Herron wanted Spielberg to see some of Daviau's recent work that
weekend, and set out on a crusade to get his hands on the footage. With
Harry Tracy still in editing, The Boy Who Drank Too Much was selected.
When Herron called the studio to get a 35mm print, he was informed that
it was still in New York. "Randy proceeded to call a friend at CBS, a gal
who owed him one . . . Breaking a lot of rules, she went to the vault, got
the air print, and snuck it out to him in the parking lot." Herron next had
to take the footage to a film house to have it put on reels and into a carry-
ing case, before personally delivering it to Spielberg's home on Sunday
afternoon. (Daviau is still represented by the same agency, now known as
Skouras Agency.)
That evening, Daviau
received a call at home from
Spielberg, inviting him to
come read the script. Daviau
received his first Oscar nomi-
nation for his work on E.T.
Over the next few years,
Daviau went on to shoot two
segments of Twilight Zone:
The Movie (one of which
was directed by Spielberg),
reunited with Jerrold
Freedman for the film Legs,
then on to The Falcon and
the Snowman with John
Schlesinger, and the California
unit for Spielberg's Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom.
A friend introduced Daviau to the book The Color Purple. "I remember
reading it on the plane back from New York. I thought it was a remark-
able book . . . " Spielberg directed the film with Daviau as cinematogra-
pher, earning him a second Oscar nomination.
Two years later, Daviau earned a third nomination for cinematography
on Empire of the Sun, also directed by Spielberg. "I remember the first day
of shooting. We were in Shanghai . . . I remember standing and looking
down at 5,000 extras milling around and saying to myself, `I'm really
glad to be here, because they're not going to make many more of these.'
Today, those extras would be digital."
The success of Empire was followed by the Barry Levinson directed
Avalon. Daviau had met Mark Johnson and Barry Levinson during the
shooting of The Color Purple, when they came to North Carolina to show
"Learn film. It's
still here. It's going
to be here for quite a
while. Learn it. Learn
to see what photography
can do. If you learn to see and think and
previsualize with film, you'll be so far
ahead of the game compared to people who
only know how to look at a monitor."
--Allen Daviau, ASC
"The good thing about film school is
you're hanging out with people with the same
insanity as you have."--Allen Daviau, ASC
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