Legendary cinematographer Michael Chapman passed away at the age of 84 in September 2020, due to congestive heart failure. Chapman, whose name perhaps was not widely known to movie fans, was one of the giants in the world of cinematography. His accomplishments are astonishing and numerous.
Early Life and Education
Michael Crawford Chapman was born in New York City in 1935. As a youth, he would grow up in the comfortable suburbs of Boston. His father was a teacher. His mother was a librarian. Chapman would later reflect on his childhood:
“…I was devoted to movies as a child…Airplanes flying, bombs exploding, battleships firing huge cannons. Extraordinarily powerful images of a world far away…”
After being educated at Andover Academy and Columbia University, Chapman would spend some time drafted into the army in the early 1950s, after the end of the Korean War. He would even work on the Erie Lackawanna railroad in the late 1950s, as a brakeman. In a 2003 interview after being given the ASC’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Chapman stated:
“…I suppose I was an English major or a history major in some vague way…It was a very chic thing to do in the late 1950s…Echoes of Kerouac and Ginsberg and all that…”
The 1970s
Like so many great Hollywood stories, Michael Chapman just sort of “fell into” the business. This was when his father-in-law, Joseph C. Brun, ASC, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer, got him a job, and into the camera guild.
It was in 1970 that “Chappy” as his friends and colleagues would call him, would find himself in the right place, at the right time. He was working for New York-based MPO Videotronics and was immersed amongst the American New Wave of filmmakers that would dominate cinema throughout the 1970s. Chapman would later reflect:
“I started out loading magazines on commercials — there were very few features being shot in New York at that time — and I worked as an assistant camera, focus puller, clapper loader and all that.”
Michael Chapman, in the early 1970s, was operating the camera for directors such as Francis Ford Coppola. John Cassavetes. Hal Ashby, and Robert Towne. In addition, Chapman was also apprenticing for cinematographer legend, Gordon Willis, while working on such films as The Landlord. Husbands. Klute. The Last Detail, and The Godfather.
Jaws
Chapman’s camera work on these films would come to define the cinematic look of the 1970s. It was while working with Steven Spielberg on 1975’s Jaws, that Chapman would stand out and take his work to the next level. Director Martin Scorsese took notice and the two began a short but legendary run as director and cinematographer.
After Michael Chapman’s passing, director and collaborator Martin Scorsese issued a statement, saying in part:
“…I remember when Taxi Driver came out and Michael became known as a “poet of the streets”–I think that was the wording, and it seemed right to me. Michael was the one who really controlled the visual palette of The Last Waltz, and on Raging Bull…One of the greatest of those challenges was shooting in black and white, which Michael had never done before, a fact that still astonishes me. His relationship with the camera and the film that was running through it was intimate, mysterious, almost mystical…”
Martin Scorsese
The muted way that Chapman lit the grimy New York City streets of the mid-1970s for Martin Scorsese in 1976’s Taxi Driver. The grungy color palate that Chapman uses, it’s iconic. The look that Chapman created for Taxi Driver would be one of the defining moments of 1970s independent film.
In the clip below, Chapman discusses his approach and general attitude toward cinematography, while emphasizing that cinematography didn’t need to be beautiful, but rather it needed to be appropriate.
Chapman would go on to team up with Martin Scorsese again a few years later in 1978’s seminal concert movie The Last Waltz. The film was a chronicle of the legendary R&B/Rock & Roll group “The Band” and their “farewell” concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom.
While the concert is an absolute star-studded affair – with guest rockers including Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, and more – Chapman’s cinematography keeps the film grounded in reality. These music legends are shot and lit in a most unflattering way.
That same year, Chapman would be the cinematographer for the superior remake of the 1956 science fiction classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Chapman presents a depressed and dirty San Francisco that is prime for an alien takeover. Further, Donald Sutherland’s iconic ending scream and finger point have to be one of the hallmarks of Chapman’s career.
The 1980s and Beyond
After teaming up with directors James Toback, Phillip Kaufman, and Paul Schrader in the late 1970s for a string of movies, Chapman would reunite for the third and final time with director Martin Scorsese. It would be what most would call the crowning accomplishment in Chapman’s long career, 1980’s Oscar-winning Raging Bull.
The opening slow-motion sequence of champion prizefighter Jake LaMotta (played by Robert De Niro), shadowboxing in gorgeous black & white to “Intermezzo” by Pietro Mascagni, is maybe the greatest sequence Chapman has ever filmed.
The final collaboration between Scorsese and Chapman is arguably both auteurs’ crowning achievement. In addition, it cements both artists as legends of the industry. Critic and author David Thomson would later state:
“Michael Chapman’s black-and-white photography (printed on Technicolor stock) is like living in filth, and it aids and abets the lovely capturing of the 1940s—an achievement of soundtrack, clothes and décor.”
Branching Out
The 1980s saw Chapman branching out. He would get behind the director’s chair and involved in different genres. He also teamed up with comedic giant Carl Reiner to work as the cinematographer on a pair of comedies: 1982’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (filmed in grainy black and white) and 1983’s The Man With Two Brains.
That same year Chapman would get behind the director’s chair for the first time, to direct the enjoyable, yet forgettable, Tom Cruise high school football vehicle, All the Right Moves, released in 1983. On a $5.7 million budget, the film grossed over $17 million globally, so the director and star both did OK.
Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Chapman would serve as the cinematographer on one solid film after another: Personal Best. The Lost Boys. Kindergarten Cop. The Fugitive. Primal Fear. Doc Hollywood. Space Jam. Ghostbusters II. Scrooged, and others. In addition, he would reunite with Scorsese in 1987 to work on Michael Jackson’s Bad video.
Later Years
Michael Chapman, ASC would work into his 70s, with his final film before his announced retirement being the 2007 Gabor Csupo film, Bridge to Terabithia, starring Robert Patrick and Zooey Deschanel.
In a long and fabled career dating back to 1965, Michael Chapman has worked with countless legends of the industry. More importantly, he’s left his mark on the generations of directors and cinematographers to come. You only need to watch 2019’s Joker for evidence of that.
Indeed, in 2016, Chapman was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 24th annual International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography Camerimage. Held in Poland and failing health, Chapman attended the event in person. He reflected on his long and illustrious career:
“I was involved in a ridiculous number of those movies, and I must say that it was much more about accidents or happening to be at the right place at the right time than any overarching genius on my part…Had I known at the time that it was going to be thought of as a great renaissance, I would have taken a lot more notes and paid more attention. We thought we were just making movies.”
Michael Chapman, ASC, is survived by his wife of almost forty years, screenwriter Amy Holden Jones (Mystic Pizza, Beethoven, Indecent Proposal), and four children, as well as four grandchildren.
