Four years ago today, an acquaintance of mine, Austin McKinney, passed away, followed in subsequent weeks by his cohort of over 60 years, Lee Strosnider.
Austin was primarily a cinematographer, later a sound mixer, and shot over 25 features. While his name is not widely known, even to those with an affinity for outsider cinema, Austin happened to touch a surprising number of what are now cult films during the course of his career: INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES, THE SKYDIVERS, and THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS all found fans and notoriety through MST3K. During a time when even B films were not easy to produce or distribute, he just wanted to work and make movies.
Lee (far left) and Austin (far right) with acclaimed cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs (center), circa mid 1960s. Photographer and date unknown.
Early in his career, Austin was a frequent collaborator of schlock auteurs Coleman Francis and Ray Dennis Steckler. In his partnership with Steckler, Austin met and befriended Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond, newly escaped from Hungary and fresh to get their careers started in Hollywood.
Austin’s most well-regarded work may be in Jack Hill’s PIT STOP, executive produced by Roger Corman, starring Dick Davalos, Beverly Washburn, Sid Haig, and newcomer Ellen McRae (later Burstyn) where he photographed incredible—and incredibly dangerous—figure eight stock car races in stunning black and white. Austin worked on a number of films with Hill, including SPIDER BABY and HOUSE OF EVIL, before they had a falling out.
Beverly Washburn and Dick Davalos in PIT STOP (1969)
Austin moved on from the monster and delinquent films of the 60’s to exploitation films in the 70’s and 80’s, including REDNECK MILLER, a blaxploitation comedy with a unique tone and perspective. In 2007, Quentin Tarantino, owner of the sole known print of REDNECK MILLER, showed the film during the Grindhouse Film Festival at the New Beverly, thirty years after its initial release. Austin attended the screening—he laboriously collected copies of all his work, and by the time he passed away, REDNECK MILLER was the only outstanding film he didn’t own a copy of.
To this day, REDNECK MILLER has only seen two subsequent screenings, at another Grindhouse Film Festival in 2011, and once more in 2016. Because it has never been made available for home release, those three audiences, roughly 660 people, are the only ones who have seen the film since its theatrical release in 1977, which is a shame because I think it’s an important title for anyone interested in or studying blaxploitation cinema.
In 2007, shortly after the REDNECK MILLER screening, Austin suffered a debilitating stroke, from which he never really recovered. He lost the ability to communicate effectively, however he was still energetic and excited to talk. It was shortly after the stroke that we first met.
I was focused on my long gestating project about Tom Graeff, director of another MST3K favorite, sci-fi caper TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE. Austin, Lee, and Tom had attended UCLA together in the 1950s, and Austin shot Tom’s student film TOAST TO OUR BROTHER, and subsequently his first feature, THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT, which was considered to be, as of 2007, a lost film. I had obtained Austin’s information from Brian Quinn; Austin had left his number at the New Beverly after the 2007 screening in the hopes of contacting Quentin to obtain a copy of the film. On a lunch break later that summer I called Austin’s number, hands shaking. Lee picked up. They had lived together since their sophomore year of college, in a relationship that they were hesitant to clarify publicly; Austin’s former UCLA roommate remembers the day Austin left to live with “a young fellow of like mind” in his autobiography.
Lee explained that due to Austin’s recent stroke, he couldn’t speak on the phone. I explained that I was looking for information about the lost film. “Lost?” Lee said. “But I have a copy in the basement.”
Thus began a friendship that continued until Austin passed away in November of 2013. I saw them a few times a year, and we discussed preservation of the film, and their careers, including a set visit to James Cameron’s film AVATAR. Austin, before he retired, had moved into visual effects photography, working on process effects and plates. Austin met Cameron on the set of BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS in 1980, and after working together on GALAXY OF TERROR and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, Cameron asked Austin to shoot the process photography for the famous animated sequence at the end of THE TERMINATOR. They remained friends throughout the decades, with Cameron seeing Austin as a kind of mentor.
I sat with Austin at the packed 2011 screening of REDNECK MILLER. In Austin’s deteriorating condition, it was a difficult screening for him to attend, but it was the only way he would be able to see his work, which he liked to reminisce about. There was another screening I attended, of Tom Graeff’s work, that Jim Tushinski helped organize through the UCLA Legacy Project, where Austin’s prints of Tom’s work are now stored. The only LA earthquake I’ve ever felt happened during during the night’s showing of TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE.
In October of 2013, I visited the time-capsule mid-century home off of Cahuenga Pass. Five weeks later, Austin passed away. Shortly after hearing the news, Lee suffered a stroke and he too passed.
At the time, the estate was in disarray, and a hypothesized memorial never came to fruition. Though Austin was a member of the cinematographer’s local, and his work touched so many now-infamous titles, his passing has never even been marked with an obituary; having contributed so much to outsider art, he never seemed to gain any recognition from the industry he participated in for so many decades, which upsets me to this day.
I think about Austin all the time, when watching his films or working on my Tom Graeff project. Any time I’m near Cahuenga Pass I can’t help but remember those sunlit afternoon visits to the lovely home, which too has sadly disappeared into the annals of time, a victim of a gut reno in 2017. I’d like this post to live as an evolving obituary for Austin’s work, as a resource for people to learn about his life, and for his closer friends and collaborators to share their own remembrances and photographs.
You can watch PIT STOP illegally on YouTube: