RIP Bill Butler

 

Bill Butler, Cinematographer on ‘Jaws’, Dies at 101

The Oscar nominee shot the first film ever directed by William Friedkin and replaced Haskell Wexler on 'The Conversation' and 'Cuckoo's Nest.'

The Hollywood Reporter

By Rhett Bartlett

April 6, 2023

 

Bill Butler, the self-taught, Oscar-nominated cinematographer whose work on the landmark 1975 horror film Jaws unleashed a wave of anxiety for beachgoers that lasts to this day, has died. He would have turned 102 on Friday.

Butler died Wednesday evening in Los Angeles, according to the American Society of Cinematographers. He is survived by five daughters and his wife, Iris.

During his five-decade career, Butler also shot Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969) and The Conversation (1974); Peter Hyams’ Capricorn One (1977); Randal Kleiser’s hit musical Grease (1978); and Rocky II (1979), Rocky III (1982) and Rocky IV (1985), all written and directed by and starring Sylvester Stallone.

On another noteworthy 1975 release, Butler replaced the fired Haskell Wexler midway through production on Milos Forman‘s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Both shared an Oscar cinematography nomination for their work.

Butler also had replaced Wexler on The Conversation after creative differences forced Wexler off that production early on.

Butler also lensed the first film William Friedkin ever directed as well as Jack Nicholson’s 1971 helming debut, Drive, He Said; the horror sci-fi Demon Seed (1977); the skating drama Ice Castles (1978); the 1980 musical Can’t Stop the Music; the Ivan Reitman comedy Stripes (1981); and the 1997 scary snake picture Anaconda.

Butler had collaborated with Steven Spielberg on his early 1970s telefilms Something Evil, featuring Sandy Dennis and Darren McGavin, and Savage, starring Martin Landau. He bumped into the director by happenstance in the Universal Studios parking lot one day and said, “I hear you are making a movie about a fish.”

For Jaws, Butler said his intention was for the early scenes on Amity Island to reflect the style of Andrew Wyeth paintings — regional and realistic — and later contrast them with darker, violent imagery.

His iconic shots included the early dawn attack of the first victim (Susan Backlinie) that opens the film, the Vertigo-inspired dolly zoom that accompanies Chief Brody’s (Roy Scheider) shock at witnessing a shark attack from the beach and the extreme close-ups of panicking swimmers.

“I brought a lot of new things to the picture, such as hand-holding the camera,” Butler noted in Patrick Jankiewicz’s 2015 book, Just When You Thought It Was Safe: A Jaws Companion.

“In the old days of making sea pictures, they used a giant gimbal, which weighs roughly 400 pounds and is slow and hard to set up but does keep the camera level. I found, just by experimenting, that I could hand-hold the camera on an oceangoing boat and keep it level simply by using my knees. I told Steven that I had this idea about shooting the picture hand-held, and he just fainted.”

As second-unit photographer on John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), Butler shot stunt footage and the opening-title sequence as the camera skims across the river, an experience that heavily influenced his Jaws approach.

Butler recalled how Deliverance cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond filmed the famed rapids sequence, then approached Panavision to construct a waterproof plastic and glass floating box that would enable him to shoot at ocean level for Jaws.

“We were able to dip just slightly into the water to show the audience a scene from the shark’s perspective,” he said in 2005. “The dangling legs of swimmers looked like dinner to the shark. Panavision also provided an underwater camera. It was enormous but very stable underwater and easy to operate.”

Production problems on the set of Jaws became legendary. The movie began without a completed script, the giant mechanical shark malfunctioned, and the planned 55-day shoot ballooned to 159 days with a wildly overblown budget that more than doubled to approach $9 million. Spielberg feared he would be fired at any moment.

“I said to Steve, ‘I’ll tell you something, it’s been a week and we’re still here. You have absolutely nothing to worry about. They must think we’ve got a great project going here or we would be gone, because we’re over further than any picture at Universal has ever gone over!’ “

Despite all the setbacks, Jaws received Oscar nominations for picture, score, editing and sound (eventually winning all but the top award), but Butler’s name went missing from the cinematography category. The summer blockbuster became the highest-grossing film of all time ($470 million) until surpassed by 1977’s Star Wars.

Wilmer Butler was born on April 7, 1921, in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and raised in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. He said his earliest film memory was watching The Jazz Singer (1927) when he was 6.

Years after graduating with a degree in engineering from the University of Iowa, Butler was working as a cameraman doing live shows and commercials for WGN-TV in the early 1960s when he met Friedkin, then a floor manager at the Chicago station.

BUTLER, Bill (Wilmer Butler)

Born: 4/7/1921, Cripple Creek, Colorado, U.S.A.

Died: 4/5/2023, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

 

Bill Butler’s westerns – music consultant, cinematographer:

Good Times -1967 [music consultant]

Running Wild – 1973 [cinematographer]