Stanley Cortez
| Stanley Cortez | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 4, 1908 New York City, New York |
| Died | December 23, 1997 (aged 89) Hollywood, California |
| Cause of death | heart attack |
| Occupation | Cinematographer |
| Title | A.S.C. |
| Board member of | A.S.C. President (1985–1986) |
Stanley Cortez, A.S.C. (November 4, 1908 – December 23, 1997) was an American cinematographer. He worked on over seventy films, including Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955), Nunnally Johnson's The Three Faces of Eve (1957), and Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964).
Cortez was born under the surname "Krantz" in New York City and attended New York University. He adopted his professional name, Cortez, to capitalize on the fame of his older brother, Jacob Krantz, who had been transformed into the film matinee idol Ricardo Cortez. He first worked as a designer of elegant sets for several portrait photographers' studios (including that of Edward Steichen), which may well have instilled in him his great talent: a strong feeling for space and an ability to move his camera through that space in such a way as to embody it in film's two-dimensional format. His first job in the film industry was for Pathé News, which later allowed him to give his films a newsreel-like touch when necessary. During the 1920s and the early 1930s, he worked his way up the usual Hollywood cameraman ladder: camera assistant, camera operator, and cinematographer (or first cameraman, a rank he attained in 1936). He managed to work for some of the great Hollywood cameramen, among them Karl Struss, Charles Rosher, and Arthur C. Miller. On the side, Cortez managed to do an experimental film, Scherzo (1932), that drew on the techniques of Slavko Vorkapić; critics have referred to this short as a "symphony of light."
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