When the legendary Otto Nemenz, founder of Otto Nemenz International, passed last year at the age of 83, he left behind a vision, a reputation and a legacy that will live on in our industry for years to come. Otto Nemenz International will continue to service the community with the same uncompromising quality, reliability and service that has been the foundation of their success for decades. Born in Austria in 1941, he emigrated to the United States in 1964 to pursue his dreams of becoming a DP in Hollywood and worked his way up the ranks before scoring a job as a camera technician and assistant on the Oscar-winning John Frankenheimer film Grand Prix.
He went on to work as a DP on various film and TV projects, but it was his passion for precision optics and camera innovation that fueled his career and really set him apart. In 1979, he founded Otto Nemenz International in a small shop on Sunset Blvd. with just two employees, quickly establishing the company as a trusted name among cinematographers worldwide. By 1982, the company had relocated to its new, far bigger Hollywood headquarters on Vine Street, and then in 2020, he celebrated the grand opening of a spacious new 38,000-square-foot facility in Culver City—marking over four decades of service to the global filmmaking community. Along the way, in addition to many other awards and accolades, in 1991 Otto Nemenz International received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for the design and development of the Canon/Nemenz Zoom Lens, and his peers recognized his contributions with the ASC Award of Distinction in 2015 and the Cinegear Expo Legacy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.
With all that background and history in mind, I recently toured the impressive Culver City facility with host Fritz Heinzle. Highlights included 21 prep bays, a 1500 sq. ft storage area for camera assistant carts, a 1250 sq. ft. machine shop, a 1085 sq ft projection and a 50ft. long lens test room with Chrosziel Large Format Projectors, and the massive new Trioptic ImageMaster Cine Flex Lens Tester. “It’s basically three motorized telescopes that pivot on different axes, so you check and align lenses, including MTF values,” he explains.
Back in his office, I ask Heinzle how the rental business is doing these days. “We have our longtime shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and shows for Netflix Apple, Amazon, and other studios as well as a lot of indie stuff, but it’s very bumpy still,” he admits, “and it’s going to probably stay that way until the second quarter of 2026.
While Heinzle adds that, “in general right now, the biggest thing we face is the overall drop in worldwide production,” he also notes that recent mergers like the Paramount-Skydance one “are a good thing for the industry and I’m feeling far more positive about next year, especially with all the new tax incentives here in California.” Indeed, faced with competitive tax incentives from other states, California expanded its Film & Television Tax Credit Program earlier this year, increasing statewide incentives to $750 million annually through 2030. And in addition, Otto Nemenz International’s hometown of Culver City just approved its own $500,000 film incentive program.
He goes on to stress that despite ongoing challenges, “top DPs love coming here and they keep coming back because of our great customer service and quality control. I believe that’s the most important thing for us. For instance, we have our machine shop where we can customize equipment for a lot of our customers and we always want to make sure everything is perfect for them, in both film and digital.” Talking about the future of film versus digital, Fritz stresses that “we have the technicians who can take care of all the film cameras out there and I do not believe film will go away anytime soon.”
Later, I sat down with Daniel Lopez, head of the lens department, who reports that their newest development is the popular Ottoblad. “This is basically a rehousing of the Hasselblad vintage Zeiss C and CT series, which is a medium format lens that’s been used forever and we’ve always liked them,” he explains. “The Hasselblad lenses don’t work on 35mm film cameras that well because they’re kind of slow lenses. Then when digital started taking off we started thinking about these cameras, as they can handle lenses that aren’t very fast because there’s so much latitude in the digital camera. So when P&S Technik announced they were doing a rehousing of the Hasselblad we thought, ‘what a great opportunity to do something a little more special with them’ When we were talking to the manufacturer, we wanted to speak to the optical engineer to ask them, ‘is it possible to control the field of the lens, keeping your center sharp but your field you can change?’ We took some readings on our ImageMaster and we sent the information to them, and after some more back and forth, he said it’s possible. Then we asked him to build one. And it worked! It’s an attachment that is on the rear of the lens that you can adjust during a shot and it’ll control your field. So we said, build us more right away, because we wanted it to be not just a rehousing of the Hasselblad, but a whole new invention of the Hasselblad. You can use it as a Hasselblad, as in a zero position it looks just like a regular Hasselblad. But then you move the dial on the lens and you can control your field to get a nice very center punch lens, depending on how much you want. You can have just a little bit or a lot, it’s your call.”
Lopez notes that even the prototypes were “very popular and when we saw DPs looking at the lens, you could just see their creativity immediately being sparked. They were saying, ‘I could try this and I can try that and do it while I’m shooting, which is fantastic,’ and that’s the whole purpose of creating a new tool like this.” Since then, he’s heard “many stories from clients where the directors are in the video village and they’re shouting, ‘Give me a little bit more,’ and the DPs are actually able to turn it up or down and adjust it while they’re watching the monitor. And then another big advantage is that you don’t have to add anything extra, and it doesn’t take a lot of time to just turn the dial and get exactly the look you want.”
Although the Ottoblads were introduced “right in the middle of the strike,” he adds, it was because production and the whole industry had ground to a halt that a lot of top DPs had the time to come over and check it out, including David Stockton, who then used it on the Dark Wolf TV series, and Lawrence Sher, who used it on Joker: Folie À Deux, the sequel to the acclaimed billion-dollar blockbuster Joker for which Sher was nominated for an Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography. Sher, a longtime Otto Nemenz client, told me that he chose to keep the camera package and lenses “very similar to the ones I used on the first Joker. We did test some other things, but we went back to basically the same setup because we liked the language of the Arri 65, and we repeated a bunch of lenses from the first film, including lenses from Nikon, Canon, Leica, and Arri, and modified them to match as closely as possible with regard to warmth and sharpness. Then we also added a new set of Hasselblad lenses, including a 150mm, that were rehoused by Otto Nemenz and branded as Ottoblads, which have a special ring which detunes the focus of the lens from the outside in, which worked so well for the film.” For Lopez, who reports that the Ottoblads are also very popular with DPs shooting commercials,
Summing up, Heinzle says that “despite the challenging times, the studios and filmmakers rely on us for equipment and great service, and there will always be a need as I think 85% of all the gear needed on a film or a TV series is rented. Why? Because the technology and IT are turning over too fast now. Back in the ‘50s you could keep the same cameras for 20 years and just have one set of lenses. That’s all changed, but Otto Nemenz International will always adapt to the constant advances and changes in our industry and to new business models, and we will continue to offer all our clients the same innovation, reliability and the highest standard of service that we’ve always offered.”
