Biography

Bitzer fell out with Griffith in 1924. Work became harder to come by and he worked on just a handful of films afterwards, retiring in 1933. He had done well financially by investing his lifetime savings ($7000) in the hugely successful The Birth of a Nation (1915), but ended up losing it all. His last job was restoring old movies at the Museum of Modern Art for $20 a week and he died in relative obscurity.

Much has been written about Bitzer having been born in Germany and speaking with a very heavy German accent. In his autobiography, Joseph Henabery, who worked with Bitzer and knew him for more than 20 years, says that although Bitzer's family came from Germany, Bitzer himself was born in the US and he had no German accent whatsoever. In Bitzer's autobiography, "Billy Bitzer: His Story", he states that he was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1872.

Considered the greatest cinematographer of his time, Bitzer earned up to $850 per week. He was the first to use artificial lighting to illuminate a set. Among his numerous innovations and inventions are travelling shots, backlighting, soft-focus, the running dissolve, the fade-out and the close-up. Since he failed to patent any of these processes, he never derived financial benefit from them.

Became the first cinematographer to cover a war, when he was commissioned by William Randolph Hearst to get footage of the Spanish-American War. Witnessed Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charging at El Caney.

According to Bitzer in an article published posthumously in "Films in Review" in October 1975, his salary in the 20's with Griffith was the same it had been when they were at Biograph, $250 per week with an additional $100 for managing the lab.