In Memoriam — Otto Nemenz (1942-2025)

Austrian émigré Otto Nemenz arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 in pursuit of a career in cinematography, and when he finally started shooting, he was dismayed by the condition of the equipment he needed. “I was doing a lot of commercials [and] after-school specials and Saturday morning shows for kids — all on 16mm,” the ASC associate member recalled in 2004. “16mm equipment in this town was in very bad shape … so I started buying 16mm cameras, Eclairs.” Nemenz fine-tuned them himself, optimizing an engineering degree and experience as a camera technician. Soon, colleagues in search of quality 16mm gear began asking to borrow his. “Before I knew it,” he said, “I was in business.”

Thus he remained for the rest of his life. When Nemenz died in November at the age of 83, he had been innovating and providing camera and lens solutions for nearly 50 years at his namesake company, which originated in his garage and today occupies a 38,000-square-foot facility in Culver City. Otto Nemenz International also maintains a satellite facility in Atlanta.

Nemenz was born in Judenburg, Austria, on Nov. 12, 1941, to an Austrian father and a Greek mother, and he was raised in Austria, Greece and Turkey. “I grew up in both the Western and Eastern European cultures,” he noted in 2023. “The international community is my family — that is who I am.” After earning a degree at the Vienna Technical Institute (known today as TU Wien), he worked briefly for an Austrian public-broadcasting company, then decided to try his luck in the United States. Unable to join the camera union in L.A., he began working at Panavision as a camera technician, a job that soon took him back overseas with the crew of Grand Prix, which was tasked with capturing Formula 1 racing for director John Frankenheimer.

Upon returning to the U.S., Nemenz began assisting, operating and, eventually, shooting, but once he launched his business, it took off to such a degree that he had to limit jobs behind the camera in order to manage it. So, he decided to devote himself to it fulltime. In the ensuing years, he became a trusted ally of countless cinematographers who favored Moviecam and Arri cameras (which initially comprised the bulk of his inventory), as well as filmmakers in search of custom solutions. To highlight a few of the latter: Nemenz technicians Dick Cavdek and Steve Hamerski won a 1992 Academy Award for Technical Achievement for the optomechanical design and development of the Canon/Nemenz Zoom Lens, created for Haskell Wexler, ASC; the Otto Nemenz Swing & Tilt lenses helped cinematographer Tom Richmond visualize the effects of heroin for 1993’s Killing Zoe; and Nemenz technicians devised lenses dubbed “The Deakinizers” for Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC, who sought to imbue images in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with early still-photography characteristics. In 2023, Nemenz partnered with P+S Technik to create the Ottoblad Lens Series, Zeiss Hasselblad T* C&CF lenses that feature an Optical Tuner; they made their debut on Joker 2, shot by Lawrence Sher, ASC.

Nemenz maintained that growing up in Europe taught him “the customer is king,” and indeed, his company is renowned for its customer service. Robert McLachlan, ASC, CSC told Variety in 2020 that he had been a loyal Otto Nemenz patron since 2013, when he started shooting Ray Donovan for Showtime, and “the service was so impressive we continued to use them when the show moved to New York in 2018, even though they don’t have an office there.”

Nemenz became an associate member of the ASC in 1986, after ASC members Gene Polito, Rexford Metz and Stephen H. Burum put his name forward. In 2015, the Society honored him with the ASC Bud Stone Award of Distinction, which is bestowed on an ASC associate member who has demonstrated extraordinary service to the Society or the industry.