John Arthur Morrill(1935-2015)

The secret weapon behind films like "The Witchmaker," "A Boy and His Dog," "Kingdom of the Spiders," and "The Dark," John Arthur Morrill began his career helping shoot Kent Mackenzie's groundbreaking "The Exiles," and nearly 45 years later helped excavate it from the vaults. Morrill eventually began teaching cinematography at USC's Cinema school, then retired in 1992 in El Segundo, CA, pursuing his model plane hobbies and serving on the public library board. His work as a cinematographer always seemed to go above and beyond what the material asked of him, and it's no wonder this giving and philanthropic nature showed itself in his private life of teaching and scholarship. One of his last recordings was the audio commentary for a DVD release of Kingdom of the Spiders in 2010, in which he speaks passionately of bringing images he can be proud of even to B-grade material (single-handedly elevating every film he worked on), before passing away in 2015.