Bill Butler was born Wilmer Cable Butler in Cripple Creek, Colorado to farmer parents, and grew up in a log cabin. When he was five, his family moved to Mount Pleasant, Iowa. Butler graduated with a degree in engineering from the University of Iowa.
Butler began his career as an engineer at a Gary, Indiana radio station. Subsequently, he moved to Chicago, and helped design and build the first television stations at the ABC affiliate and later at WGN-TV. When WGN went on the air, Butler operated a live video camera for commercials and locally produced programs. While at WGN, he met William Friedkin.
Friedkin asked Butler to be his cinematographer on The People vs. Paul Crump, a documentary that focused on a prisoner slated for execution in Illinois. The documentary resulted in the governor of Illinois commuting the prisoner’s death sentence.
Butler earned his first narrative credit in Chicago for Fearless Frank (1967), a low-budget feature directed by Philip Kaufman. Two years later, Francis Ford Coppola hired Butler to shoot The Rain People (1969), after being introduced to Butler by Friedkin. Butler moved to Los Angeles in 1970.
Though uncredited, Butler was a second-unit photographer on The Godfather (1972), and shot the West Coast scenes as well as the scenes of Michael Corleone and Enzo the baker standing guard outside the hospital where Vito is recovering from the assassination attempt.
While working on the Universal Studies lot as a writer, trying to get into the Los Angeles camera guild, Butler met Steven Spielberg. He would lead cinematography on two of Spielberg’s earliest films, Something Evil (1972) and Savage (1973).
Butler served as the director of photography for The Conversation (1974), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Grease (1976) and Rocky II, Rocky III, and Rocky IV. He was also the cinematographer for Stripes (1981), Biloxi Blues (1988), and Child’s Play (1988), among other films. He won Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Cinematography for Raid on Entebbe and A Streetcar Named Desire, and was nominated for The Thorn Birds.
In early 1974, Butler heard that Spielberg was preparing to shoot Jaws, and said, “I hear you’re making a movie about a fish.” The two men joked for a few minutes and then Spielberg asked Butler if he was interested in working on the film.
Butler’s first contribution was to show Spielberg how he could brace a handheld Panaflex camera and take the roll out of the boat rocking on the waves with his knees, instead of using a gimbal. Spielberg embraced the concept, and about 90% of the shots on the boat were handheld.
Butler also created a special camera platform that worked with the water to quickly accommodate both surface and below-water-line shots quickly. He also designed a “water box” casing used to hold a camera in the water to capture longer surface shots.
At one point in production, the crew was about to abandon footage from a camera that had sunk into the ocean. Butler realized that the sea water was similar to saline-based developing solutions, and collected the film in a bucket of water for the flight to New York. The film was developed, and none of the film was lost.
Butler also innovated a pontoon camera raft with a waterproof housing that achieved the water level shots of the shark’s point of view. To avoid water drops from hitting the lens, Butler used Panavision Spray Deflector, with an optical glass spinning at high speed to deflect the drops. The spray deflector was not used during the 4th of July beach stampede following the prank dorsal fin, because the water-lens interface added to the panic.
There is no record of a patent application filed or patent granted for any of Butler’s technical solutions developed during the filming of Jaws. Butler’s pioneering work
In 2003, the American Society of Cinematographers awarded Butler the Lifetime Achievement Award. Spielberg wrote Butler a letter, calling him “the calm before, during and after every storm on the set of Jaws.”
Butler continued to work in cinematography through 2016, with credits in television and movies. He had five daughters, and died in Los Angles at the age of 101. Without Butler’s innovative solutions to bring audiences into the experience of the great white shark attacks and the subsequent hunt, the film would not have been considered a classic or spawned an ongoing fear of sharks.