Biography
John M. Nickolaus Jr. was a 52-year veteran of the American movie business. He worked in the photography departments of every major studio in Hollywood at one time or another and rose from laboratory assistant to become one of the busiest cinematographers of the late '50s and 1960s. The son of John M. Nickolaus Sr., a veteran cameraman whose career dated from the first decade of the 20th century, he was born in Bayonne, NJ, in 1913, at a time when much of the movie business was still on the East Coast. Soon after, however, the family moved to the filmmaking community that was rapidly taking shape in Hollywood. The younger Nickolaus entered the industry at MGM in the mid-'30s, working in the film lab before moving up to assistant cameraman. By 1941, he was a camera operator working with such notables as
George Folsey,
Joseph Ruttenberg, and
John Alton before being assigned to work with two-time Oscar-winner Charles Rosher. They remained together as a team for 14 years, during which Nickolaus distinguished himself in the field of Technicolor and, especially, in successfully capturing the underwater sequences in
Esther Williams films. Nickolaus left MGM after Rosher retired and became a director of photography, in the process moving into lower-budgeted, independent productions. His credits included films made at Allied Artists and Lippert Pictures, including Westerns, crime dramas, and science fiction. Among the stranger movies that he shot during this period was
Night of the Blood Beast (1958), an eerie, claustrophobic, sci-fi thriller that featured echoes of the contemporary horror film It! The Terror From Beyond Space and elements that anticipated the late-'70s horror-thriller
Alien. Nickolaus moved into television work during the early '60s, photographing more than 90 episodes of
Rawhide before he was hired by producer
Leslie Stevens to work in tandem with Conrad Hall shooting
The Outer Limits. He left that series during its first season to become the director of photography on The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, an adventure show set in the 19th century American West starring a young
Kurt Russell. Nickolaus also shot 60 episodes of
Perry Mason during that program's final seasons before moving on to
Peyton Place, which kept him busy for most of the rest of the decade with its twice-weekly broadcast schedule. At the end of the '60s, he worked on the comedy series
Room 222, the topical drama
Judd for the Defense, and, later, the period drama
The Waltons. He finished his career working for producer
Irwin Allen on a series of made-for-TV movies. Nickolaus was diagnosed with cancer in the early '80s and retired soon after. He died in 1985 at the age of 71. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide