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Master DP James Wong Howe
A Relative's Perspective
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| Howe at home with his Super-8 camera in the early 1970s. |
When I was eight years old, I was already aware of the importance of one relative who'd managed to break free from our ostensibly dysfunctional family mold. Most of my immediate and extended family was, and still is, situated around central and eastern Washington state, but even at an early age I was told about "Uncle Jimmie's" film career in California. Not a few times when a movie was playing on television, it was pointed out to me that Jimmie had worked on it. My father had always promised me that someday we would go to California to see my great-uncle Jimmie. I eagerly awaited that day, until the phone rang in my home in Yakima on July 12, 1976. The voice on the other end of the line gave us the news that Uncle Jimmie (as everyone called him) had died. I remember being intensely disappointed, for now I would never meet the larger-than-life uncle for whom I was given my middle name. I would, however, develop a curiosity for the art of filmmaking and, not surprisingly, an interest in James Wong Howe's work in particular.
Through Uncle Jimmie's widow, my 89-year-old great-aunt Sonora Babb Howe, I've since heard some interesting stories about his life. Although she is a professional writer and undoubtedly the best one to present the information in this article, she has given me her blessing to proceed with this humbling task and unique opportunity.
James Wong Howe was born Wong Tung Jim in Kwantung, China, on August 28, 1899. His father, my great-grandfather Wong How, came to America in 1899, settled in Pasco, Washington and went to work for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Eventually Wong How opened a general store in Pasco, and in spite of anti-Chinese bigotry, became a successful businessman.
For young Wong Tung Jim, those early years in America were not happy ones. He was a constant subject of ridicule because of his Chinese heritage. Jimmie would take candy from his father's store to bribe the neighborhood children into playing with him. Prejudice would follow him throughout his life and career; although, ironically, his ethnicity distinguished him from other cinematographers and played a role in making him one of the best-known practitioners of his craft in the world.
James Wong Howe was around 12 years old when he bought a little Brownie camera in a drugstore. He took pictures of his brothers and sisters, even though his father was an old-fashioned Chinese who was superstitious about having his photo taken. When he had the film developed, their heads were missing! This wasn't because of some angry spirit lurking nearby, but due to the fact that his camera had no viewfinder. Just the same, Jimmie's father was very displeased with the results, to say the least.
Several years passed, and Jimmie left for Oregon to take up boxing. This had no lasting appeal for him. Eventually he became a delivery boy for a commercial photographer in Los Angeles, but was dismissed when he helped a friend who was going back to China by doing some passport photos in the firm's laboratory.
Jimmie next took a job as a busboy at the Beverly Hills Hotel. On Sundays he would go to Chinatown to watch a comedy being shot. He spoke to the cameraman, who suggested to Jimmie that he try working in the movies. Shortly thereafter, Jimmie went to the Jesse Lasky Studios, but the man in charge of photography told him that he was too small and frail to carry the equipment. Instead he hired Jimmie to pick up scraps of nitrate stock from the cutting-room floor for 10 dollars a week. In his spare moments, he became familiar with the hand-cranked cameras, the lighting equipment and the film-laboratory processes.
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| Howe received the first of his 16 Academy Award nominations for Algiers (1938) with Hedy Lamarr. |
Jimmie's break came in 1919 on the Cecile B. DeMille film Male and Female. The crew was shooting a scene in which Gloria Swanson was to be attacked by a toothless lion. The sequence required multiple cameras, and there were not enough assistants. Jimmie was called from the camera room and given the slate. He was dubbed the fourth assistant cameraman. Before long, Jimmie endeared himself to DeMille. The legendary director had encountered a major production problem: he needed a close-up of a canary singing, and the crew tried everything to get the bird to sing, but to no avail. Jimmie asked if he could try. He took a piece of chewing gum and lodged it in the canary's beak. The bird moved its beak in an attempt to dislodge the gum, and on silent film it looked like it was singing. DeMille was impressed and raised Jimmie's salary to 15 dollars a week.
Jimmie became as interested in taking still photographs as in shooting motion pictures, and made more money selling photographs to the stars than he did at the studio. A film actress named Mary Miles Minter approached Jimmie one day and asked if he would take her picture. She was ecstatic over the photographs because Jimmie could make her pale blue eyes, which did not turn out well on film, look dark. She wanted to know if he could do the same thing on motion picture film. He assured her that he could. If that was the case, Minter said, then she wanted him as her cameraman. Jimmie was elated at the thought of becoming a cameraman -- even though in reality he wasn't sure how he'd made Minter's eyes look dark in the first place. Eventually he realized that the darkness was caused by light reflecting off some black velvet that happened to be in the studio. So he had a big frame of black velvet made, cut a hole in the center for the lens and filmed all of Minter's close-ups that way. Word got around that the actress had found herself a mysterious Chinese cameraman who made her eyes go dark on film! Soon everyone with blue eyes wanted him to photograph them, and his career was launched.
In 1922, James Wong Howe was director of photography on Mary Miles Minter's Drums of Fate, and on Trail of the Lonesome Pine the following year. He had no problem finding jobs, and began freelancing. He shot Sorrel and Son (1927) for United Artists; and Laugh Clown Laugh (1928), Four Walls (1928), and Desert Nights (1928) for MGM.
When sound came to movies, Howe was in China shooting backgrounds for a movie he planned to direct. The footage he shot was used, but not by him. It was incorporated into a film called Shanghai Express (1932). When Jimmie returned to Hollywood, the film industry had been revolutionized by the advent of sound. Cinematography had changed to accommodate it, and only cameramen with experience shooting "talkies" could get work. By chance, Jimmie met director William K. Howard, who was anxious to secure James Wong Howe's help on a picture called Transatlantic. Jimmie had just purchased some new lenses with $700 of his own money, and did some tests. The studio was impressed with the results. Howard got the green light to make his film, and hired Howe to shoot it.
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| His last Academy Award nomination was for Funny Lady, his last film, shot in 1974, the year this picture was taken. |
Jimmie's low-contrast lighting on interiors earned him the nickname "low-key Howe," and his reputation landed him numerous assignments. He moved to MGM in 1933 and shot 15 pictures for the studio. In 1934 he filmed The Thin Man in 18 days, and Manhattan Melodrama in 28 days. He gained a reputation for being fast, and his salary rose to $500 a week. Jimmie could now be seen driving in his $37,000 Duesenberg, and onlookers would stare in disbelief, wondering who would let their houseboy drive such an expensive car.
By the mid-1930s James Wong Howe was the best-known cameraman in the world, due in no small part to being an Oriental in the movie industry. In 1938 he received the first of his 16 Academy Award nominations, for Algiers. His photography of Hedy Lamarr so impressed Jack Warner that he offered Jimmie a seven-year contract. From 1938 to 1947 he ended up shooting 26 films for Warner Brothers, and was loaned out to shoot four more pictures for other studios.
During the war years, racial bigotry intensified. Since Jimmie was an Oriental, he was grouped with the Japanese and forced to wear a large button proclaiming: "I am Chinese." Out of protest, Jimmie's close friend James Cagney wore one as well. It was just prior to this time that Jimmie met writer Sanora Babb. She is a white woman, and at that time the miscegenation laws forbidding interracial marriage were in effect. Consequently, they did not marry until September of 1949. Aunt Sanora told me that on one particular occasion when they were going out to dine at a Chinese restaurant, a woman had taken the time to follow them to the entrance of the establishment. As she harassed the two of them for being together, Aunt Sanora took the woman's hat and tossed it in the gutter. Aunt Sanora remembers this woman chasing the hat down the sewer drain exclaiming, "My $100 hat!" When the miscegenation laws were repealed, it took them three days to find a judge who would marry them. When they finally did, the judge remarked, "She looks old enough. If she wants to marry a chink, that's her business."
The late '40s and early '50s saw a decline in James Wong Howe's career. He developed a reputation for being difficult to work with and having a temper on the set. Producers were concerned that such displays would alienate the crew and slow down production. Another problem arose during this period, also known as the McCarthy era. Although he was not blacklisted, Jimmie came under the scrutiny of Congress' House Un-American Activities Committee. He was deemed suspicious because of his so-called willingness to work in films with "Commies." (He had worked with men who were ultimately blacklisted, such as John Garfield, as well as other actors and directors who'd been his associates at Warner Brothers.) None of this hindered Jimmie from winning his first Academy Award for The Rose Tattoo in 1955.
The funniest anecdote that circulated around Hollywood occurred when Jimmie had purchased a Chinese restaurant near the Ventura Freeway which Aunt Sanora helped him run. A photographer from a valley newspaper had come to take a picture of it. Jimmie had told him that if he would only put a wide-angle lens on the camera, the photographer could come closer to take the picture and not have to stand so close to the freeway. Without knowing who he was talking to, the photographer told Jimmie, "I'll take the picture, you just mind your goddamned noodles!"
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| A Warner Brothers PR still from the early 1940s. |
Jimmie got the opportunity to direct a feature film in 1953 called Go, Man, Go, about the founder of the Harlem Globetrotters. It was shot in 21 days on a budget of $130,000. His only other work as a director came in 1957 when he co-directed The Invisible Avenger. His direction, however, did not net him any acclaim.
Jimmie won another Academy Award for shooting Hud in 1963. He was at the top of his profession, turning down far more jobs than he accepted. One of his favorites was his work on The Molly Maguires in 1970. It was shot over five months in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. Not long after, Jimmie's health began to fail. Retirement was forced upon him, and for the last six years of his life he was sick and frequently hospitalized. He was reportedly offered the first two Godfather films, but just wasn't strong enough to accept.
In 1974, Ray Stark was producing Funny Lady, the sequel to Funny Girl. Stark, director Herbert Ross and production manager Howard Pine wanted a replacement for cinema-tographer Vilmos Zsigmond. They contacted Jimmie because they believed he could make Barbra Streisand look her best. Jimmie's health was stable, and the day after Ray Stark called, he was on the set ready to shoot. But a short time later, Jimmie collapsed on the set and had to be rushed to the hospital. ASC president Ernie Laszlo substituted for him until Jimmie recovered and returned to finish the film, for which he was awarded a 16th and final Oscar nomination.
Aunt Sanora has written, "My husband loved his work. He spent all his adult life from age 17 to 75, a year before his death, in the motion picture industry. When he died at 77, courageous in illness as in health, he was still thinking of new ways to make pictures. He was critical of poor quality in any area of film, but quick to see and appreciate the good. His mature stylewas realistic, never naturalistic. If the story demanded, his work could be harsh and have a documentary quality, but that quality was strictly Wong Howe. If the story allowed, his style was poetic realism, for he was a poet of the camera. This was a part of his nature, his impulse toward the beautiful, but it did not prevent his flexibility in dealing with all aspects of reality."
To this, a great-nephew and mere observer can only add, "Amen." MM
(I am indebted to my great aunt, Sanora Babb Howe, and to the work of Mr. Todd Rainsberger, without which this article would not have been possible.)
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Adrienne Low on 11/03/07 at 2:42 pm
I recently saw my second movie (Bell, Book and Candle w/ James Stewart, Kim Novack)in which the credits listed a James Wong Howe as the director of cinematography. My curiosity was peaked when I noticed the Chinese Surname again and wondered if indeed, this was a Chinese American that managed to overcome the huge racial barriers of the time. Thank you for your wonderful biography that shed light on a truly extradinary man. As a Chinese American living in San Francisco, I am gratefully aware of the prejudices and discrimmination that the generations that came before me had to endure so that I might have the opportunities that I now enjoy. Thanks again.
- Comment by Liam Rodriguez on 12/06/07 at 3:16 am
Mr, James Wong i like to present you an idea of who you could cast as Gohan for the Dragonball movie you will make. Is my 7 year old nephew. Its could sound crazy i know millions of people are asking you for this chance! But my nephew is the one please write me back ill send you the picture of him, nut i need an email address where to send it to you! Thank you so much.
