The son of "Mutiny on the Bounty" co-author James Norman Hall, American cinematographer Conrad Hall initially intended to follow in his father's footsteps as a writer, but a bad grade in a journalism class at the University of Southern California turned him in the direction of filmmaking instead. Forming a small production company with two fellow USC classmates, he entered the business when they sold their prize-winning class project "Sea Theme" to television. They shot a little bit of everything (i.e., industrials, commercials), including footage for Disney's acclaimed feature documentary "The Living Desert" (1953) before deciding to do a low-budget outdoors feature, "My Brother Down There/Running Target" (1956). The three drew the top three positions (producer, director, cinematographer) out of a hat, and Hall's picking cinematographer propelled him further down the cameraman's road. There was another low-budget feature ("Edge of Fury" 1958) before he embarked on life as an assistant cameraman, apprenticing with the likes of Ted McCord, Robert Surtees and Ernest Haller.
After working on the ABC TV series "Stoney Burke" (1962-63) and "The Outer Limits" (1963-65), Hall made his feature debut as director of photography on "The Wild Seed" (1965) and immediately drew critical praise, earning Oscar nominations for that year's "Morituri" and "The Professionals" (1966), his first collaboration with director Richard Brooks. Hall's decision to use anamorphic lenses on Brooks' bitterly monochromatic "In Cold Blood" (1967) placed the picture slightly outside of the documentary style inherent in filming on the exact locations where the famous murders had transpired, thereby involving the audience more deeply on a dramatic, storytelling level.
Despite his start in black-and-white, Hall began learning the "color" ropes with "Harper" (1966) and won Oscar three years later for the hazy, desaturated, mythic look he brought to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", shooting through smoke, steam, branches, anything to help accomplish the effect. He also used extremely long zoom lenses to dehumanize the relentless posse chasing the bandits, so that zooming in on them at a distance of five miles left them a faceless presence. His inspired work on John Huston's "Fat City" (1972), however, did not help it at the box office, and he has often used the film as a teaching aid, studying it to see why nobody went to see it.
Hall's cinematography for John Schlesinger's "The Day of the Locust" (1975), long considered by his contemporaries as a perfect example of visual mood wedded to dramatic content, garnered him a fifth Oscar nomination, but after shooting Schlesinger's "Marathon Man" (1976), he "retired" from big screen work until he accepted the position of director of photography on "Black Widow" (1987). In the interim, he partnered with Haskell Wexler in a commercials production house and even helmed numerous TV spots while hoping to develop a project with which to make his feature directorial debut. Hall was back in the running for the Academy Award with Robert Towne's "Tequila Sunrise" (1988), ratcheting the golden romanticism of "The Day of the Locust" a few notches higher to upstage the lackluster script. If working with first-time director Steve Zaillian on "Searching for Bobby Fischer" (1993) showcased his facility for human-scale films emphasizing the close-up, he was equally at home on his second outing with the writer-director, the much larger-in-scale "A Civil Action" (1998), in which he contrasted the world of rural New England with that of Boston, achieving the effect through naturalistic lighting and an almost monochromatic color palette. For his efforts on both films, Hall racked up his seventh and eighth Academy Award nominations. He wove a similar magic working with first-time filmmaker Sam Mendes on the universally-praised "American Beauty" (1999), employing three distinct styles in the course of the movie--tightly composed tension-inducing movements for the main scenes, fluid movements for the fantasy sequences and handheld video footage for the films shot by Wes Bentley's character. The overall effect was to find corresponding visual stylings to the film's emotional narrative which he did brilliantly, earning his second Academy Award for his efforts. Although Hall had yet to make his feature directing debut, his planned adaptation of William Faulkner's "The Wild Palms" stood ready in the pipeline just waiting for a "go". Hollywood would never see the fruits of Hall the director, however; his last film work would be as director of photography for Mendes' gangster opus "Road to Perdition" (2002), for which Hall's work was praised to the heavens--even at his advanced age, Hall filmed throughout weeks of long nights, including a sequence where the whole crew, himself included, was knee-deep in freezing mud . Indeed, at the time of his death in early 2003 Hall had already won or been nominated for several awards for his final project, including a 2002 Academy Award.