CONRAD L. HALL

"Road to Perdition" [2001]

1990

Born: 21 June 1926, Papeete, Tahiti, as Conrad Lafcadio Hall, son of 'Mutiny on the Bounty' co-author James Norman Hall [1887-1951].

Education: Cinema Department of the University of Southern California [USC] [graduated in 1949].

Career: Formed Canyon Films with his USC classmates Marvin R. Weinstein and Jack C. Couffer. They prod 'Sea Theme' [1949], a USC class project, which was cut down to 15 minutes and sold to tv. The film won the First Prize in the USC amateur filmmaker contest. Won the ASC Student Scholarship in 1950. In 1956 Canyon Films produced the feature film 'My Brother Down There/Running Target', which was ph and co-written by Hall. Canyon Films was dissolved in 1957. Co-operated with doph Richard Moore [also a student of USC] in Arriflex Imports. Moore: 'We didn't sell a single camera. The heads of the studio camera departments thought they were too noisy, and couldn't conceive of using a handheld camera.' Joined the International Photographers Guild and became c.asst and c.op. Became doph for producer-director Leslie Stevens on the tv-series 'Stoney Burke' [Working with Ted McCord on 'Private Property', Hall got to know writer-director Leslie Stevens, who went on to do the television series 'Stoney Burke' [McCord didn't want to do episodic television, even though it was shot on film, but ABC-tv wouldn't go for camera operator Hall. For Hall's sake, McCord agreed to do the first six episodes while Hall did 2u photography, which gained him first cameraman status and ABC's respect. After six shows, Hall would become the main man. Unfortunately, McCord became ill on the fifth episode, although it ultimately benefited Hall.] & 'The Outer Limits'. In the mid-1970s he formed, together with doph Haskell Wexler, Wexler-Hall Inc. for the production of commercials, which were often dir by CH. He didn't ph feature films for almost 11 years [1975-86].

Was member of the ASC since 1967. Was married to actress Katharine Ross [1969-75]. Was honored with the 2,224th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 28 April 2003. His son Conrad W. Hall is a doph.

Appeared in the doc's 'The Making of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"' [1970, Robert L. Crawford; ph: Ronald Priessman], 'Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography' [1991], 'American Beauty: Look Closer...' [2000, Barbara Toennies] & 'The Making of "Road to Perdition"' [2002, Danny Miller; ph: Sovonto Green].

Awards: 'Oscar' AA nom [1965; b&w] for 'Morituri'; 'Oscar' AA nom [1966; color] for 'The Professionals'; 'Oscar' AA nom [1967] for 'In Cold Blood'; 'Oscar' AA [1969] & BAFTA Film Award [1971] for 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'; 'Oscar' AA nom [1975] for 'The Day of the Locust'; BSC Award nom [1976] for 'Marathon Man'; ASC Award [1989] & 'Oscar' AA nom [1989] for 'Tequila Sunrise'; ASC Award [1994], Camerimage 'Bronze Frog' Award [1994] & 'Oscar' AA nom [1994] for 'Searching for Bobby Fischer'; ASC Lifetime Achievement Award [1994]; Camerimage Lifetime Achievement Award [1995]; ASC Award nom [1995] for 'Love Affair'; 'Oscar' AA nom [1999] for 'A Civil Action'; 'Oscar' AA Award [2000], BAFTA Film Award [2000], ASC Award [2000] & BSC Award [2000] for 'American Beauty'; National Board of Review, USA, 'Career Achievement Award' [2002]; Camerimage 'Golden Frog' Award [2002], 'Oscar' AA [2003], ASC Award [2003] & BAFTA Film Award [2003] for 'Road to Perdition'.

The period from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s was a particularly rich time for American cinematographers, who were called upon to help a new generation of directors explore different ways of visualizing film genres. Among the most prestigious who emerged during that era was Conrad Hall, who has died aged 76.

"Cinematography is just the language of storytelling; it's not academics, it's not literature, it's just pictures," he once explained. "Of course, it's a very complex language. The piano has only 88 keys, but just think about what they can do. Likewise, the few things that cinematographers have to work with can create nuances in the story that are infinite and just as complex as music."

Hall was once asked how he knew where to point his camera. "I point it at the story," he replied. "I'm not trying to characterize the people in the film; the actors do that. I'm trying to frame them in an appropriate emotional context for the scenes."

Hall, who was named after the writer Joseph Conrad, saw himself as a storyteller, perhaps not surprising for the son of James Norman Hall, the author of 'Mutiny on the Bounty' and 'The Hurricane'. "I found that I could be a storyteller like my father, but by using visuals."

Born in Tahiti, where his father was researching his book, Hall went to live with relatives in San Diego at the age of eight after his father decided he needed a good American education. Many years later, he settled on the family estate on Tahiti. After studying journalism at the University of Southern California, he took a film course. As assistant and camera operator, he worked steadily from the mid-1950s on US television shows.

He first worked with Paul Newman on 'Harper' and 'Cool Hand Luke', and Newman was so impressed that he asked for Hall on 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'. Katharine Ross, the film's female star, became Hall's wife from 1969 to 1975.

After two films for John Schlesinger, Hall retired from big-screen work for 11 years, before working on Bob Rafelson's thriller, 'Black Widow'. In the interim, he ran a commercial production house with fellow cinematographer Haskell Wexler, and began planning to adapt and direct 'The Wild Palms', from the William Faulkner novel, the rights of which he owned. He was still trying to get the project off the ground at the time of his death.

He is survived by his wife, his son Conrad W. Hall, also a cinematographer, and two daughters. [From obituary by Ronald Bergan in The Guardian, January 10, 2003.]

'One of the great cinematographers and a master of light.' The director of 'American Beauty', Sam Mendes, was extravagant in his praise of Hall's work and the contribution he made to the success of the film, Mendes's first. Hall photographed the second film directed by Mendes, the period gangster movie 'Road to Perdition', produced by Richard Zanuck, who said, "With 'Road to Perdition', you could virtually take every frame of his work and blow it up and hang it over your fireplace. It was like Rembrandt at work."

[Hall] attended the University of Southern California with the intention of taking up journalism, but, after showing little aptitude in creative writing classes, he looked for another subject. Last year he told The Los Angeles Times that he did so by flipping through the university's course catalogue: "It started with A for astronomy, B for biology and C for cinema. I thought, 'Cinema? You mean like movies? Rubbing shoulders with stars? Making all that money?' For all the wrong reasons, I signed up, and then had a love affair with the visual language and learned to tell stories like my dad." One of Hall's teachers at USC was the Yugoslavian montage expert Slavko Vorkapich.

One of the first major films on which Hall received sole credit was 'Morituri'. Directed by Bernhard Wicki, a German director working for the first time in Hollywood, the black-and-white film was poorly received, with only the cast and Hall's strikingly vivid camerawork winning praise. Another black-and-white film lauded for Hall's photography was Richard Brooks's true crime story 'In Cold Blood'. "I started off my career in a sort of naturalistic style, as opposed to an operatic style," said Hall, "and I've refined that over the years to fit the stories."

Hall preferred to work in black-and-white, but by the mid-Sixties most of Hollywood's films were being made in color, and Hall's work on 'Harper', 'The Professionals' and 'Cool Hand Luke' displayed his mastery of the form. Disliking the artificial style of Hollywood lighting, he favored a naturalistic or impressionist approach.

Able to be selective in his assignments, he liked to work on projects about "moral and ethical dilemmas". "I look for stories about humanity," he said, "about choices a person has to make. I don't like thrillers. They're not made about the human condition. They exist to torture you."

Hall was to receive nine Oscar nominations during his 50-year career [and may well receive another for 'Road to Perdition']. He won his second award for his surreal evocation of the world of a dysfunctional family in 'American Beauty'. "This was Sam Mendes's first film," he said, "but it never felt like his first film. He's actually a kind of control freak. I mean that in a good way. It's one thing to be directing. It's another to be directing and to have a vision and communicate that. Sam has vision. I helped contribute to that vision and to that wonderful screenplay." The dream-like shot of cascading rose petals featured in the film has already become an iconic image of Nineties cinema, but Hall confessed to some initial trepidation with the project. "I kept asking Sam, 'How are we going to light these people? They're all so unlikeable.'"

"Every film that he worked on was something beautiful to the eye, and very imaginative," said [producer Richard] Zanuck. "Connie was not known for his speed, but neither was Rembrandt. He was known for incredible genius." [From obituary by Tom Vallance in The Independent, January 9, 2003.]

1949 Sea Theme [Conrad L. Hall, Jack Couffer & Marvin Weinstein] b&w; doc/15m; + co-scrpl/co-ed

1951 Nature's Half Acre [James Algar] c; doc/32m; cph: Murl Deusing, Elma & Alfred Milotte, a.o.; time-lapse ph: John Nash

1953 The Living Desert [James Algar] 16mm-35bu/c; doc/73m; uncred co-addph; ph: N. Paul Kenworthy Jr. & Robert

1956 My Brother Down There/Running Target [Marvin Weinstein] c; ph the film but was cred as visual cons; cred ph:

1956 Edge of Fury [Irving Lerner & Robert Gurney Jr.] b&w; cph: Jack Couffer & Marvin Weinstein

1959 Islands of the Sea [Ben Sharpsteen] 16mm-35bu/c; doc/?m; uncred addph; ph: ?

With dir Richard Brooks [right]

"The Professionals"

1965 The Professionals [Richard Brooks] p/c; 'I saw a lot of things I did that were offensive to me when I viewed it again. But

I like it; it's not a badly photographed picture, I don't think. There are certain things though that I had a hard time

dispensing with: things that came from my black-and-white days. For example liners - you have to use them very, very

carefully otherwise they create unreal light... A liner is a light that comes from a reflecting angle. This highlight on my

cheek right now is a liner from that window. You would use this in black-and-white in order to help separate the

background from the foreground. It's a technique you don't have to use in color because color will separate itself. It's

1967 In Cold Blood [Richard Brooks] p/b&w; 'When you come into a darkened room, there is still some visibility there. Even

with the blinds closed, you still have light seeping in from outside. So, first of all, in lighting that sort of thing, you create

the visibility. You have to do that quite precisely with certain kinds of lights hidden around the room. After you've set up

the amount of visibility you want, you bring the flashlight into the room and it produces a different visibility. When it

produces that different visibility, it's not just where it shines that produces the visibility. When it passes across a

fireplace, it's white and suddenly the illumination blooms back at you. And that bloom is occurring out of the frame but

it's still having an effect on the frame. The lighting is changing every second depending on where that flashlight beam is

C. Hall - Lee Marvin - John Boorman - Toshirô Mifune

"Hell in the Pacific"

1968 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid [George Roy Hill] p/c; 2uc: Harold Wellman

1969 [Truman Capote's] Trilogy [seg 'A Christmas Memory' dir by Frank Perry] c; cph: Joseph Brun (seg 'Miriam' & 'Among

1973 The Day of the Locust [John Schlesinger] c; 'After we had decided that the style of the film was going to be romantic

rather than austere and naturalistic, I had to go about achieving that style. One of the ways is to use diffusion to change

the sharpness of the image so it becomes softer-looking and somehow, more comfortable. So this technique is one way

of achieving romanticism. The only difference that John Schlesinger and I had was that he didn't want it to be all golden;

he wanted some contrast and I wanted it to be all golden. There is a blue scene in it. It's the one where they go to the

bar and there's a female impersonator dancing; I wanted that couched in golden tones too but he wanted it blue. We

1987 Scrooged [Richard Donner] scheduled as doph, but replaced by Michael Chapman

1988 Tequila Sunrise [Robert Towne] c; 2uc: Robert Seaman; C. Hall joined the prod after 5 days of shooting

1992 Searching for Bobby Fischer/Innocent Moves [Steven Zaillian] c; addph: Robert Hahn

*From interview with Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato in 'Masters of Light', 1984.

1962 Stoney Burke [20 ep dir by various] series/b&w, 1962-63; other ph: Ted McCord

1963 The Outer Limits [ep #2 'The One Hundred Days of the Dragon' dir by Byron Haskin (BH), #3 'The Architects of Fear' dir

by BH, #4 'The Man with the Power' dir by Laslo Benedek, #6 'The Man Who Was Never Born' dir by Leonard Horn, #7

'O.B.I.T.' dir by Gerd Oswald (GO), #8 'The Human Factor' dir by Abe Biberman, #9 'Corpus Earthling' dir by GO, #11

'It Crawled Out of the Woodwork' dir by GO, #15 'The Mice' dir by GO, #17 'Don't Open Till Doomsday' dir by GO, #18

'Z.Z.Z.Z.Z' dir by John Brahm (JB), #19 'The Invisibles' dir by GO, #20 'The Bellero Shield' dir by JB, #22 'Specimen:

Unknown' dir by GO & #32 'The Forms of Things Unknown' (served as pilot for unsold series 'The Unknown') dir by GO]

49-part series/b&w, 1963-65; 1st season, 1963-64; other ph: John M. Nickolaus Jr. & Kenneth Peach; filmed June

1964 The Ghost of Sierra de Cobra/The Haunted [Joseph Stefano] unsold pilot (b&w/60m) for CBS-tv

1966 Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory [Frank Perry] tvm/51m; cph: Jordan Cronenweth & Vincent Saizis; ep #14 of

1961 Hero's Island/The Land We Love [Leslie Stevens] co-c.op; ph: Ted McCord