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James Wong Howe
In the USA from 1904, Howe worked his way up from the position of janitor at the Lasky Studios in 1917 to become one of the greatest, and most prolific, Hollywood cinematographers of all time. His achievement seems today all the more remarkable given the paucity of people of Asian descent who were able to obtain major positions in the Hollywood system. The list of directors with whom he worked reads like a history of American cinema, stretching from Victor Fleming and Allan Dwan in the 1920s to Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer in the 60s, with a number of landmark figures in between.