LLOYD KNECHTEL, ASC (1907-1971)

Lloyd Knechtel, ASC

            Over the five-year history of this blog, I’ve gone deep to deliver information you probably wouldn’t have encountered anywhere else.  As the latest in the long line of if-only-they-were-underrecognized-rather-than-completely-forgotten cinematographers, Lloyd Knechtel, ASC deserves all the attention I can give him.  He was one of the great early-Hollywood special effects pioneers, and the influence of what he did is still being felt today.

            As an Ontario schoolboy, Lloyd followed older brother Alvin – an established cameraman – as a general assistant at the Detroit Motion Picture Company.  After declining a career as a lawyer (as so many cinematographers of that time seem to have), he relocated to Los Angeles and once again took up employment alongside Alvin at Pathé News.  Some of his assignments included the funeral of silent-film star Rudolf Valentino, U.S. Navy maneuvers off the West Coast, the disappearance and return of Aimee Semple McPherson, Charles Lindbergh’s California landing after his solo flight to Paris and innumerable football games.

            During the late ’20’s, Alvin became known for his trick short subjects at Pathé Review.  Of course, Lloyd was his assistant.  Together, they bolted a wooden platform to concrete so as to house an early model of the optical printer.  On one end was a Pathe camera that served as a printer head, with a light shining through the movement.  At the other was a Bell &Howell camera that functioned as the photographing device to optically reproduce the image.  In the moment of their first exposure with that rig, the course was set for the next fifty years of special effects work.

            As he became an expert in miniature and matte photography and optical effects, Lloyd rose to head the VFX Department at RKO.  During the mid-’30’s, he took a five-year sabbatical to work for George Humphries & Co. in London, where he established the special effects craft within the British film industry.  Upon his return to the U.S., he freelanced for MGM before being commissioned a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during 1942.  In that role, he installed the SFX department at Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, a place that produced hundreds of training films during World War Two.  Later, he headed a twenty-two-man unit that spent three months filming in Africa, then moved on to Italy where he was assigned to Fifth Army Headquarters.  Soon promoted to Captain, he became the personal cinematographer to General Mark Clark and accompanied the first American troops into Vienna.  He also photographed the German surrender in Italy, but his most exciting experience during that time was the sudden eruption of Mt. Vesuvius as his plane filmed the rim from low altitude.  Hot lava and rocks bombarded the aircraft, breaking the pilot’s windscreen in the process.  According to Knechtel, the heavily-damaged plane was lucky to land safely.

         His final assignment for the Army was photographing the first war crimes trial, that of German Lieutenant General Anton Dostler, who was convicted and later shot in Rome.  Returning to Hollywood in January 1946, he was soon recording atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll with several other ASC members.

         Though you’re probably not aware of it, there’s no chance you haven’t seen some of his work.  In addition to his principal photography on more than twenty features, an uncredited Knechtel contributed matte\glass shots, optical effects, multiple exposures, miniatures, process shots and other FX work to hundreds of movies.  He was also a mentor to many; most prominent among them was Linwood Dunn, ASC, who would go on to become one of the all-time great SFX cameramen.

         Knechtel died at the too young age of sixty-four in Long Beach, CA.  Think of him the next time you see a rear-projection shot in some movie from the ’20’s through the ’60’s.  Somehow, in some way, he probably had a hand in it!