Dean Cundey Biography

Cinematographer Dean Cundey is among those unsung master photographers whose names appear parenthetically next to the names of their more celebrated directors. Cundey's first feature credit was Where the Red Fern Grows (74). Thereafter, he worked on such John Carpenter films as Halloween (78), The Fog (80) and The Thing (81). Few films have so successfully captured the wet, overgrown ambience of Central America as has the Cundey-lensed Romancing the Stone (84), directed by Robert Zemeckis. One year later, Cundey successfully coordinated flashy special effects with two vastly different time-frames (the 1950s and the 1980s) in Zemeckis' Back to the Future. Cundey's prowess at seamlessly melding live action with laboratory effects prompted Zemeckis to re-engage Cundey for the landmark live/cartoon combo Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which earned Cundey an Academy Award nomination. As late as 1993, Cundey was still convincingly juggling reality with computer-generated artifice in Jurassic Park. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi