John F. Seitz — Little Close-Ups of the A. S. C. (1922) 🇺🇸

John F. Seitz, A. S. C, is the student type of cinematographer and he is as quiet and self effacing as a cuckoo clock when it isn’t cuckooing. If you want to know anything about Seitz you have to ask Roy Klaffki [Roy H. Klaffki], John Arnold, Al Siegler [Allen G. Siegler] or some of the other members of the Metro staff, for John is too busy doping out the next scene to talk about Seitz.

For that matter all the A. S. C. cameramen are reticent, modest and not given to vain boastings. This is because they are masters of their profession and do not need self glorification to obscure inefficiency. But John F. Seitz is in a class by himself. Compared to John F. the oyster is an orator and the starfish a noisy roisterer, but he did loosen up enough to acknowledge that it was really he who photographed The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

This wonderful picture was a masterpiece of cinematography and it earned for Mr. Seitz a wide reputation. His work so impressed Director Rex Ingram that he asked that Mr. Seitz be assigned as chief cinematographer in the producing of The Prisoner of Zenda which is now nearing completion at Metro. If advance notices are to be relied upon this production is to add greatly, not only to the laurels of Mr. Seitz, but to those of Director Ingram who, the wise men say, has produced the master work of his career in The Prisoner of Zenda.

A full list of Mr. Seitz’s productions is not at hand but Hearts Are Trumps, another Metro picture, The Sagebrusher, a B. B. Hampton [Benjamin B. Hampton] production, and others establish that the subject of this little sketch has a habit of turning out pictures of photographic quality.

—

Collection: American Cinematographer, February 1922

—

see here all Little Close-Ups of the A. S. C. (1922)