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50 P E R S P E C T I V E | S E P T E M B E R / O C TO B E R 2 0 1 6 Above: A complex visual effects shot laid out by Production Designer Robert Boyle and Illustrator Harold Michelson for WINTER KILLS (1979) involved a hanging miniature in the foreground, a full-size ramp forty feet below with the actors (Anthony Perkins and Jeff Bridges), and a painted backing on the floor ten feet below that, all filmed from the grid on Stage 30 at MGM. Opposite page: Mr. Zsigmond at his first photo exhibition in Hungary, at the Ludwig Museum of Budapest on April 10, 2015. together as director of photography and Production Designer. I did have the chance to work as a Production Designer with his cinematographer blood brother, Lazlo Kovacs, on Mask. Vilmos and Lazlo "acquired" a camera and reels of unexposed film from their film school in Hungary and filmed the Russian Invasion of their homeland in 1956. They escaped across the border to Austria and eventually made their way to New York City, where they sold the film to CBS News. It provided the network with exclusive inside coverage of the invasion for a Walter Cronkite special report. Their cinematic coup also brought them fame in Hollywood where they took up with Roger Corman, the famous low-budget movie producer, who was eventually recognized for giving "half of the country's great filmmakers" their start. There is a wonderful documentary that you might find on your favorite website called No Subtitles Necessary: Lazlo & Vilmos (2008). You would enjoy it, and a few other titles too: Light Is Everything and Silhouettes in Shadow and Light, among them. Vilmos jumped directly from film school in Hungary to the limelight of Hollywood. He brought a great talent and an innate understanding of the physics of dramatic lighting. He learned on the job the special tricks of cinematography: lighting backings, visual effects like matte shots, hanging miniatures, optical dissolves, rain effects, etc. He was experimenting with these first-time efforts not as a camera assistant or an intern but as the director of photography. Generous gaffers, grips, Production Designers, editors and producers helped him along. If anyone in that group had an ego that was too big and they wouldn't help, the results were usually bad. These early glitches made him cautious and unwilling to turn on the camera if he felt he could not deliver the most elegant shot. He was wary of filmmaking partners who didn't seem cooperative, but he always delivered great cinema as far as most of us were concerned. He would dwell on a single bad visual effect in a film like Deliverance rather than enjoy the gorgeous compositions he captured in natural light. Audiences loved his visual storytelling and his emotion- evoking lighting, but he despaired the bad advice and poor help he got on the optical rain effects. When I met him on Winter Kills in the mid-1970s, I was working with Bob Boyle, one of the finest Production Designers in the business. He was cautious with us because of some bad experiences he had had with other designers, but eventually, he realized that Bob and he were both straightforward filmmakers only interested in helping each other tell director Bill Richert's story. The two formed a great partnership and delivered wonderful images together, and I got to be there as the go-between. Bob and I designed an in-camera effect for a shot that established part of the communications headquarters of a character named Cerruti (Anthony Perkins), who stored all the potential blackmail information on everyone in the world in a huge silo for his boss, the