American Cinematographer - September 2008 - (Page 62) A Tale of 2 Cinematographers but he notes he first received wide recognition in Europe. In 1973, when he was still relatively unknown in the States, he was nominated for the BAFTA cinematography award for three separate films: Deliverance, Images and McCabe & Mrs. Miller. “It was a good year,” Zsigmond says with a laugh. Five years later, in 1978, Zsigmond won an Oscar for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In an ironic interlude in No Subtitles Necessary, Chressanthis recounts the producers’ repeated attempts to fire Zsigmond throughout the production. When things went wrong, Chressanthis muses, “they had to blame it on somebody; the producers will certainly not blame it on themselves.” In this case, the producer was the late Julia Phillips, whose 1991 tell-all book, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again, rocked the industry by revealing some startling Hollywood secrets. The disagreement between Zsigmond and Phillips on Close Encounters centered on the amount of light needed for the film’s climactic ending, when the alien mothership lands. Throughout the film, Zsigmond indicated the aliens’ presence with powerful light sources, and his lighting list for the final sequence was both awesome and expensive. His goal was to overexpose the mothership by three full stops. “We ended up using at least 20 Brutes and 40 10Ks,” Zsigmond recalls, explaining that a Brute arc lamp is roughly the equivalent of a 40K. “There was a huge search to replace Vilmos on Close Encounters,” says Chressanthis. “They asked every cinematographer, and no one would take the job. One reason was loyalty and respect — you didn’t go behind someone’s back and take a job. The No Subtitles producers Zachary Kranzler (far left) and Tony Frere (far right) flank Chressanthis (second from left) and filmmaker Ray Dennis Steckler, who hired Kovacs as an assistant cameraman on the 1964 exploitation picture The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? not alone in their experimentation. “There were all these experiments going on for how to make film look different, less contrasty, less saturated, and [future ASC members] Conrad Hall, Haskell Wexler and Johnny Alonzo were all doing it, too.” Zsigmond’s career flowered, 62 http://www.kinoflo.com
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