American Cinematographer - October 2011 - 63

He was selected to staff the machine shop, where he spent the next four years converting 35mm wind-up Eyemos and 16mm Filmos and Auricons for handheld use on the battlefield. The Signal Corps station served as a school whose faculty included some of the most prestigious names in cinema. “Stanley Cortez [ASC] prided himself on teaching those soldiers the craft,” DiBona recalls. “He finally made it to PFC, and a lot of the guys who worked with him were officers. He was always yelling at them, telling them what to do with the camera. They listened, of course!” During his time at the Photographic Center, DiBona also met fellow soldier and future ASC cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld. After the war, DiBona and Hirschfeld accepted civilian positions in the Signal Corps. When the U.S. ramped up its atomic-bomb program, DiBona was one of the cameramen present in Nevada for the first tests. He and others photographed the explosions from “News Knob,” a mesa about 7 miles from ground zero. “I went out there twice,” DiBona recalls. “We didn’t get too close, although we were close enough to get knocked off our feet.” DiBona left the Signal Corps in 1955 to take a position as a camera technician with Camera Equipment Co. (known as CECO) in Manhattan. “It was the biggest camera company in New York,” he says. CECO introduced DiBona to the world of Hollywood filmmaking. Commercials were also making money in New York, and CECO did big business with the companies producing content for the ad agencies on Madison Avenue. One of these companies was MPO, a commercial production house that had a staff of cinematographers and its own cameras, mainly 35mm Mitchell NCs and BNCs. Future ASC member Owen Roizman worked at CECO as a technician for two summers, in 1955-56, and then later assisted Hirschfeld at MPO. He recalls sitting in on breakfasts with

Opposite: General Camera co-founder Richard DiBona (second from left) poses with Panavision executives (from left) Egon Stephan Sr., founder of CineVideoTech Inc., which represented Panavision in Florida; Sydney Samuelson, founder of England’s Samuelson Film Service, which represented Panavision in Europe and Australia; Robert Gottschalk, who co-founded Panavision in 1953; and Mel Hoppenheim, founder of Panavision Canada. Following General Camera’s success in the 1960s, Panavision offered the company exclusive distribution of Panaflex cameras on the East Coast. Above: DiBona (fourth from left) is surrounded by a group of Signal Corps enlisted men at the U.S. Army’s Photographic Center in Queens.

his father, Sol, who was a cinematographer for Fox Movietone News, and DiBona. “Dick has such a dynamic personality, and he’s fantastic with cameras,” Roizman says. “Whenever there was a tough technical question about cameras, even the pros turned to him.” CECO founder Frank Zucker left the company to his son, Burt, who died in a plane crash in 1961. This prompted the sale of CECO’s assets to another New York camera house, Florman & Babb, which renamed itself F&B CECO. Without the Zuckers in charge, DiBona decided it was time to strike out on his own, and at the invitation of CECO salesman Milton Keslow, he helped start up General Camera. “In the beginning,” says Keslow, “all we had was a name and a dream.” The company’s first customer was Hirschfeld. “Dick and Milton bought a Mitchell NC and were trying to rent it out,” he recalls. “I was then the vice president at MPO, and I told them I’d rent the camera, leave it at the studio and
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give them whatever they wanted for the year. We took their camera, and they took our money and immediately bought another Mitchell.” General Camera’s first office was at the corner of 7th Avenue and 48th Street, above the legendary Cafe Metropolé. In 1962, the company’s staff comprised DiBona and Keslow, along with DiBona’s wife, Anne Marie, who handled the books, and Joe Malavenda, a young machinist. One year later, DiBona hired a young German engineer named Fred Schuler (future ASC). Schuler had started out working for Arri in Munich, and he was 24 when he joined General Camera. One of his first tasks was to build a noiseless mirror-reflex viewing system. Some 35mm cameras used a prism to direct the image through a viewfinder, but the glass would absorb and refract precious light before it reached the film plane. The Arri 35IIC, an old camera by that time, used a reflex viewing system, but the gear-driven rotating shutter was too loud for sync-sound production. Most of the 35mm motionOctober 2011 63

Photos courtesy of Owen Roizman, Richard DiBona and Craig DiBona.

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American Cinematographer - October 2011

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