Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1351516
C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I S P R I N G 2 0 2 1 21 Your childhood was definitely unique… From the time I was 5 years old, I hadn't lived with my parents. My mother was subpoenaed to the House of Un-American Activities—she felt it was her greatest accomplishment for her very left-wing, public, social speeches. Because my father was a production manager at MGM Studios—and because blacklisting was rampant—my mother had to leave the U.S. so that my father could keep his job. I lived with many different people in the most interesting situations. One nanny took my sister and I on the road for several years. It did concern my father, who was working for Fox Studios in London—and it concerned law enforcement. But it was actually the best education and loving concern I ever received. A minor downfall was that I never learned how to read. I did deal with that, much later in life. One can't ask for everything. What was high school like? I went to a private boarding school in Ojai, CA. It was started by Jiddu Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley. It was very, very small. There was no grade delineation, no letter grades, no competition of any form, no scorekeeping in sports, no TV or outside newspapers, no popular music—just classical music performed for us every morning with a meditation to follow. It was very different than where I had come from. I was a punk! I had a "screw you" attitude with Lucky Strikes rolled up in my shoulder sleeve. I was fi lled with so much angst and low self-esteem. I got thrown out the fi rst day! My dad came up and they decided to give me a second chance. How did you turn things around? The hottest thing a guy could do there was to be on the dance tour… I soon found myself touring California with a Ukrainian folk dance group. After four years of this, I was different. I became their student body president and wrote their constitution. I am on the Executive Board of the school today. [Another chain of events that infl uenced me was that] from 13 to 18, the fi rst half of my summer was spent moving and working with California's migrant fruit workers. I moved with the workers up the Central Valley. I was protesting the short hoe controversy involving Cesar Chavez, so fi eld workers wouldn't have to stoop over their entire workday. My stepfather was the wealthy farmer who was on the other side of all this controversy. I'd fl y with him in his private plane to work and I would go off in my political direction. He never noticed. The second half of the year, I would visit my father in Europe, on the set of Cleopatra and so many others, staying at the most luxurious hotels in the world. Did your dad want you to follow in his footsteps and work in the movie industry? As I was brought up on the set, I had an early sense of how movies were made. But I don't think my dad wanted me in the fi lm business. He was always on location and he saw what it does to families. He'd done Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and The Ten Commandments. But he did buy me a Nagra 4L when I was graduating from college and I thought, "How do you operate this thing? It's so complicated." Weren't you actually a camera operator before becoming a mixer? James Wong, who was the gardener in Chinatown, was producing a Taiwanese fi lm that was shot primarily in the U.S. He got a list of what he thought was potential cinematographers, but it was really the waiting list to get into fi lm school. So, he called me and asked if I would like to shoot his fi lm. I said, "Absolutely!" I guess I'd seen enough setups to understand a master, a two- shot, an over-the-shoulder, and a single. It was $50/week to shoot and it was a wonderful experience. Coming from fi lm school, the nonunion world, and Roger Corman, William Kaplan in his early DP days In addition to our correspondence by phone and email, I cited an in-depth video interview with Kaplan by Jake Slaney CAS and his company, SoundsAdventurous LTD, and also pulled some excerpts from Bill's CAS podcast interview with moderator Peter Devlin CAS. (https://cinemaaudiosociety.org/podcasts/) This piece contains some highlights.