The 86-year-old Owen Roizman, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer who worked with Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin to create films in the 1970s, has passed away.
The American Society of Cinematographers shared the information on its official social media platforms.
Roizman, who was born in Brooklyn in 1936, developed an early interest in photography. Roizman started working in a camera rental shop as a teenager before making his feature film debut as a cinematographer on Bill Gunn’s “Stop!” in 1970. His father was a camera operator for news broadcasts.
His filmography from the 1970s featured some of the most important pieces across several genres. The second feature film Roizman directed, “The French Connection,” by William Friedkin, is regarded as one of the all-time great car chase flicks.
Filmmakers continue to be influenced by Roizman and Friedkin’s ability to blend spectacle and realism in the film’s famous chase scenes through the streets of New York City.
When they reunited two years later for “The Exorcist,” a movie that still has some of the most recognized scenes in horror movie history, the two men saw comparable success in the horror genre.
Roizman continued to work steadily on some of the most popular films of the 1970s, including “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and “Three Days of the Condor.” His career reached another artistic high point when he shot Sidney Lumet’s newsroom satire “Network” in 1976, famously juxtaposing the synthetic brightness of TV news studios with dark colors in a way that created a disorienting effect.
Roizman was an active member of the cinematography community throughout his life, serving on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and as president of the American Society of Cinematographers.
While Roizman did his most famous work in the 1970s, he continued to be a prominent cinematographer until his retirement in 1995. Some memorable credits in his later years included Sydney Pollack’s “Tootsie,” Barry Sonnenfeld’s “The Addams Family,” and Lawrence Kasdan’s “Wyatt Earp,” which earned him his fifth and final Oscar nomination. He received an honorary Academy Award in 2017.