Kline decided to take advantage of the G.I. Bill to study fine arts and art history at the Sorbonne. He explains, “The camera union wouldn’t let me work anymore because television had arrived and I had lower seniority, so I couldn’t get a job unless everybody was working. I scrounged around in television for a few months. I was actually kept pretty busy at Desilu, working on I Love Lucy with Karl “Poppy” Freund [ASC], who was a colorful and talented character. I had worked with Lucille Ball on her last picture at Columbia, The Magic Carpet, and she was very nice to me. Lucy was a very well-coordinated show, the first to be shot with multiple cameras and a live audience.”

In 1951, Kline returned to Hollywood after union regulations changed and he was able to work again. He picked up where he had left off at Columbia, as an assistant, and then spent more than a decade as an operator, manning the camera on such pictures as A Raisin in the Sun, Around the World in 80 Days and The Birdman of Alcatraz.

Kline became a cinematographer in 1963, following a brief, false start. He explains, “While I was in Rome, operating on the first Pink Panther movie for Phil Lathrop, I got a telegram from John Frankenheimer. We’d worked together on Birdman of Alcatraz, which Burnie Guffey had shot. The telegram read, ‘Want you as my cinematographer. Repeat CINEMATOGRAPHER. Contact me immediately.’ I thought, ‘Is he crazy? He wants me?’ Well, I called him at Goldwyn Studios, and he wanted me to shoot Seven Days in May, a movie about the Cuban missile crisis. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, but a few days later I got a call from Ray Johnson, the head of the camera department at MGM, where I had never worked. A producer there, William Froug, had a pilot for a TV show called Mr. Novak. He screened it for me and I thought it was quite good. We talked, and he asked if I’d like to photograph the show. I laughed and explained that I’d just gone through a bad experience, but he said, ‘All you have to do is say yes and the job is yours.’ I started prepping the next day.”

Kline later learned that Froug had separately questioned three of his favorite TV directors — Lamont Johnson, Boris Segal and Richard Donner — about who he could promote to cinematographer on Mr. Novak. Each had named Kline. “It was a terrific compliment, and that changed my life. I was in the right place at the right time.”

After two seasons on Mr. Novak, Kline shot several other TV pilots, including the 1966 debut of The Monkees. One of these pilots actually became his feature debut. “It didn’t sell, so we did a few weeks of additional shooting, and it was released by Warners as Chamber of Horrors,” Kline says. “It wasn’t the most auspicious debut.”

Fate intervened yet again when a visitor to the set of Horrors asked Kline if he could spare a moment to chat about a project that would soon start shooting on the Warners lot. “It turned out to be director Joshua Logan,” says Kline. “After meeting with him the next day, I got the job of shooting Camelot.”

Based on the hit Broadway musical, Camelot was shot on location in Spain and on expansive sets built on the Warner Bros. lot. The picture would be one of Kline’s greatest challenges. “It was the scope of it that was overwhelming at times. I had certainly been on big sets before, but now it was all my responsibility. Our winter forest set, built on Stage 8, was immense. I had more than 400 10Ks in there.”

However, Kline’s reliance on mere candlelight for the film’s soft-lit wedding between Arthur (Richard Harris) and Guenevere (Vanessa Redgrave) proved equally tricky, in part because the producers “didn’t believe real candles would actually read on film,” Kline recounts with a laugh. “I did a few tests and proved that point easily enough, but we also needed more than 1,000 candles for the scene. The actors were supposed to walk through darkness, surrounded by all these candles, before kneeling and taking their vows. Well, how were we going to light them all before the first ones burned out?”

The solution was to employ a team of 30 prop men to simultaneously light the candles, while Kline doubled the wicks’ effectiveness by placing mirrors in strategic positions around the set. To add a mystical glow to the proceedings, he placed an 8'x8' pane of glass in front of the camera at a 30-degree angle. Then, behind the camera, he beamed light onto a 20'x20' white flat, which was reflected by the glass into the lens. Onscreen, shot through the glass, the royal couple seemed to pass through a warm aura of mysterious illumination that was softened even more by a hint of gauze diffusion.

Kline controlled colors and contrast on the picture by pre-flashing his negative, a technique he had heard about but never used. Because the process opened up the shadows slightly, he used far less fill than usual. Pre-flashing also muted the colors a bit, lending the realm of Camelot a burnished, more naturalistic look. “Josh Logan didn’t want a fantasy picture,” notes Kline. “He didn’t want the audience distanced from the story or characters that way.”

Soon Kline would enter a far more “real” world for The Boston Strangler, based on the gripping story of notorious serial killer Albert DeSalvo. Directed by Richard Fleischer, the picture proved to be a visual feast, particularly in its inventive and influential use of split-screen, multiple-image storytelling. Fleischer had seen the split-screen technique used in Czechoslovakia in the 1940s and had long sought a project that would benefit from this device. The Boston Strangler, which tracks the killer (Tony Curtis) and his main pursuer, Detective John Bottomly (Henry Fonda), presented the ideal vehicle. The resultant film is less of a standard mystery than an intricate procedural, as key moments play out simultaneously onscreen, often with suspenseful and horrific results.

Working from a blueprint of puzzle-like panels plotted out by visual designer Fred Harpman, Kline’s task was multifaceted: he was required to not only render each panel — they would later be combined through optical printing by L.B. Abbott, ASC — but also extend the motif into his own compositions. “Panavision’s anamorphic format was a great aid in shooting the multiple-image sequences, not only because of the widescreen configuration, but also because of the sophisticated equipment that was available, especially the zoom lenses,” Kline wrote in American Cinematographer shortly after the production wrapped. “We primarily used a short Panafocal zoom and a 50-500mm Angenieux, with the occasional use of a 35mm for wide-angle shots and a macro to get in close for some of the inserts.”