American Cinematographer - March 2009 - (Page 59) Jeannot was doing,” he remembers. “One Sunday morning, he called me up to see about having breakfast at Canter’s, and he asked if I’d do the film. We had a great relationship on the film, but oddly enough, I never worked with him again, nor with any of the executives on that film. They never called me back, and I’ve never known why!” Mankofsky still marvels at Seymour’s photogenic quality. “No matter how you lit her, she looked gorgeous,” he says. “The light just wrapped around her. Of all the actresses I’ve photographed, she was the easiest.” Somewhere in Time didn’t do particularly well in its theatrical release, but it eventually caught on in secondary markets and gained a cult following. Avid fans of the film hold an annual convention at the shoot’s location, Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Mich. Mankofsky soon shot another feature, Richard Fleischer’s The Jazz Singer (1980), and then photographed several telefilms, including Portrait of a Showgirl (1982), In the Custody of Strangers (1982) and The Burning Bed (1984). In 1985, he hooked up with director Savage Steve Holland to shoot the comedy Better Off Dead, starring John Cusack. The film was a hit, and Warner Bros. ordered up another Holland/Cusack picture, One Crazy Summer. Mankofsky recalls, however, that Cusack refused to do some of the gags in the second picture. “A lot of the material that was really good isn’t in the movie,” says the cinematographer. “Or, if it’s in the film, it isn’t the way it was supposed to have been done.” On both comedies, Holland managed to stick Mankofsky in front of the camera. “In One Crazy Summer, he had me brushing the teeth of the fake dolphin, and he also had me inside the thing to film in the water,” he says. “In Better Off Dead, I’m the neighbor in an aardvark coat, cutting the hedges.” Sandwiched between those comedies was a George Lucas TV spectacle, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985), a sequel to The Ewok Adventure. On The Ewok Adventure, producer Thomas G. Smith had called Mankofsky to shoot the second unit for Industrial Light & Magic; the two had worked together at Britannica. “Tom is one of the most loyal people I’ve worked for,” Mankofsky notes. “Whenever he had the opportunity, he’d try to get me on a film.” When John Korty, director of Ewok Adventure, had to leave the production early due to a scheduling conflict, “George Lucas decided to direct the rest of it, and I shot that material,” recalls Mankofsky. “George is a very, very nice man but an impatient director. He’s a lot like me; when something 59 http://www.sae.edu
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