Maurice Prather
Maurice William Prather (September 6, 1926 - January 9, 2001) was an American motion picture and still photographer and film director. He was born in
The Prather family was living in
While at KU, Prather got a part-time job at the local
In 1959, Centron's camera shop, Mosser-Wolf Cameras, was sold to Prather and several business partners who opened Photon Cameras, a successful camera retail store and portrait studio that Prather served as an owner-operator of until his leaving Lawrence in 1962. In 1961, Prather photographed Carnival of Souls, Herk Harvey's Lawrence-produced feature film whose groundbreaking cinematography influenced the horror and science fiction film genres, although the movie didn't really find its audience until 1989. By the time Carnival of Souls was released in late 1962, Prather had left Lawrence with his wife to work as services coordinator and photographer for Horizon Productions, a small, Kansas City-based nontheatrical film production studio. In 1967, Prather moved over to Coleman Film Enterprises, another educational film company, which was headquartered in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. Prather worked there as a photographer until 1977, when he and his wife (who had by this time had two daughters, Anne and Stefanie), moved to California where Prather attempted to give a Hollywood filmmaking career a try. He had little success. "My wife and I had lived in California and really didn't feel like moving back there," Prather said in a 2000 interview in Kansas City after the revival of interest in Carnival of Souls. "I did a lot of movie work and all of the still work for Centron. I prefer to do still photography. I came here to Kansas City [in 1983] and I got out of the motion picture business because it was too expensive. A lot of the stuff I did was food photography. I love food photography. I also did portraits to please myself, not to please the person I was photographing. You get a little old lady saying, 'Make me look like I'm 20 years old.'"
The revival of interest in his old feature film
References
- "Local Experts Join Talents for Film Try," Lawrence Journal-World, September 25, 1962
- Lybarger, Dan, "Digital 'Souls': An Interview with Maurice Prather on 'Carnival of Souls,'" Pitch Weekly (available online at http://www.tipjar.com/dan/carnivalofsouls.htm), February 3, 2000
- "Maurice William Prather," Kansas City Star, January 10, 2001