Hal Mohr

Trivia

• Even though the movies had learned to talk, Mohr showed how they need not stop moving.
• Particularly in Broadway, there is startling use of the moving camera: Mohr pioneered the extensive usage of boom and dolly shots, resulting in complicated, dazzling visuals that are among the most stunning examples of early Hollywood expressionism.
• It also was around this time that he designed a camera crane that remained in use for years.
• According to the New York Evening Journal, 10 April 1937, "Last week it was rising up, rearing back, pirouetting and generally behaving like a cross between a drunken ballerina and a ferris wheel, garnering in wild shots of rioting in German streets after the Armistice for (Universal's) super-production of The Road Back."
• By the 1940s and 1950s, Mohr had become a master of creating just the right visuals to mirror a film's mood, whether that mood be eerie (in The Phantom of the Opera), solemn (Watch on the Rhine), or stark and cool (The Wild One). The 1930s, however, was the cinematographer's most innovative decade.
• Cinematographer Hal Mohr was an expert at serving the director by creating whatever look or visual effect that director required for his film.
• He was one of Hollywood's outstanding innovators with regard to photographic technique, and he is the only person ever to earn an Academy Award on a write-in vote (for 1935's A Midsummer Night's Dream; he also won an Oscar in 1943 for The Phantom of the Opera).
• In an era when most film people remained employed by one studio, Mohr jumped from backlot to backlot; from the 1950s on, he worked mainly in television.
• A majority of the scores of films he shot during his 50-odd years as a director of photography were made during the sound era, beginning symbolically with The Jazz Singer in 1927.
• One of only six cinematographers to have a star on the famous "Hollywood Walk of Fame," the others are, J. Peverell Marley, Ray Rennahan, Leon Shamroy, Haskell Wexler, and Conrad L. Hall.

Quotes

• " they were instantly popular. This beginning finally led to Hollywood. . . . "
• "I sold some of these to our motion picture theater"
• "I get hundreds of letters from boys wanting to know how to become studio cameramen"