James Wong Howe’s childhood dream was to be a prizefighter, and as a teenager he moved to Oregon to fight.
However, his interest soon waned, and he moved to Los Angeles, where he got a job as an assistant to a commercial photographer.
His duties included making deliveries, but he was fired when he developed some passport photos for a friend in the firm’s darkroom.
Reduced to making a living as a busboy at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he journeyed down to Chinatown on Sundays to watch movies being shot there.
Howe made the acquaintance of a cameraman on one of the location shoots, who suggested he give the movies a try.
He got hired by the Jesse Lasky Studios’ photography department at the princely sum of $10 per week, but the man in charge thought he was too little to lug equipment around, so he assigned Howe custodial work.
Thus the future Academy Award-wining cinematographer’s first job in Hollywood was picking up scraps of nitrate stock from the cutting-room floor (more important than it sounds, as nitrate fires in editing rooms were not uncommon).
The job allowed him to familiarize himself with movie cameras, lighting equipment and the movie film-development process.
By 1917, he had graduated from editing room assistant to working as a slate boy on Cecil B. DeMille’s pictures.
The promotion came when DeMille needed all his camera assistants to man multiple cameras on a film.
This left no one to hold the chalkboard identifying each scene as a header as the take is shot on film, so Jimmie was drafted and given the title “fourth assistant cameraman.
He endeared himself to DeMille when the director and his production crew were unable to get a canary to sing for a close-up.
The fourth assistant cameraman lodged a piece of chewing gum in the bird’s beak, and as it moved its beak to try to dislodge the gum, it looked like the canary was singing. DeMille promptly gave Jimmie a 50% raise.
Because of the problem with early orthochromatic film registering blue eyes on screen, Howe was soon promoted to operating cameraman at Paramount (the new name for the Lasky Studio), where his talents were noted.
A long-time photography buff, Jimmie Howe enjoyed taking still pictures and made extra money photographing the stars. One of his clients was professional “sweet young thing” Mary Miles Minter, of the William Desmond Taylor shooting scandal, who praised Jimmie’s photographs because they made her pale blue eyes, which did not register well on film, look dark.
When she asked him if he could replicate the effect on motion picture film, he told her he could, and she offered him a job as her cameraman.
Howe did not know how he’d made Minter’s eyes look dark, but he soon realized that the reflection of a piece of black velvet at the studio that had been tacked up near his still camera had cast a shadow in her eyes, causing them to register darkly.
Promoted to Minter’s cameraman, he fashioned a frame of black velvet through which the camera’s lens could protrude; filming Minter’s close-ups with the device darkened her eyes, just as she desired. The studio was abuzz with the news that Minter had acquired a mysterious Chinese cameraman who made her blue eyes register on film.
Since other blue-eyed actors had the same problem, they began to demand that Jimmie shoot them, and a cinematography star was born.
Howe became the most famous cameraman in the world in the 1930s, and he bought a Duesenberg, one of the most prestigious and expensive automobiles in the world.
His driving his “Doozy” around Hollywood made for an incongruous sight, as Chinese typically were gardeners and houseboys in prewar America, a deeply racist time.
During World War II anti-Asian bigotry intensified, despite the fact that China was an ally of the United States in its war with Japan. Mistaken for a Japanese (despite their having been relocated to concentration camps away from the Pacific Coast), he wore a button that declared “I am Chinese.” His close friend James Cagney also wore the same button, out of solidarity with his friend.
Wong Howe was involved in a long-term relationship with the writer Sanora Babb, who was a Caucasian.
Anti-miscegenation laws on the books in California until 1948 forbade Caucasians from marrying Chinese, and the couple could not legally marry until 1949, after the laws had been repealed.
In September of 1949 they finally tied the knot, and Sanora Babb Wong Howe later told a family member that they had to hunt for three days for a sympathetic judge who would marry them.
Wong Howe eventually bought a Chinese restaurant located near the Ventura Freeway, which he managed with Sanora.
When a photographer from a San Fernando Valley newspaper came to take a picture of the eatery, Howe counseled that he should put a wide-angle lens on his camera so he wouldn’t have to stand so close to the freeway to get the shot. “I’ll take the picture,” the photographer unknowingly snapped at one of the master cinematographers of the world, “you just mind your g*dd@mned noodles!” (IMDb)
Happy Birthday, James Wong Howe!