The Wild Bunch - Honoring Cinematographer Lucien Ballard
Join us for a special screening of "The Wild Bunch" honoring cinematographer Lucien Ballard, an Academy Award nominee and Circle Cinema Walk of Fame recipient.
TIME & LOCATION
Jul 20, 2026, 7:15 PM
7:15pm | Screen 3, Circle Cinema
ABOUT
Feature Film • Western • 2hr 15m • English • Screen 3
$12 members, $15 non-members
Celebrate 2026 Walk of Fame inductee Lucien Ballard with the film widely considered his masterpiece! The Oklahoma-born cinematographer of Cherokee descent shot more than 130 films over five decades, and his work on The Wild Bunch won him the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Cinematography.
About The Film
Texas, 1913. Pike Bishop and his gang of aging outlaws ride into town for one final robbery, only to walk straight into an ambush set by Pike's former partner, now a reluctant bounty hunter forced to track his old friend. Fleeing across the border into revolution-torn Mexico, the gang takes on a dangerous gun-running job for a brutal general, a deal that pushes their loyalty to each other to the breaking point. Sam Peckinpah's landmark 1969 Western follows men who have outlived their era, hurtling toward a finale that changed screen violence forever. William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, and Warren Oates star, with Lucien Ballard's sun-scorched cinematography.
About Lucien Ballard
Lucien Ballard (1904–1988) — Born in Oklahoma and of Cherokee descent, Ballard studied at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Pennsylvania before breaking into Hollywood as a film cutter and earning his first cinematography credits on Josef von Sternberg productions. Over a five-decade career he shot more than 130 films and became a celebrated stylist, equally at home in moody black-and-white and sweeping color, and a favorite of directors including Stanley Kubrick (The Killing), Budd Boetticher, and Sam Peckinpah (Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch). A master of the Western landscape, he also devised a soft, line-smoothing light nicknamed "the Obie" for actress Merle Oberon, to whom he was briefly married. Ballard earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography for The Caretakers (1963) and won the National Society of Film Critics Award for The Wild Bunch. "I want to contribute to a picture, not just work on it," he once said.