Gary Graver

Graver was born July 20, 1938, in Portland, Oregon, to Raleigh and Frances Graver. His father was a native Oregonian, while his mother was born in Washington state. where he attended Grant High School. He also acted in stage productions for the Portland Civic Theatre. At age 20, Graver moved to Hollywood to become an actor, and studied acting with Lee J. Cobb and Lucille Ball. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in the early 1960s and quickly joined the Navy instead. He was assigned to a combat camera group and trained as a professional cameraman while touring in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan. ==Career==

Feature films for NASA. Welles and Graver started work on the unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, in addition to other projects Welles had in the works including F for Fake (1973), which Graver co-shot with French cinematographer François Reichenbach; and Filming Othello (1978). Graver's work for Welles was unpaid, and during the shooting of one scene in The Other Side of the Wind, Welles used as a prop his 1941 Oscar that he won as the co-writer of Citizen Kane. When shooting was finished, he handed the statuette to Graver saying, "Here, keep this." Graver understood this to be a gift in lieu of payment for his work. Graver held onto the award for several years until he ran into financial trouble in the 1990s, and in 1994 he sold it for $50,000. The purchaser, a company called Bay Holdings, then attempted to sell it at auction through Sotheby's in London. When Welles's daughter Beatrice Welles learned of the intended sale, she successfully sued both Graver and the holding company to stop it. She eventually took possession of the statuette before attempting to sell it herself, however Christie's withdrew it from auction after the Academy objected to the sale. Besides his work with Welles, Graver also worked for other Hollywood directors including Roger Corman and Fred Olen Ray. The bulk of his output was B-movies since, as he put it, "I knew how to make a movie without much money." after which he served as cinematographer on the slasher film Mortuary (1983), and the comedy Chattanooga Choo Choo (1984). He directed the thriller film Moon in Scorpio starring Britt Ekland in 1987, followed by a cinematography credit on Twisted Nightmare (1988). ==Death==

Graver died on November 16, 2006, at his home in Rancho Mirage, California after a lengthy battle with cancer. His widow, former actress Jillian Kesner, died the following year of complications of a staph infection, which she contracted after having been diagnosed with leukemia. Graver had two sons from previous marriages. ==Select filmography==