American Cinematographer - March 2009 - (Page 55) game to a quartet of noncoms.” Mankofsky, who recently accepted this year’s ASC Presidents Award, was born in New York City and raised in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Chicago. His parents had emigrated from Odessa, Ukraine, in 1923. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, and when he was stationed in Germany, he was assigned to the motor pool. After relentlessly badgering the squadron commander, he received a transfer to special services, where one of his jobs was to take pictures of the base athletic teams for the base magazine. Knowing nothing about photography, he had to learn to shoot, process the film and print the pictures. “You could say that was the beginning of my career in the magical world of motion pictures,” he notes wryly. Following his honorable discharge, Mankofsky enrolled in the Ray Vogue School of Photography in Chicago, but a quick look around revealed a lot of competition. “Then, as now, everyone who picked up a camera thought he was a professional photographer. But motion-picture photography was different — it was magical. It hadn’t dawned on me that it was just 24 still frames per second.” Mankofsky traveled to Santa Barbara, Calif., to enroll in the Brooks Institute of Photography’s motion-picture track. When one of his instructors got a call for an “all-around” person to work at KOLO television station in Reno, Nev., Mankofsky interviewed for the job and was hired. One of his first assignments was to document, on black-and-white 16mm, the new TV-antenna building on Mount Rose. “I still have the film, my first effort as a professional cinematographer,” he notes. He returned to Chicago and worked as an industrial photographer at Stewart Warner Electronics for a short time, and then, just when he Photos courtesy of Isidore Mankofsky. This page, top: In 1970, Mankofsky (right) and director Larry Yust film a sequence in Paris from the rear of a makeshift camera car. The project was a 16mm film version of Ernest Hemingway’s My Old Man, part of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Short Story Showcase series. Middle: Mankofsky lines up an Arriflex 16mm camera while on location at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco for the Encyclopedia Britannica film Seaport, also directed by Yust. Bottom: In 1956, Mankofsky trains his Bolex on legendary playwright Arthur Miller (left) during an interview for KOLO-TV in Nevada. American Cinematographer 55
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