Hal Mohr

Hal Mohr was a born experimenter. Raised in San Francisco, he built his own cameras as a teenager and shot newsreel footage of the aftermath of the great 1906 earthquake, teaching himself the craft with no formal training. That hands-on, engineer's temperament stayed with him for a career of more than half a century, and he was forever devising new rigs, cranes, and lighting tricks to solve problems others thought insoluble.

He earned a permanent place in film history early, photographing "The Jazz Singer," the part-talking sensation that helped push the entire industry into sound. But his most famous moment came in 1936. His inventive, gauzy, forest-dappled photography for the Warner Bros. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" had not been nominated for the Academy Award, yet a write-in campaign carried him to victory anyway. He remains the only person ever to win a competitive Oscar without being nominated, an event so startling the Academy promptly changed its rules to make it impossible again.

Mohr won a second Academy Award for the 1943 Technicolor "Phantom of the Opera," becoming one of the first cinematographers to take the prize in both black-and-white and color categories, a testament to his fluency in every technology the medium threw at him. Along the way he shot swashbucklers like "Captain Blood," the noir-tinged "Rancho Notorious," and dozens of other films across genres and decades.

A committed union man, he served as a leader among Hollywood's cinematographers and championed the professional standing of his craft. Colleagues admired his ingenuity and his blunt, plainspoken manner, and younger cameramen sought his counsel. He kept shooting into the 1960s, then moved into television before retiring. Mohr died in 1974, an authentic Hollywood original whose fingerprints are on the birth of sound, the triumph of color, and one of the strangest footnotes in Oscar history.