Gordon Willis

Born into a motion picture family (his father was a make-up artist at the Warner Bros. studio in Brooklyn), pioneering director of photography Gordon Willis began as a still photographer and spent four years in the motion picture unit of the US Air Force, photographing instructional films on topics ranging from survival in the jungle to how to use a machine gun. After military service, he worked in NYC as a cameraman on documentaries and commercials before getting his first opportunity to work as cinematographer on Aram Avakian's "The End of the Road" (1970, adapted from the novel by John Barth), for which he attracted some attention with the tour-de-force psychedelic montages he managed to execute at minimal expense. Though he drew praise for his color lensing on Hal Ashby's flashy directorial debut "The Landlord" (also 1970) and for his artfully composed shots in "Klute" (1971, his first of six collaborations with Alan J. Pakula) which masked off much of the frame width to emphasize a point, he first came to prominence for his contribution to Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" (1972) and "The Godfather Part II" (1974). Although Willis retired in the late 1990s, he remained so respected among cinema fans that his 2014 death brought a slew of tributes and remembrances.