Farciot Edouart

Farciot Edouart was a pioneer in the field of movie special effects and, more specifically, the preeminent expert in process-screen photography. The son of a portrait photographer, Edouart was born in California in 1897 and became an assistant cameraman at the Realart Studios in Hollywood before reaching his twentieth birthday. When World War I arrived, Edouart enlisted in the Signal Corps, but, due to a bureaucratic tangle, was not (contrary to expectation) assigned to use his photographic skills on the battlefield. He then attended the Signal Corps' cinematographers course at Columbia University, and was so gifted with his craft that the university administrators invited him to stay on board as an instructor after he graduated. After teaching for a time, Edouart worked as war photographer in France both during and after The Great War. At Paramount in the 1920s, Edouart became adept at lining up "glass shots" (scenes in which small-scale models were seamlessly blended with life-size sets), then worked on the development of the blue-backing process, which allowed actors to be "matted" in front of an artificial background. As mentioned, however, the "process screen" became the crowning achievement of his career. This was a rear-projection technique creating the illusion of stationary actors driving, running, flying, etc... in front of a moving background. While others turned out plenty of bad or unconvincing process work in movies, Edouart was a master of the technique, and few of his films look blatantly "faked". To improve the technique, Edouart developed a triple-head process projector, which improved and sharpened the background image. Remaining as head of Paramount's "Transparency Department" until his retirement in the late '60s, Farciot Edouart won Academy Awards for I Wanted Wings (41) and Reap the Wild Wind (42), the latter film lensed in Technicolor. He earned one of his final credits as a special effects technician on the classic Rosemary's Baby (1968).

~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide