Content area
Full Text
Conrad L. Hall, who won his two Oscars in cinematography 30 years apart and had an illustrious 50-year career as a cutting-edge wizard of lens and lighting including bold color experiments enriching nearly three dozen films such as "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "American Beauty" and 2002's "Road to Perdition," died Jan. 4 in Santa Monica, Calif., of complications from bladder cancer. He was 76.
Hall, considered an Oscar contender this year for his work on "Perdition," was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning for 1969's "Butch Cassidy" and 1999's "American Beauty."
Starting in television, it took Hall a good many years to work his way up through the ranks as a cinematographer; his film work, beginning in the mid'60s, was a reaction to the slick, hypercolored style of the studio system. An iconoclast, he claimed to prefer blackand-white to color for storytelling. He would sometimes overexpose the film for a distinctive look, most prominently in "Butch Cassidy."
Producer Richard D. Zanuck, who was head of production at Fox when Hall made "Butch Cassidy" and worked with him on last year's Irish-American mob tale "Road to Perdition," observed: "Every film that he worked on was something beautiful to the eye, and very imaginative. 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. ... He was known for incredible genius."
One of Hall's forays into black-and-white, Richard Brooks"In Cold Blood" (1967), featured a penetrating and stylized use of grays and blacks...