Cinerama Productions official photo CP02 SQUIRE OF THE THREE-EYED MONSTER Harry Squire is master of the "three-eyed monster," the strange device that photographs Cinerama motion picture features. The latest collaboration of Mr.Squire, A.S.C., and his three-lensed camera, Lowell Thomas' "Search for Paradise," is at the _____________ Theatre.
Harry Squire's first job in the film business was in the studios of Thomas Alva Edison in the Bronx. After an apprenticeship of driving the camera automobile used for filming crowd scenes in Staten Island, he was put in charge of cutting flies in half and photographing them - in search of the yellow fever bug. Harry filmed Edison "one-reelers" and some of the earliest sound films.
As Harry's career took its course, he seemed in an uncanny way to be drawn to the birth of every movie innovation. J.R. Bray, the pioneer cartoonist, was his employer during the period of the First World War, and Harry was entrusted with filming top-secret documents and weapons.
He shifted to Paramount Pictures for a few years and filmed some of the earliest documentary and newsreel films, an aptitude which took him to the Van Buren Company. Harry directed the photography of the Joan Lowell and Frank Buck adventure features. For Harry, this began a life of globe-trotting that includes nearly a dozen trips around the world, and passport entries from virtually every country on the map. The Joan Lowell films took him into the Caribbean and Central America, while the Frank Buck features sent him to the Orient, mainly India and the Malayas. Harry sports scars from encounters with snake fangs and tiger claws.
For Fox Movietone, Harry Squire roamed the world with a sound truck filming the "Magic Carpet" short subjects. His experiences are almost too numerous to recount. Based in England and Belgium for a time, his newsreel "scoops" include the filming of the attempted assassination of the Crown Prince of Italy.
He journeyed into Africa and the Middle East and recorded the wild and uncivilized ways of strange peoples. Employed for a time by Commander Gatti, Harry entered the African jungles to photograph the seven-foot-tall Watusi and the tiny Pygmies.
Back in the United States, Harry built the first stereophonic camera for Loucks and Norling. He came in contact with an old friend from the special effects department of Paramount Studios, Fred Waller. Fred was tinkering with a device that grew into our modern Cinerama. Harry performed the camera experiments, but when war began, Fred's ideas were turned into the Waller Aerial Gunnery Trainer. Harry photographed attacking aircraft for the device, which was credited with saving over 300,000 American lives.
Harry Squire has since photographed all the Cinerama productions, "This Is Cinerama," "Cinerama Holiday," "Seven Wonders of the World," and now, "Search for Paradise." In this last Cinerama adventure presented by Lowell Thomas, Harry and his camera crew went to the "Roof of the World" in Central Asia. They brought back remarkable films from two real-life Shangri-Las called Hunza and Kashmir. With the "three-eyed" camera mounted on the bow of a neoprene raft, Cinerama and Harry were the first to run the rapids of the Indus River. The last great Oriental durbar in Nepal was preserved by Cinerama.
Home for Harry is in Eagle Bridge, New York, where he breeds white-faced Herefords and is next door neighbor to famed American artist Grandma Moses. He likes home best of all! There is his Paradise.
