The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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He was born in Szeged, Hungary, and studied cinema at the State Academy of Theatre and Film Art in Budapest. Together with his friend and fellow student László Kovács, he filmed the events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest and then smuggled the film out of the country shortly afterwards.
In 1962 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He settled in Los Angeles and worked in photo labs as a technician and photographer. During the 1960s, he worked on many low-budget independent films and educational films, as he attempted to break into the film industry. Some of the films that he worked on during this period credited him as "William Zsigmond," including the classic horror B-Film, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. The first film he worked on in the United States was "The Sadist," starring Arch Hall, Jr.
He gained prominence during the 1970s working on Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye and Steven Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the latter of which won him the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Zsigmond has worked with Brian De Palma on Obsession, Blow Out, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and The Black Dahlia, and with Michael Cimino on The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate.
He received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999 from the American Society of Cinematographers.
Has been a longtime user and endorser of Tiffen filters.
Alongside his Oscar win for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Zsigmond has been nominated for an Academy Award on three other occasions: in 1978 for The Deer Hunter, in 1984 for Mark Rydell's The River and in 2006 for The Black Dahlia.
