The American Society of Cinematographers has announced the recipients of three special career citations: Allen Daviau will receive the society’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the art of filmmaking. Donald Morgan will be honored with the ASC’s first-ever Career Achievement in Television Award. And Gerald Hirschfeld will get the Presidents Award for his visual effects achievements.The kudos will be handed out at the ASC’s 21st annual awards dinner set for February 18, 2007.Allen Daviau “is in the prime of his career, but he has already created an innovative body of work that will stand the test of time,” commented ASC awards committee chairman Russ Alsobrook. The DP has been nominated five times for the Academy Award for best film cinematography. He received nods for three films he did with director Steven Spielberg—E.T. The Extraterrestrial, The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun. The other nominations were for Avalon and Bugsy, both directed by Barry Levinson. He also won top honors from the ASC for his work on Bugsy and Empire, and the latter earned him Britain’s BAFTA award for best cinematography.Previous ASC Lifetime Achievement Award honorees for film cinematography include Charles Lang Jr., Haskell Wexler, Conrad Hall, Gordon Willis, Sven Nykvist, Owen Roizman and Laszlo Kovacs, among others.Cinematographer Morgan’s career has spanned feature films, television and commercials. This TV work has earned him five Emmy Awards. “Don has literally become a legend in his own time,” observed ASC president Daryn Okada. “He has that rare combination of innate talent, mastery of a complex and constantly changing craft, and the ability to collaborate.”Morgan received five Emmy awards for TV movies Something The Lord Made, Out of the Ashes, Miss Evers’ Boys, Geronimo and Murder on the Mississippi. He also got four other Emmy nominations and has been the recipient of top honors from the ASC in the television movie/miniseries/pilot category for The Siege at Ruby Ridge, Geronimo, Dillinger and Murder in Mississippi.Theatrical features Morgan has photographed include Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York and Christine.Hirschfeld is the ASC’s most senior member, having been part of the cinematographers’ association for 55 years. He has more than 50 film credits, including DP work on classics like Fail-Safe, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Young Frankenstein and My Favorite Year.He is known for technical experiments that led to innovations like the perfection of a traveling matte system utilizing infrared-sensitive film and a three-strip Technicolor camera that was used to record backgrounds at the same time with live-action footage on the negative, resulting in seamless special effects.Previous ASC Presidents Award honorees include actor Robert Duvall; visual effects pioneer Linwood Dunn, Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown; cinematographers Hans Koenekamp, Douglas Trumbull and Howard Anderson Jr.; and documentarian Albert Maysles.
Written by Jack Egan
