A television cameraman first and a director second, John C. Flinn III lit Hill Street Blues and Babylon 5 with more care than the scripts always deserved. When the talk is good his light serves it; when it is not, the light cannot rescue it.
Fi1m perspective
Look at an alien face on Babylon 5 (1994) and the first thing you notice is the colour on it. John C. Flinn III gelled his lamps so the station's corridors and council chambers were lit in shades no real spacecraft would bother with, and he did it on a budget that also had to pay for some of television's earliest digital effects. His own account of the job is cheerful: "Give me every gel we've got and test this and that." The result is a series that looks, in its better hours, like it was lit by someone enjoying himself.
He came up the slow way, as a camera assistant in the late 1960s on shows including Gunsmoke, and did not get a cinematography credit until The Flame Is Love in 1979. Then the work arrived quickly: Magnum, P.I. (1980), Hill Street Blues (1981), Jake and the Fatman (1987). Hill Street Blues is the one that mattered, a police drama shot with a moving camera and lighting that looked found rather than placed, and it made his name among the people who light television. He was principal cinematographer on all 102 episodes of Babylon 5 between 1994 and 1998 and directed nine of them. Afterwards he shot Gilmore Girls, Boston Legal, CSI: NY and, as late as 2015, Jane the Virgin.
We scored Babylon 5 74, and it earned that by the long game rather than the short one. The early episodes are stiff, and Flinn's camera, shared with Fred V. Murphy, does not help them much. We sat through those first conversations waiting for the photography to give us something to look at while the dialogue explained itself, and it did not; the hardware is lit lovingly and the people talking in front of it are merely lit. John Iacovelli's production design gives him rooms worth photographing, and once the series has grudges to dramatise rather than a universe to introduce, the images stop competing with the drama and start carrying it.
The page lists him as a director, and he did direct, on Babylon 5 and before that on Jake and the Fatman and Magnum, P.I. We cannot honestly separate the nine episodes he directed from the ninety-three he only shot; a house cameraman directing his own series tends to make it look like his own series. That is not a complaint. The nearest thing to a criticism anyone has managed is that he spent his whole career in television rather than film, and given what the television looked like, we are not inclined to count it.
Biography
John C. Flinn III is an American cinematographer and director. Born on 28 December 1944 in Los Angeles, California, he comes from a film family: his grandfather John C. Flinn Sr. was a producer and executive who worked with Cecil B. DeMille, and his father John C. Flinn Jr. was director of advertising and publicity for Columbia Pictures.
He began his career as a second assistant cameraman and received his first cinematography credit on the 1979 television film The Flame Is Love. Flinn served as director of photography on series including Hill Street Blues (1981), Magnum, P.I. (1980s), Jake and the Fatman and Babylon 5 (1994), where he also directed multiple episodes. His later credits include Boston Legal (2004) and Jane the Virgin (2014).
Flinn received the American Society of Cinematographers Career Achievement in Television Award in 2010 and has earned multiple Primetime Emmy nominations for cinematography.
