Hal Mohr

Hal Mohr, A.S.C. (August 2, 1894 in San Francisco – May 10, 1974 in Santa Monica, California) was a famed movie cinematographer who won an Oscar for his work on the 1935 film, A Midsummer Night's Dream. He was awarded another Oscar for The Phantom of the Opera in 1943, and received a nomination for The Four Poster in 1952. Career From a young age, Hal Mohr wanted to pursue a career in cinematography because he was curious to learn about how to make pictures move onscreen. He worked as a photo finisher in a photo lab to gain experience with the camera. When he was 19 years old, he filmed his first movie, Pam's Daughter, which, unfortunately, was never seen by the public because of problems with the motion picture distribution company. Mohr moved to Hollywood in 1915 and began working at Universal City to gain further experience in the industry. There, he filmed The Jazz Singer in 1927 for Warner Brothers. In 1915, in an early example of an exploitation film peddled directly to theater owners, Mohr and Sol Lesser produced and directed a film The Last Night of the Barbary Coast. This film purported to show the last night of the depraved Barbary Coast red-light district of San Francisco before it was shut down by the police. (The area was not actually closed down until 1917.) This is now considered a lost film.