Lawrence Schiller has a knack for being in the right place at the right time. Two months before Marilyn Monroe's death in August 1962, the American photographer captured her undressing during her last (unfinished) film, Something's Got to Give. These iconic images were then splashed across the globe in 71 magazines in one week, from Paris Match and Life magazines to London's The Sunday Times, making them some of the best remembered images of Monroe.
Last week he was in town to promote The Photographs of Lawrence Schiller, an exhibition of 26 images at Schoeni Art Gallery, highlighting his view of America in the 1960s and showcasing the period's most famous people from John F. Kennedy and Clint Eastwood to Barbra Streisand and Muhammad Ali.
'In those days, I was known as a cover journalist, and I'm not exaggerating by saying I went to 200 assignments a year. I could be in a different city on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday,' says Schiller, who lives in Woodland Hills, outside Los Angeles.
'I would send in my pictures undeveloped and would only see them published. Sometimes it would be two or three years later before I had time to look at everything I shot.'
The Brooklyn-born California-raised native seems much younger than his 71 years. Dressed in a brown suit and sporting a white beard, Schiller comes across as friendly.
His accomplishments are impressive. Starting out as an international award-winning photographer in his 20s, Schiller changed careers in his 30s to be a Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Executioner's Song (sharing the credit with Norman Mailer) and a multiple The New York Times best-selling author. He has six Emmy awards as a director/producer and one Academy Award as an editorial director for the documentary The Man Who Skied Down Everest.
During the 1960s, Schiller's photojournalistic timing was uncanny. In addition to shooting the nude pictures of Monroe, Schiller was on the plane to photograph Robert F. Kennedy during his presidential nomination campaign one week before the politician was assassinated in 1968; he was in Mexico photographing Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1968 before it became a landmark cowboy film; and Schiller was ringside photographing Muhammad Ali's defeating blow to Floyd Patterson in Las Vegas 1965 shortly before Ali refused to fight in Vietnam. These images and other defining historical moments of the 1960s are featured in the exhibition.
