Welles cinematographer Gary Graver is dead [blog post, 2006]

Film Welles cinematographer Gary Graver is dead

Posted By Jonathan Rosenbaum on 11.20.06 at 09:30 PM

 

 

Some very sad news from late last week: Gary Graver, the cinematographer who virtually made the last third of Orson Welles’s filmography possible, died Thursday night of throat cancer. He’d been in the hospital since June, after shooting his last film, a short, in the south of France—work he characteristically insisted on doing, in spite of his poor health, out of friendship. For anyone who knew Gary, he was just about as selfless, as generous, and as unpretentious as it’s possible for someone to be. I think it’ll be years before many people realize just how much he did for Welles—which means how much he did for all of us, even though much of this work, such as The Other Side of the Wind, will remain unseeable until someone is willing to pay for its completion. (Among the better known films he shot were F for Fake.) When I was editing This Is Orson Welles, he was endlessly helpful, in every way imaginable.

His association with Welles started around 1969, when he basically turned up on Welles’s doorstep, offering not only to shoot whatever he wanted but to help him acquire the equipment he needed for doing so. Read more