Fred LeRoy Granville

Biography

Fred LeRoy Granville, ASC was one of the original 15 founders of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). The reorganization committee met in the home of William C. Foster on Saturday, December 21, 1918 and drew up a new set of bylaws. The 10-member committee and five invited Cinema Camera Club member visitors were designated as the board of governors for the new organization. The next evening, in the Hollywood Hills home of Fred LeRoy Granville, officers for the American Society of Cinematographers were elected - Philip E. Rosen, president; Charles Rosher, vice president; Homer A. Scott, second vice president; William C. Foster, treasurer; and Victor Milner, secretary. The Society was chartered by the State of California on January 8, 1919. Born Warnambool, Victoria, Australia, in 1896, educated in New Zealand, as a young boy became interested in photography. His first experience with cinematography came in 1913 under the guidance of James Crosby at the Selig Polyscope studio in Edendale, near downtown Los Angeles. Granville became an ornithological collector. He visited Santa Cruz Island in April 1912, then in 1914 he began his film career with the Sunset Motion Picture Company where he worked in Alaska, going as far north as Barrow, collecting birds while filming and traveling. He married his first wife, Mary Jayne Paynter in 1907, and they had two children: George Layton Granville (1908-1947), and Fred LeRoy Granville, Jr. (1910-1986) who became a two time Academy Award nominee, EMMY recipient as a sound effects engineer, with long career on films as It's a Mad Mad Mad World (1963) and The Under Sea World of Jacque Cousteau (1968.) Granville, Sr photographed the documentary Rescue of the Stefansson Expedition (1914) and a number of features and serials for Universal, including Liberty - A Daughter of the U.S.A. (1916) and The Heart of Humanity (1918). He also shot several of cowboy actor Tom Mix's early Fox features. GB Samuelson who had been operating a British film studio since 1912, became disappointed in lack of interest in distribution of his films in the United States, embarked on production renting space at Universal studios in December 1919. He brought over American born director Alexander Butler, and British silent screen actress Peggy Hyland who had made her debut in England in 1914 and was placed under contract at Fox studios in Hollywood in 1918. She was loaned out to Samuelson who also hired Universal cameraman Fred LeRoy Granville and promoted him to the ranks of director. Granville went to England, where he married Peggy Hyland in 1921. His wife was a prolific filmmaker, in 1922 she wrote, produced, directed, and starred in With Father's Help, and in 1923 she starred in the US production, Shifting Sands (1923), directed by her husband Fred Le Roy Granville, with whom she had worked in America. The following year Hyland directed and starred in The Haunted Pearls and in 1925 she acted in Forbidden Cargoes (directed by Granville), then they divorced in 1923 while he continued working as a cinematographer and director until his death in London on November 14, 1932, from complications related to Bright's disease.