American Cinematographer - February 2017 - 79

Photo on p. 78 by Bruce Birmelin. Photos on p. 79 by Peter Polymenakos (top) and Erin Brown (bottom). All images courtesy of Nancy Schreiber, ASC.

Arts, her father a home-movie buff, and
her high school affiliated with the
Cranbrook Academy of Art. Those years
were filled with ceramics, modern dance,
music (she sneaked out to hear Joni
Mitchell at a coffee house at age 14), and
fledgling efforts at photography (one
project: again sneaking out, this time
after the Detroit riot of 1967 to photograph the devastation.)
Also in high school, Schreiber
spent a seminal four months as a
foreign-exchange
student
near
Amsterdam, whose museums drew her
like a magnet. "Seeing the masters -
Rembrandt, Vermeer - and how they
use light, I was very affected by it." And
even while studying psychology, the arts
remained a draw. She took a photography course and shot "crazy black-andwhite, arty abstracts," she says. Through
her involvement in the burgeoning
women's movement, she helped on film
projects, where her interest in the technical side began. She also ran a theater for
the Ann Arbor Film Co-Op. "We
showed all the Nouvelle Vague and
Italian directors, but the only time we
made money was on Bergman and Marx
Brothers films. That theater was my film
education."
Schreiber followed a boyfriend to
New York and landed in a Greenwich
Village sublet on the corner of Bleecker
and MacDougal. "It was the center of all
the insanity of hippiedom and activism.
I had to fight my way to the front door."
She loved New York and stayed.
A crash course in film proved
pivotal. "The students were a few
Vietnam vets and myself," Schreiber
says. "I'm thankful for my teacher, Jim
Pasternak. He was totally inspiring. I just
picked up a movie camera, took risks
- and caught the bug."
A Village Voice ad led to her first
film job: "Production assistant, $50 a
week. They wanted someone with a van"
- which her roommates happened to
have - "so I got hired." The movie, a
political satire called The Werewolf of
Washington, was so understaffed that
Schreiber ended up working as best-boy
electric. "I had no experience. Zip." But

Opposite: Society member Nancy Schreiber is the recipient of this year's ASC Presidents Award.
This page, top: Schreiber measures the light while handholding the camera. Bottom: The
cinematographer operates on a recent shoot.

she learned quickly under gaffer Marty
Andrews and cinematographer Bob
Baldwin, and had her epiphany: "I found
I had an aptitude. I realized that cinematography was so much about light,
which tied in with the art I'd seen all my
life - and I just fell into this exciting
world without looking back. It's weird
how these things happen."
A year later, Schreiber was
recruited to work with co-directors
Shirley MacLaine and Claudia Weill on
The Other Half of the Sky: A China
Memoir. Nominated for an Oscar and
Golden Globe, the documentary follows
a women's group on their kaleidoscopic
www.theasc.com

junket across China in 1973, a year after
Richard Nixon's historic trip. "We took
70 cases of equipment, because there was
nothing there," says Schreiber, who
served as gaffer and periodically took
over AC duties. "I learned how to load
mags. In those days, a lot of documentaries didn't have gaffers, so I'd usually do
both."
Throughout the 1970s and '80s,
Schreiber mixed it up, doing electric for
features, gaffing on documentaries and
commercials, and operating camera. She
credits
producer-director
Mark
Obenhaus with giving her that push.
She'd gaffed on his vérité series Six
February 2017

http://www.theasc.com

American Cinematographer - February 2017

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