The Consummate Collaborator: Bill Butler (1921-2023) | Tributes

It launched Friedkin’s profession. And although Butler would return to shoot tv typically throughout his profession, when Friedkin went to Hollywood, Bill went with him. While Friedkin was off helming a spoof referred to as “Good Times” (1967) with Sonny & Cher, Bill shot Phil Kaufman’s Frankenstein comedy “Fearless Frank” (1967), notable as Jon Voight’s debut but in addition for Butler’s curiosity within the pure world; his reward for capturing the emotional intimacy of household relationships by easy, unforced framing; his fondness for the sluggish push-in and excessive close-up to amplify rigidity; of key-lighting and even a closing-iris in-camera impact to attract consideration to particulars in a scene; and for taking pictures from excessive excessive and low angles to offer visible curiosity and texture. When freshly-reanimated corpse Frank (Voight) foils a diabolical cat burglar in Fearless Frank, he punches the villain all the way in which up a spiral staircase with one swing. Butler shoots the felon’s dazed mug from above so our sightline tracks all the way in which down and round to Frank, nonetheless on the backside, trying up with one fist raised within the follow-through. Butler wasn’t ostentatious, he was succinct. Everything you wanted to know, you get in a single shot.

In easier phrases, Butler’s approach of seeing, born of modest, tightly-knit roots, a farmer’s love for the outside and an engineer’s and technological auto-didact’s ingenuity, helped to outline the look of the best period of movie within the historical past of the medium. Bill Butler grounded the incomprehensibility of the American ‘70s—the vitality and the cacophony of it; the sensation of change carried earlier than a violent, anarchic gale. Already 46 years previous throughout the Summer of Love, he wasn’t one of many “Film Brats,” that group of tousled trailblazers who crammed the gulf left behind by a decrepit studio system that discovered itself out of step with the tastes of the Flower Power era. 

He was there for Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut “Drive, He Said” (1971). He was there, too, for Robert Culp’s first and solely directorial effort, 1972’s large and sadly underseen LA noir “Hickey & Boggs,” the primary produced screenplay by a younger author named Walter Hill for which Butler re-used the sundown seashore shot on the finish of “Fearless Frank”. Then, a lot later, he shot actor Bill Paxton’s directorial debut “Frailty” (2001). In an interview with the Austin Chronicle in April of 2002, Paxton says “I wished my first film to have some nice craft in all the departments, and cinematically talking, I knew that Bill Butler may try this.” If mentorship wasn’t a job Butler craved, it was one it appeared during which he was solid. Butler offered a search for “Frailty,” intimate and heat earlier than it turns into insinuating and sinister, keyed in on the daddy/son dynamics that drive the piece.