Paul M. Pollard, a veteran camera operator with credits including Bound for Glory, Heaven’s Gate, Northern Exposure and The Larry Sanders Show, has died. He was 84.
Pollard died Aug. 1 of heart issues at Southern California Hospital (formerly Brotman Medical Center) in Culver City, his daughter, Georgia Pollard, told The Hollywood Reporter.
The son of a special effects man at 20th Century Fox, Pollard also shot Bud Greenspan’s 16 Days of Glory (1985), the definitive documentary about the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, and the 1986 TV special Ozzy Osbourne: The Ultimate Ozzy, which captures the singer live in concert.
As a camera technician, Pollard worked for famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler on Bound for Glory (1976), the biopic of Woody Guthrie that was directed by Hal Ashby. Wexler won an Oscar for his work, which included a pioneering 2-minute, 15-second Steadicam shot that trailed and then led David Carradine as the folk singer through a crowd of migrant workers.
He teamed with Wexler again on Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982).
Pollard surely kept busy as an operator for cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond on Heaven’s Gate (1980), the famously over-budget frontier epic that was filmed mainly at a studio-constructed town in Glacier National Park in Montana. Director Michael Cimino ordered up more than 1.3 million feet of film — nearly 220 hours — for that.
Paul M. Pollard operated a camera from on high in Los Angeles.
Courtesy Georgia Pollard
The youngest of three kids, Paul Michael Pollard was born in Los Angeles on April 11, 1942. His father was A. Paul Pollard, who was head of construction at Fox and handled effects on such landmark films as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), The Great Escape (1963), Dirty Harry (1971) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). His mom, Irene, was a homemaker.
Pollard attended Culver High School and lived with an aunt and uncle in Montana while working on a cattle ranch, then helped out his dad on movie sets.
He was a greensman on Lewis Milestone’s remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and as a cable man on the auto racing drama Winning (1969), then graduated to assistant camera on True Grit (1969), They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! (1970) and Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha (1972).
Pollard’s big-screen credits also included Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit (1981), John Landis’ Into the Night (1985), Roger Spottiswoode’s Air America (1990), Mick Jackson’s L.A. Story (1991), Gillies MacKinnon’s A Simple Twist of Fate (1994) and Jon Avnet’s The War (1994).
And for TV, he worked on In the Heat of the Night, Northern Exposure, Space: Above and Beyond, If Not for You and The Larry Sanders Show and served as director of photography on the 1997 Fox series 413 Hope St.
Pollard was once involved in a helicopter crash while filming in France, his daughter noted.
Survivors also include his son, Justin; grandchildren Aurelia and Juliet; sister JoAnn; and nephews Greg, Chris, and Jeff.
He was married and divorced four times; two of his wives were script supervisor Kathleen Newport and first camera assistant Tama Takahashi.
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