earliest content creators busily at work in the company’s basement laboratories, inventing a new form of communications and entertainment: television. 

Werrenrath, with his boss Bill Eddy, moved to Chicago to begin building a television station owned by the movie theater chain, Balaban & Katz. A year later, World War II interrupted Werrenrath’s career, when he served in the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet as Fighter Director Officer on the USS Cabot, employing a new technology known as “radar,” and earning the rank of Lieutenant Commander and two Bronze Stars with combat “V”.  

Following the War, Werrenrath (affectionately tagged “Werry” by his co-workers) returned to Chicago to finish building the NBC television station WNBK, which, after several evolutions, is today’s ABC network-owned and -operated WLS.  Once on the air, Werry produced and directed dozens of ground-breaking shows such as ‘Chicago Cubs Baseball,’ the Emmy award-winning ‘Ding Dong School’ with Our Miss Francis, and one of the network’s first live remote programs, ‘Zoo Parade,’ which was broadcast weekly from Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, featured host Marlin Perkins and that would later become the hugely popular, ‘Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.’ 

After having his career interrupted again by U.S. Navy service, but this time in the Korean War, Werry spent the majority of his long and productive television career creating additional, first-time-ever programming, and in the early 1970s with his wife, Betty, started their own company, Goldberg-Werrenrath, producer of educational films.  

Werry was recently honored as a Television Academy Silver Circle inductee. He passed away in 2020, just short of age 107, and is survived by his wonderful wife, business partner and co-filmmaker, Betty, who turns 109 years young in January 2023. Dugan is forever grateful for their wisdom, tutelage and love.