A few days after the passing of legendary dp Haskell Wexler, the great Vilmos Zsigmond — a contemporary of Wexler’s whose career also flourished during the auteurist heyday of the 1970s — has died at age 85. Zsigmond’s sterling reputation largely rests upon groundbreaking photography he captured in films released between 1971 to ’81. During this decade he shot Robert Altman‘s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (a sombre, lantern-lit, snow-sprinkled western — probably Zsigmond’s best work), John Boorman‘s Deliverance (which used a rarely-seen desaturated color scheme), Altman’s The Long Goodbye (one of my favorite L.A. mood films), Steven Spielberg‘s The Sugarland Express, Jerry Schatzberg‘s Scarecrow, Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Michael Cimino‘s The Deer Hunter, Mark Rydell‘s The Rose, Cimino’s disastrous Heaven’s Gate and Brian De Palma‘s Blowout.
After Blowout (which I’ve never been a fan of) it was like the air just whooshed out and Zsigmond was stuck shooting…well, films that were nowhere near as good. Jinxed!, The River, The Witches of Eastwick, The Bonfire of the Vanities (the fuck?), Sliver, Intersection, Maverick (a $75 million Elvis Presley film), Assassins, The Ghost and the Darkness, Playing by Heart, Life as a House, Jersey Girl, Melinda and Melinda, The Black Dahlia, Cassandra’s Dream and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. What happened?