November 2022

5-25-77: An ASC Odyssey

Images courtesy of Patrick Read Johnson and MVD Entertainment Group Patrick Read Johnson was not the first budding filmmaker to arrive at the ASC Clubhouse in 1977 with a reel, a reverence for Kubrick’s 2001, and an encyclopedic recall of every issue of American Cinematographer he’d struggled to procure in his rural hometown, but he was nevertheless unique. He was 15. Tucked under the boy’s arm was a VFX-heavy Super-8 oeuvre that had become the talk of the town in Wadsworth, Ill. His proactive mother, recognizing a passion that could not be developed (or even fully understood) locally, had flipped open a copy of AC and cold-called the magazine’s editor, Herb A. Lightman, in search of career advice for her son. When Lightman offered some...more