American Cinematographer - March 2009 - (Page 57) try that “he has influenced my framing ever since!” Mankofsky spent 17 years trying to join the camera guild, to no avail. When a group of cameramen filed a lawsuit that ultimately broke down the union’s wall of nepotism, Mankofsky, who wasn’t part of the suit, was grandfathered in. That led to his first union picture, American International Pictures’ Scream Blacula Scream (1973). On that picture, the dilemma was shooting a dark-skinned actor, William Marshall, who was wearing a mostly black costume at night. “In my days at Britannica, I shot with Kodachrome, which was a very contrasty film,” Mankofsky recalls. “I had learned to be very careful with my lighting because Kodachrome didn’t have much latitude, maybe 1 stop, and then you were in trouble. Print stocks at the time weren’t very good; they were also contrasty. I had to get the contrast down, and I did that by having the lab flash the film.” Flashing the film, which brings up detail in the blacks but does not affect highlights, would have some producers breaking into cold sweats, but the powers-that-be had no idea Mankofsky had instructed the lab to do such a process. In that era, he notes, producers were more handsoff. “They weren’t quite as dictatorial as they are now,” he jokes. In 1975, Mankofsky started working at Universal TV. His agent had received a call from a production that was seeking a feature cameraman to shoot a pilot, and from then on, Mankofsky was pigeonholed as a TV cinematographer, a tag he felt he never shook completely. “I felt like it held me back,” he says. “I stuck to my guns in not shooting series.” He specialized in miniseries and telefilms; his credits in those genres include Captains and Kings (1976), Columbo: How to Dial a Murder (1978), Goldie and the Boxer (1979) and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (1981). ¢ Top: The ABC movie-of-theweek version of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound remained stagebound, utilizing a twostory set of interiors and exteriors. Here, Mankofsky takes a light reading on Hume Cronyn, who won an Emmy for his supporting role. Middle: Director Debbie Allen toasts Mankofsky before dragging him in front of the camera and onto the dance floor for a scene in Walt Disney Television’s Polly: Comin’ Home! (1990). Bottom: A giant among miniatures, Mankofsky takes a reading on the set of Too Loud a Solitude (2007) before shooting the crane shot that opens the film. Based on Bohumil Hrabal’s book, the film uses rod puppets to enact the tale of a simple man who saves books from destruction in communist Czechoslovakia. At the time, Mankofsky had shot every kind of puppet except rod puppets. “They were the hardest to work with because the rods were quite objectionable at times,” he recalls. American Cinematographer 57
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