Content area
Full text
Philip H. Lathrop, ASC, who was honored with the 1992 ASC Lifetime Achievement Award, died of cancer on April 12, 1995. The award was particularly appropriate in that Lathrop spent most of his life in the movie studios. Born in Merced, California, his playground as a child was the Universal lot, where his mother was employed in the film lab. He became a member of the camera department there when he was 18. He recalled watching Gilbert Warrenton, ASC photograph the first version of Show Boat in 1928-29. Lathrop loaded cameras for John Mescall, ASC on the 1936 version.
In 1938 he became assistant to Joseph A. Valentine, ASC, Universal's top-ranking cinematographer. With Valentine he worked on the Deanna Durbin pictures; two Alfred Hitchcock classics, Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt; and The Wolf Man. He later became an operator for Russell Metty, ASC for nine years, culminating in the intricacies of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil in 1957.
Lathrop became a director of photography at Universal in 1958, when he shot a series of 50 one-reel films at Walter Lantz Studio. His first feature that year was The Perfect Furlough, in CinemaScope and Eastman Color, with Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. The color negative at that time had an ASA rating...