“I hear you’re making a movie about a fish,” the cinematographer Bill Butler said to the young director Steven Spielberg when they bumped into each other on the Universal lot in 1974. Butler, then in his early 50s, had already shot two projects for Spielberg – the TV movie Something Evil (1972) and Savage (1973), a pilot that was not taken up as a series. But it was their collaboration on the “fish movie” that cemented their reputations.
Summer was not previously regarded as an optimum time to release a big studio picture, which is why Jaws (1975), which flooded screens across the US rather than trickling out in stages, is considered the first summer blockbuster – though its finesse and skill, not to mention an intimate second half in which the cast dwindles to three men and a largely unseen shark, give it little in common with the sort of crash-bang-wallop productions that followed in its wake.
It remains one of the finest slow-burning suspense movies outside Hitchcock in his heyday, due in no small part to the cinematography by Butler, who has died aged 101. The production was besieged with difficulties but in 2003 Spielberg called him “the calm before, during and after every storm on the set of Jaws”.
Butler shot about 90% of the ocean scenes with a handheld Panaflex camera for greater flexibility and immediacy. Borrowing a trick he had picked up while shooting second unit on the thriller Deliverance (1972), he also made a transparent box into which the camera was placed to allow for shooting at water level. The effect, he explained, was dramatic and instantaneous. “The big advantage is that psychologically you’re asking: ‘What’s right below the water? Is that shark right there?’” Shots of the thrashing legs of oblivious swimmers “made the audience think: ‘That must look good to a shark. It looks like dinner time.’”
Jaws was one of two best picture Oscar nominees that year in which Butler had a hand, the other being Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the eventual winner, based on Ken Kesey’s novel about patients in a psychiatric hospital. Butler was Oscar-nominated for Forman’s film along with Haskell Wexler, who had shot the lion’s share of the footage before being sacked. It was a stormy set, with the actor Jack Nicholson refusing to speak to the director and communicating instead with Wexler and then Butler, who reportedly shot everything from the climactic party scene onwards. A year earlier he had replaced Wexler on Francis Ford Coppola’s brooding surveillance thriller The Conversation (1974).
After Jaws, Butler’s biggest commercial successes were the musical Grease (1978) as well as three consecutive sequels to Sylvester Stallone’s 1976 boxing drama Rocky, beginning with Rocky II (1979). Butler brought a special vitality to the fight scenes in the series, occasionally shooting with as many as eight cameras simultaneously. “As carefully as we planned, there were times when we expected to pan left and something unexpected happened, and we needed to go to the right or zoom instead,” he said. “When an actor slipped, we caught the expression of surprise on his face.”
Some projects even he couldn’t save. Can’t Stop the Music (1980), a vehicle for the disco group the Village People, was a flop that later acquired a cult following. That honour eluded another musical, Graffiti Bridge (1990), starring and directed by Prince. It was shot by Butler, once again serving as an 11th-hour replacement, at the singer’s Paisley Park studios near Minneapolis.
Butler was born in Cripple Creek, Colorado, to Wilmer, a farmer, and Verca, a psychiatric nurse. The family moved to Henry county, Georgia, when he was five, then on to Mount Pleasant, Iowa. He was educated at Mount Pleasant high school and received a degree in engineering from the University of Iowa, where he became fascinated with cameras. He worked for four years as a radio station engineer while also setting up a television station that was later sold to ABC.
Next he got a job at the Chicago-based WGN-TV, where he met the director William Friedkin. Their documentary The People Vs Paul Crump (1962), about an African American man on death row, was screened for Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, in rough-cut form the night before Crump was due to be executed. Examining the evidence presented in the film, Kerner changed the sentence to life without parole. “I remember thinking: ‘My God, film has this kind of power?’” said Butler. “That little 16mm film saved someone’s life.”
For Philip Kaufman, Butler shot Fearless Frank (1967), starring Jon Voight as a man who is killed then resurrected as a superhero crime-fighter. He collaborated for the first time with Coppola on the director’s road movie The Rain People (1969), then shot Nicholson’s directorial debut, Drive, He Said (1971).
Among his later credits are the baseball comedy-drama The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars & Motor Kings, the rape revenge thriller Lipstick (both 1976), Demon Seed, in which Julie Christie is impregnated by a malevolent computer, the conspiracy thriller Capricorn One (both 1977), the horror sequel Damien: Omen II (1978) and two military comedies, Stripes (1981) and Biloxi Blues (1988).
Butler was lauded for his television work: he won an Emmy each for Raid on Entebbe (1976), based on a real-life hostage rescue mission in Uganda, and an adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1984) starring Ann-Margret as Blanche DuBois. He was nominated for another for shooting the steamy mini-series The Thorn Birds (1983).
In 1997 he shot a pair of films that echoed his past glories: the monster movie Anaconda owed more than a little to Jaws, while Don King: Only in America, made for TV, utilised his expertise in rendering ring-craft. For the latter, Butler built a box camera that the actor Danny Johnson, who played the world heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, could physically attack. Johnson “pulverised the lens”, said the director, John Herzfeld. “He literally beat it to shit. You’re completely in a subjective point of view.”
Butler maintained that the 1970s were the “perfect time” for him to make his name. “It was a merging of a lot of film styles that up until then had been very staid, very straightforward. There were certain rules you didn’t break, except I was one of those people that came to break all the rules.”
He is survived by his second wife, Iris (nee Schwimmer), their children, Genevieve and Chelsea, and three daughters, Judy, Patricia and Pam, from his first marriage, to Alma (nee Smith), which ended in divorce in 1983.
• Wilmer Cable Butler, cinematographer, born 7 April 1921; died 5 April 2023
