Lucien Andriot

Lucien Andriot at the camera, with director Maurice Tourneur at left and John van den Broek at the second camera below, shooting The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917)

Lucien Andriot ASC[1] (1892-1979) was a prolific French-American cinematographer. He would eventually shoot more than 200 films and television programs over the course of his career.

Life and work

Born in Paris, Andriot began his career in France in 1909 working for Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset. His elder sister Josette Andriot was a French film actress, working for Jasset. He then came to the U.S. some time before 1914 as an employee of the Éclair American Company based in Fort Lee, New Jersey, [2] [3]

The outbreak of World War I drove a re-organization of foreign film-industry assets in Fort Lee, including the employees. Now working for the World Film Company, financed by Lewis J. Selznick and run by William A. Brady, Andriot became a member of a separate French-speaking unit within World Film. For about three years Maurice Tourneur, George Archainbaud, Emile Chautard, Albert Capellani worked together on films such as the 1915 version of Camille, and taught a young apprentice at the World studio: Josef von Sternberg. [4]

Andriot moved to Hollywood around 1920 and went to work for Fox. The cinematography of the early widescreen John Wayne western The Big Trail in 1930 is unfortunately not his: his was the standard-looking 35mm version, shot in parallel alongside Arthur Edeson's ground-breaking "70mm Grandeur" version. [5]

But Andriot did show a long-standing affinity for French directors working in Hollywood, initially Maurice Tourneur, and later René Clair, Robert Florey, and Jean Renoir. In the 1930s and 1940s Andriot worked principally on B pictures for major studios. He did some television work in the 1950s and early 1960s, and retired to Palm Springs, California.

Andriot is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale. [6]

Partial filmography

Andriot's films include:

References

  1. ↑ http://www.theasc.com/magazine/mar99/members/
  2. ↑ Fort Lee: the film town, by Richard Koszarski, page 108
  3. ↑ http://fortleefilm.org/studios.html
  4. ↑ Von Sternberg, by John Baxter, pages 21-22
  5. ↑ John Wayne's America, by Garry Wills, page 53
  6. ↑ Lucien Andriot at Find a Grave
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