DEEP FOCUS
PHOTO COURTESY OF ZACK FELLMAN
06.2021
Mark Fellman UNIT STILL PHOTOGRAPHER
My photo career started after my mom died in 1977. I bought an Olympus OM-1 and flew to Hawaii for all kinds of adventures. When I picked up the slides at the lab, the guy asked, “What magazine do you work for?” Huh? “You are a professional photographer, right?” That’s how it started. My first industry job happened because my girlfriend won on a game show and said, “Let’s go to Tahiti.” While there, we met our future friends Julie and Jon Landau. Jon called me a year later and said come work on this movie, Campus Man. First shot, I picked up my camera and the operator looked at me and said, “You know this is a talkie! We are recording sound. Where’s your blimp?” I said, “What’s a blimp?” Subsequent to that Jon mentored me, answered my myriad questions and has been a huge source of
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support and guidance. I am forever indebted to him and to that girlfriend who became my wife!
bring your camera.” Some guys started throwing TVs out the window, à la David Letterman.
An early project, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, was difficult as film stocks were not up to shooting in such low light. What’s fun about lowbudget films is that there’s an opportunity to be more creative. I would pull out my Hasselblad and shoot little setups. They ended up making baseball cards with those images. At the end of the movie, a dog is supposed to sniff Jason’s mask, but the dog wouldn’t do it. So, I put some hot dog meat under the mask. Uncredited animal trainer!
On Dunston Checks In, animal trainer extraordinaire Larry Madrid and I became friends. I would go into his office before work and read the paper. One morning, there was a huge commotion in the other room. Dunston [the orangutan] comes running in, sits on my chest, and takes a crap on me. Larry looks over, and casually asks, “Did you bring another shirt to work?”
I’ve been lucky to have worked on many comedies… Dumb and Dumber was a traveling roadshow. “Hey Mark, come over to this building and
The Sum of All Fears was a very different experience. Big sets, big actors, big shots. I don’t like to photograph anyone until I meet them. When I came onto the project, production was already underway, and publicist Karen Pidgurski said, “You need to get this shot of Morgan Freeman.”