American Cinematographer - February 2008 - (Page 57) remembers an odd, green halo surrounding the matte lines in the first CinemaScope movie, The Robe — his earliest awareness of the artifacts that would become the bane of his professional life. The Edlund family moved to Minneapolis when Richard reached junior-high school, and a few years later, in 1955, they decided to move to California. In his freshman year of high school, Edlund picked up a still camera for the first time, a miniature spy camera. He then adopted his mother’s Kodak Tourister before dropping $25 on an old 4"x5" press camera, an enlarger and some trays. He built a darkroom in the family carport, then studied photography with his high-school physics teacher, who taught him the rudiments of optics and how to mix developer and other chemicals. He learned to tell a story with pictures after joining the Scholastics Sports Association, which encouraged students to cover school sports. “I’d go to Bakersfield, shoot pictures of cheerleaders and football practice and put a little essay together, jamming as much info as possible into my lead,” he recalls. “My pieces ran center spread in the Los Angeles Examiner’s sports section.” His camera’s shutter-speed limitation helped develop his sense of timing: “I couldn’t get a picture without blur unless I took it exactly at the peak of the action. That was a good lesson.” After graduating from high school, Edlund and a friend attended “A Day in the Navy,” an elaborate display of maneuvers staged for recruitment purposes. “It worked on us,” he says. “I was 17 and needed my parents’ permission to enlist. I had a journalism scholarship at Pepperdine University, but I didn’t want to be a journalist; at that time, I wanted to be a photojournalist. I thought I’d ‘join the navy and see the world.’” Edlund discovered that highschool graduates could pick their specialty, and he chose to become a Photographer’s Mate. After boot camp and prep school, he attended the Naval Photographic School in Pensacola, Florida. There, something happened that changed his life. It started with a bad sunburn he got by falling asleep at the base pool, a “dereliction of duty” offense. Instead of punishing Edlund, a warrant officer hid the talented photography student in his office for two weeks, where Edlund read Ansel Adams and other advanced-photography books cover to cover. When it came time to hand out duty assignments, he says, the same officer gave him a plum one. “I was to be stationed in Atsugi, Japan, which was like a paradise. It was a chance to live in a highly developed and artistic culture, and things were very cheap at 360 yen to the dollar.” When Edlund got there, fate was waiting at the Fleet Air Photo Lab. “I opened a case in the equipment-storage room, and there was a brand-new Mitchell 16mm movie camera. I dragged it outside and started experimenting. I found a book in the base library called The Grammar of The Film, a treatise on silent movies and Russian film editing — apropos, because we had no sound equipment. I also found a reversal-film processor outside under a tarp. I rebuilt it and started up a motion-picture department, and by the time I left, we had five processing machines.” The lab’s photo officer soon found a suitable project for the nascent cinema department: an educational film about how to change over to generator power when the Japanese power grid failed (which was fairly often). Edlund and a pal prepped, gaffed and shot the film in the base’s generator room, “but when it came time to demonstrate how to start the generator, we couldn’t flip any switches except one, or we’d disrupt power all over Opposite: ASC Presidents Award honoree Richard Edlund, ASC poses with one of the tools of his trade. This page, left: The cinematographer mans a camera while working for Joseph Westheimer, ASC, his first Hollywood employer. Below: Stationed in Japan by the U.S. Navy, young Edlund visits Tokyo Tower in 1960. Photos courtesy of Richard Edlund. American Cinematographer 57
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