Latest news with #BillyWilliams
Chicago Tribune
5 days ago
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Today in Chicago History: Two police officers killed by snipers inside Cabrini-Green high-rise
Here's a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on July 17, according to the Tribune's archives. Is an important event missing from this date? Email us. Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago) 1955: A Braniff Airways twin-engine Convair 340 trying to land at Midway Airport in the fog struck a gas station sign just beyond the airport and crashed, killing 22 people and injuring 21. This was one of several accidents that prompted the city and federal government to restrict obstructions and the height of buildings near airports. 1966: Chicago Cubs left fielder and Hall of Famer Billy Williams hit for the cycle. Vintage Chicago Tribune: Chicago Cubs who have hit for the cycleIn the second game of a doubleheader against the Cardinals in St. Louis: 'The sweet swinger from Mobile way achieved the dream of everyone who ever toted a bat to the plate,' Tribune reporter Edward Prell wrote. Williams hit a single, double, triple and a homer — precisely in that order — in the Cubs' 7-2 win. 1970: Two Chicago police officers walking in Seward Park — Sgt. James Severin and Patrolman Anthony Rizzato — were shot and killed by snipers firing high-powered rifles from a Cabrini-Green high-rise. Within minutes, other officers arrived to retrieve their bodies and return gunfire. Later, Johnny Veal and George Knights were convicted in the shooting deaths. Both were serving 100- to 199-year sentences. Veal was granted parole by the Illinois Prisoner Review Board in 2021. 1974: Illinois issued the first state lottery license to a Chicago coffee shop. Although other agent licenses had already been distributed, the establishment at 1419 W. Taylor St. was chosen to stage a ceremonial 'grand opening' of the Illinois Lottery. Vintage Chicago Tribune: Illinois Lottery's first drawing took place 50 years agoAl and Theresa Prisco were interviewed as lottery officials taped posters to the coffee shop walls urging customers to use their coffee change to buy lottery tickets. A $1.5 million advertising campaign — including a supplement section published in the Tribune that taught readers how to play the games — followed. 'We've been here 25 years,' Al Prisco told the Tribune. 'I didn't expect to celebrate it with a bang like this.' 1980: Chicago Bears founder and owner George Halas signed a new 20-year lease for the team to play at Soldier Field. 1984: 'I tell you we need a change! Come November, there will be a change because our time has come!' The Rev. Jesse Jackson ended his presidential campaign but promised to throw his support behind the Democratic Party's candidate while speaking at the party's convention in San Francisco. Highlights in the life of Rev. Jesse Jackson: Minister, civil rights advocate, politician, intermediary, social justice proponent and COVID-19 survivorSubscribe to the free Vintage Chicago Tribune newsletter, join our Chicagoland history Facebook group, stay current with Today in Chicago History and follow us on Instagram for more from Chicago's past.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Letter: Billy Williams obituary
The cinematographer Billy Williams made a brief but crucial contribution to The Exorcist (1973), helping to create in Iraq its 11-minute scene-setting prologue. He had worked in the country 18 years earlier, making an oil company documentary about the cultural history of Mesopotamia. His assistants then were now leading figures in the local film industry, and joined up with him to shoot the eerily atmospheric sequence set among excavations. The film, which had been famously jinxed during its American shoot, now suffered one more piece of bad luck. The director, William Friedkin, and Williams could not find a huge packing case containing a fibre-glass statue of the demon Pazuzu. Without it there could be no film. Eventually, Pazuzu was tracked down to Singapore, where it had been offloaded after being accidentally left on a plane.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Billy Williams, Oscar-winning British cinematographer whose credits included Gandhi and Women in Love
Billy Williams, who has died aged 95, was one of the leading British cinematographers across four decades, winning an Oscar for his work on Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982). Exactly a year earlier he had missed out by a hair's breadth on scooping an Academy Award for the autumnal geriatric drama On Golden Pond (1981), starring Henry and Jane Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. But in April 1983 Williams received the gold statuette – shared with Ronnie Taylor – as one of the eight Oscars garnered by that epic film. It was the culmination of a long and often painful collaboration that for Williams had begun three years earlier when, in a short telegram reply to Attenborough's request for him to join the creative team on Gandhi, he wrote: 'Dear Dickie. Yes. Love Billy.' Williams enjoyed telling the a story of informing Katharine Hepburn that 'Richard Attenborough would like me to shoot Gandhi for him,' to which the actress replied: 'I think he's already dead, Billy.' The production, which was shot over six months, was fraught with logistical problems during filming in India – from the endless dust which unless swiftly checked would form like cement on the camera equipment, to problems obtaining official permission to shoot inside various key government buildings. Then, six weeks into filming, Williams slipped a disc and had to fly back to the UK. With his blessing, his duties were handed over to Ronnie Taylor, who had worked as a camera operator on two of Attenborough's earlier films. Taylor filmed for a month before Williams returned – only to suffer another slipped disc a month later, replaced once more by Taylor. By the time the production returned for its final weeks in the UK, Williams had recovered and completed the film, which included shooting in Staines Town Hall, doubling for the court house in Ahmedabad where Gandhi's 'Great Trial' had taken place in 1922, and at the Institute of Directors building in Pall Mall for a key interior sequence begun months earlier on the long steps leading up to the old Viceroy's House (now the presidential palace) in New Delhi. Williams had earned his first Oscar nomination a decade earlier for an altogether more intimate drama, Ken Russell's Women in Love (1970), featuring the much talked-about nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed. 'Photographically, it was the best opportunity I've ever had in terms of what the script was offering,' Williams recalled. 'It had every kind of challenge. Apart from the usual day and night interiors and exteriors, there was candlelight, snow scenes, dusk and dawn, and that nude wrestling scene. Bates and Reed agreed to be fully nude for one day only, on a closed set. After that they'd only do waist-upwards scenes.' Billy Williams was born on June 3 1929 in Walthamstow, east London. His father, also Billy, was one of Britain's great pioneering cameramen, who shot the surrender of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow, covered the trailblazing Cape Town-to-Cairo truck expedition, and was the first man to film from the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro. When young Billy left school at 14 he was offered a choice of jobs: working in a city brokerage for one of his mother's in-laws, or as an assistant to his father. There was no contest. After working some years for Billy Snr, he broke away and joined British Transport Films, before moving into commercials when all attempts at graduating to features failed. Working on ads with successful film directors like John Schlesinger, Ken Russell and Ted Kotcheff paid off when Williams managed to make it into long-form drama with Russell on the spy thriller The Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the second sequel to The Ipcress File, then on Women in Love. The Schlesinger connection also paid dividends handsomely in 1971 with Sunday Bloody Sunday, a daring – for its day – and intimate drama of homosexual love, which earned Williams one of his four Bafta nominations. Williams continued to shoot films, including the award-winning Western, The Eagle's Wing (1979) and Dreamchild (1985). He retired after Driftwood (1997). During and after his career as a cinematographer, he taught cinematography at workshops in the US, Germany, Ireland and Hungary, and in the UK at the National Film & Television School in Beaconsfield. One of his regular teaching colleagues was another great cinematographer, the Hungarian-American Vilmos Zsigmond. When Zsigmond declared himself unavailable to shoot On Golden Pond, co-starring Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, he paved the way for Williams to notch up one of his most memorable international credits. 'Around that time,' he recalled, 'Vilmos was very much into flashing the film to soften the image, and using various filters to take the contrast away. The director Mark Rydell was very keen I should do something like that, too. I wasn't, though, because I didn't like the idea of the film looking too chocolate-boxy, too soft and sentimental. I thought the actors [Henry Fonda was 76 playing 80, Hepburn 72] should look their age.' Eventually, he managed to persuade Rydell to do away with filters altogether, apart from a 'very fine black net on the extreme close-ups of Hepburn and Jane Fonda'. Henry Fonda and Hepburn went on to win Academy Awards for their performances, in Fonda's case posthumously. Williams's other notable contributions to cinema history included shooting the atmospheric 11-minute opening sequence in Iraq for The Exorcist (1973). Tall and distinguished-looking, he was perhaps unique among cinematographers in appearing front-of-camera in major Hollywood movies – first, as a British vice-consul shot down by Sean Connery's North African Berber tribesmen in John Milius's period adventure The Wind and the Lion (1975), and then as an expert witness in Suspect (1987), Peter Yates's courtroom thriller starring Cher and Liam Neeson. He served as president of the British Society of Cinematographers from 1977 to 1979 and was appointed OBE in 2009. Billy Williams and his wife Anne had four daughters. Billy Williams, born June 3 1929, died May 20 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Billy Williams obituary
The cinematographer Billy Williams, who has died aged 96, was Oscar-nominated for Ken Russell's adaptation of Women in Love (1969) and the sentimental tearjerker On Golden Pond (1982), which starred two generations of Fondas, Henry and his daughter Jane, acting together for the first time, alongside Katharine Hepburn. He finally won the Oscar for Richard Attenborough's biopic Gandhi (1981), sharing the prize with Ronnie Taylor, who stepped in for him when he had to twice withdraw from the production due to a slipped disc. They each completed around 10 weeks' work on the movie. Williams and Taylor used newsreel footage as a visual guide for Gandhi, which won seven other Oscars including best picture. He had gone out to India with Ben Kingsley before shooting began. While the actor fasted, Williams familiarised himself with the extensive Indian crew. Challenges during shooting included the hot, dusty conditions and the logistics of marshalling crowd scenes with thousands of extras. A few weeks before starting on Gandhi, Williams had been on location in idyllic New Hampshire shooting On Golden Pond. Hepburn, said Williams, was 'absolutely delightful. She was very opinionated … a driving force, an absolute dynamo … feisty and determined to get things her own way.' Williams's cinematography on Women in Love, adapted by Larry Kramer from DH Lawrence's novel, represented him at his most adventurous. He called it 'the best visual script I ever had', explaining that it offered 'all the opportunities that a cinematographer could wish for'. These included day and night interiors and exteriors, as well as one sequence shot during the 'magic hour' (the time after sunrise or before sunset), another in the snow, and an abundance of candlelight and firelight. 'It was a very broad and interesting palette to work with. Ken was in agreement with me that we should go for very strong colour effects like the colour of firelight, which is very orange.' Though brilliantly textured, staged and performed throughout, the film is still best remembered for its naked fireside wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. For this, Williams filtered all the lamps on set to be the same colour then created a flickering effect. Reed and Bates were fully nude for an entire day of shooting, then filmed from the waist up for another. Williams shot with a hand-held camera to allow more freedom to follow the action, and to infuse the scene with additional energy. By the time the editor insisted it needed an extra element, the location was no longer available. Russell and Williams reconvened in a studio with the actors, prioritising tight close-ups of them on the rug. 'By using the same techniques of lighting, and shooting everything close, it cut together closely,' Williams said. Russell's take on Lawrence combined period drama with a modern sensibility. 'Billy Williams's cinematography and Shirley Russell's costume design fuse 1920s and 60s aesthetics, linking the screen adaptation to the roaring 20s spirit and the 60s bohemian/ counter-cultural mindset,' wrote Caroline Longhurst. In short order, Williams shot Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), John Schlesinger's groundbreaking study of a bisexual love triangle; Zee & Co (1972), scripted by Edna O'Brien and starring Michael Caine and Elizabeth Taylor, the latter also appearing in one of Williams's next films, the thriller Night Watch (1973); and John Milius's Moroccan adventure The Wind and the Lion (1975), with Sean Connery, in which Williams also had a small role as a British consul. 'I had an action scene where I had to do a lot of shooting with an automatic [at] Berbers who were intent on kidnapping Candice Bergen,' he said. 'That was a departure for me.' The son of Ada and Billy Williams, he was born in Walthamstow, east London. His father had been a cinematographer since 1910, and took on his son, who left school at 14, as an apprentice. Billy Jr worked with his father for four years, including a stint making educational films in Kenya and Uganda for the Colonial Film Unit. At 18, he became a photographer for two years with the RAF as part of his national service. He then worked for British Transport Films before travelling to Iraq to shoot the documentary Rivers of Time (1955). He would later shoot one scene in that country for the prologue to The Exorcist, his sole contribution to the 1973 horror hit. Williams was hired by Television Advertising in London, where he met directors including Russell and Schlesinger, and made his feature debut with the comedy San Ferry Ann (1965). When the original cinematographer refused to take the medical required by the producers, Russell hired Williams to shoot the thrillingly stylish Billion Dollar Brain (1967), starring Caine in his third outing as Harry Palmer. Set in Helsinki, it was filmed there and at Pinewood, giving Williams his daunting first experience of working on large studio sets. His eclectic CV included the brilliantly twisted Hitchcockian thriller The Silent Partner (1978) and the sumptuous western Eagle's Wing (1979). He did excellent work for Peter Hyams on Eleni (1985), set during the Greek civil war, and Suspect (1987), with Cher as an attorney defending a homeless man (Liam Neeson) accused of murder. The Rainbow (1989) reunited Williams with Russell for another Lawrence adaptation, this time with Glenda Jackson playing Anna Brangwen, the mother of her Women in Love character Gudrun. Not everything turned out so well. Saturn 3 (1980), directed by Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain), scripted by Martin Amis and featuring an incongruously naked Kirk Douglas, later parodied by Amis in his novel Money, was rightly regarded as a disaster. Williams's most arduous undertaking was Shadow of the Wolf (1992), made in Montreal during a savage winter. 'We were shooting in extreme cold,' he said. 'That was difficult and we weren't rewarded with a good film at the end of it.' His final film before retiring was Driftwood (1997). Starring James Spader and shot in Ireland, it was memorably described by Variety magazine as a 'low-key drama about a female wacko who holds a shipwrecked man prisoner in her remote dwelling'. Williams was appointed OBE in 2009. His wife, Anne (nee Pearce), whom he married in 1957, died in 2024. He is survived by their four daughters, Clare, Helen, Jo and Kate, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Billy (William Desmond) Williams, cinematographer, born 3 June 1929; died 21 May 2025
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Yahoo
Blue Alert issued for man suspected of shooting police officer
MUSKOGEE COUNTY, Okla. (KFOR) – The Oklahoma Highway Patrol has issued a Blue Alert for a man accused of shooting a police officer in Muskogee County. According to OHP, Billy Williams is 5'11', 380 pounds with brown hair and hazel eyes. He is suspected of shooting a police officer and is considered armed and extremely dangerous. He may be traveling in a white Nissan Altima. If seen, do not approach and call 911. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
