Ace cinematographer Owen Roizman was born September 22, 1936, in
Brooklyn, New York. His father Sol was a cinematographer for Fox
Movietone News and his uncle
Morrie Roizman was a film editor. Owen
studied math and physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He
began his career shooting TV commercials, and made his feature debut as
a director of photography with the obscure and little seen 1970 movie
Stop! (1970). Owen brought a strong and
compelling sense of raw, gritty, documentary-style realism to
William Friedkin's harsh and
hard-hitting police action thriller classic
French Connection - Brennpunkt Brooklyn (1971).
Roizman received a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for his
outstanding visual contributions to this picture; he went on to garner
four additional Oscar nominations, for
Der Exorzist (1973),
Tootsie (1982),
Network (1976) and
Wyatt Earp - Das Leben einer Legende (1994). Owen gave a similar
rough and grainy look to the edgy urban thrillers
Stoppt die Todesfahrt der U-Bahn 1-2-3 (1974)
and Stunde der Bewährung (1978). His other
films encompass an impressively diverse array of different genres which
include horror ("The Exorcist"), science fiction
(Die Frauen von Stepford (1975)),
comedy
(Pferdewechsel in der Hochzeitsnacht (1972)
"Tootsie"), musicals
(Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)),
drama (Fesseln der Macht (1981),
Die Sensationsreporterin (1981)) and
even Westerns
(Der Mann, den sie Pferd nannten - 2. Teil (1976),
"Wyatt Earp"). His last feature to date was
French Kiss (1995). In the early
1980s Owen took a hiatus from shooting films and formed the commercial
production company Roizman and Associates. He has directed and/or
photographed hundreds of TV commercials. In 1997 he was the recipient
of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of
Cinematographers.
