Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1506077
LMGI LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 2023 DOW GRIFFITH M arking out Dow Griffith's lifetime career on a world map reads like a pincushion: Puerto Rico, Iguazu, Macao, Hong Kong, Tenerife, the Philippines, Seattle, Tibet, Fiji. The widely traveled location manager behind films like Proof of Life, The Fountain and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, has explored more than 100 countries over a blockbuster- packed career spanning 65 motion pictures, landscaping many of cinema's most indelible images. Griffith's enthusiasm and creativity have set the scene for movie sites around the world, collecting passport stamps and film credits in far-flung regions like China, Namibia, Honduras, Vladivostok, Vietnam, Samoa, and Machu Picchu. With a background in anthropology, a taste for adventure, a love of learning and a keen eye for situating story, Griffith is a well- seasoned expert in accessing remote and foreign locations. Dow's filmmaking passion was activated as a teen when he borrowed a Super 8 camera and a reel-to-reel recorder to create presentations for high school assemblies. He made anthropological documentaries on 16mm in college before joining the master's program in cinema at USC, where in 1975, he was asked to interview for the unfamiliar role of location manager on the horror classic Carrie. Calling the experience a "huge learning curve," Dow was tasked with showing director Brian De Palma the locations he'd scouted over three days—and impressed De Palma with an innovative shooting strategy for a glassed- in soda shop. His successful work on Carrie would be the starting gun that propelled Dow around the globe for the next 45 years. He and producer Richard Vane worked together from Moses Lake to Canaima on projects Always and Arachnophobia and Dutch, while producer/director Frank Marshall hired Dow on Alive, as well as The Bourne Legacy and The Bourne Supremacy, filmed in Manila and India. He received a COLA in 1999 for his remarkable location work on Disney's live-action/computer-animation movie Dinosaur, for which he filmed in 12 countries over 2½ years. Griffith's other motion picture credits include Ghost in the Shell, The Last Airbender, Crimson Tide, Tropic Thunder, Born in East L.A., Contagion, The Chronicles of Riddick, Mission to Mars, Sleepless in Seattle, The Color of Money, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, The Jerk, Jumanji, and dozens more.