Sam Leavitt Video

An apprentice and assistant cameraman in the silent days, Sam Leavitt became a camera operator in the 1930s. Among his credits were such splashy MGM Technicolor musicals as Bathing Beauty (1944) and Anchors Aweigh (1946). Leavitt found himself harking... MORE

An apprentice and assistant cameraman in the silent days, Sam Leavitt became a camera operator in the 1930s. Among his credits were such splashy MGM Technicolor musicals as Bathing Beauty (1944) and Anchors Aweigh (1946). Leavitt found himself harking back to his silent-movie career for his first director of photography assignment: The Thief (1952), a dialogue-less experiment directed by Ray Milland. In films until retiring after 1975's The Man in a Glass Booth, Sam Leavitt won an Oscar for his black-and-white lensing of Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958), and was Oscar-nominated for his work on Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Exodus (1960). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi LESS