Meet Lawrence Schiller, photographer, journalist, Emmy award-winning film producer and director. According to Norman Mailer (in The Executioner’s Song, 1979), Larry’s father “bought him a Rolleicord when he was a kid, and a police band radio, and Schiller would hear accidents come in on the radio, get on his bike and ride to the place. If it was far away, and he only arrived after the vehicles had been removed, he could still photograph the skid marks. Then he would sell the prints to the insurance companies.” 

“He was conceivably the best one-eyed photographer in the world - “ “Schiller sold a nude photo of Marilyn Monroe to Hugh Hefner. It obtained the highest price ever paid for a single picture up to then, $25,000.” “He was one of LIFE’s youngest photographers…” 

“He left LIFE and went into producing books and movies… on stories that weren’t small. Wanted to do people in depth. Instead, did Jack Ruby on his deathbed, and Susan Atkins in the Manson Trial. He got a terrible reputation… worked hard to change that image. He published a book called ‘Minimata’, about mercury poisoning in Japan, and created the still montages in ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ and ‘Lady Sings the Blues’, produced and directed ‘The American Dreamer’ with Dennis Hopper, did the interviews for a book on Lenny Bruce by Albert Goldman. He won an Academy Award… for ‘The Man Who Skied Down Everest’. 

It did not matter. He was the journalist who dealt in death.” 

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