American Cinematographer - February 2017 - 65

Numb3rs photo by Cliff Lipson, courtesy of CBS Broadcasting Inc. Portrait by Owen Roizman, ASC. All images courtesy of Ron Garcia, ASC and the ASC archives.

Opposite: Ron
Garcia, ASC on set
for the "Scorched"
episode of the
series Numb3rs.
This page, left:
Garcia and actor
Sheryl Lee confer
on the "Red
Room" set from
the series Twin
Peaks. Below: A
portrait of Garcia
by Owen Roizman,
ASC.

or Ron Garcia, ASC, it all started
with a favor for a friend. It was 1966,
and Garcia was 26 years old and
happily employed as a design draftsman at McDonnell Douglas, working on
the DC-9 aircraft. He recalls, "My friend
was fiberglassing racing boats, and one of
his clients wanted a promo to show at a
trade show, so my friend said to me,
'Let's go shoot a boat race.' We had no
idea what we were doing, but I knew
someone who'd worked on The Endless
Summer with Bruce Brown, so I called
him for advice. We rented a 16mm
camera from Birns & Sawyer and went
out to Lake Havasu. Little by little, we
figured it all out, and by the end of it, I
was bitten. I fell completely in love with
the whole process and decided to learn
everything I could about it."
At 27, Garcia stepped away from
the aerospace industry, though not without some difficulty. "I'd worked on a few
projects that needed a secret atomic
clearance, so I had to be debriefed, and
those guys refused to believe I was quitting so I could handle props on a Civil
War movie shooting in Bronson Canyon
in Hollywood," he recalls, laughing. "I
said, 'What's wrong with that?! Let me
outta here!'"
Over the next five decades,

through rigorous self-education, hard
work, and a handful of serendipitous
encounters that typify the adage "only in
Hollywood," Garcia forged a filmmaking career that encompassed producing
and/or shooting B movies, including the
drive-in hit Machismo: 40 Graves for 40
Guns; learning the finer points of cinematography at Zoetrope Studios during
production of Francis Ford Coppola's
experimental musical One From the
Heart; shooting television projects for
Michael Mann (Crime Story), David
Lynch (Twin Peaks), and Ridley and
Tony Scott (Numb3rs), among others;
and playing an active role in ASC
Technology Committee initiatives for
10 years. When Garcia receives the
ASC Career Achievement in Television
Award this month, it will cap a list of
honors that includes two Primetime
Emmy nominations, a CableACE
Award and four ASC nominations.
When he reflects on these laurels,
however, Garcia emphasizes that it was
practicality rather than passion that led
him to television and, as his reputation
in the field grew, kept him there. "I
didn't want to be 'typecast' in television,
but I found I was well suited to its pace
and demands as a result of my early lowbudget experiences," says the cinewww.theasc.com

matographer, whose credits also include
the features Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With
Me (AC Sept. '92) and The Great White
Hype.
Garcia's entrée into the union
world was the TV series Hunter (1985),
which he joined in its second season. "A
friend, Stu Segall, from my independent
days had become a TV producer on
Hunter, and he knew I could do a lot
with a little, so he called me up. On my
February 2017

http://www.theasc.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 2017