Look at Dean Cundey’s résumé from 1978 to 1995, and it reads like a list of the movies that raised an entire generation.
Halloween. Escape from New York. The Thing. Back to the Future, all three of them. Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Hook. Jurassic Park. Apollo 13.
Now keep reading. In 1997, Cundey directed Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, a direct-to-video sequel. In 2010, he shot Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster, a live-action TV movie for Cartoon Network. In 2011, he shot Jack and Jill, the Adam Sandler comedy where Sandler plays his own twin sister.
So what happened? How does the man who lit the T. rex in the rain end up shooting Scooby-Doo? The real answer is more interesting, and a lot more hopeful, than the punchline suggests.
From Satan’s Cheerleaders to Michael Myers
Cundey did not start at the top. He started in the trenches of 1970s exploitation filmmaking. His early credits include Satan’s Cheerleaders, Black Shampoo, and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks. On The Human Tornado, he was credited as “Gene Condie.”
One detail from those years explains a lot about his rise. Cundey owned most of his own camera and lighting gear, which made him an unusually valuable hire on low-budget shoots. Halloween producer Debra Hill reportedly called his equipment truck the “movie van.”
Then came Halloween in 1978. John Carpenter’s tiny independent slasher became a phenomenon, and Cundey’s prowling camera became part of its legend. “Halloween was the first one that became a big enough success,” Cundey told Den of Geek in 2008, explaining how the industry started to notice what he could do.
He became Carpenter’s go-to cinematographer for most of the next decade, shooting The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China. That is an incredible run for any cinematographer, let alone one who was shooting Satan’s Cheerleaders a few years earlier.
The Zemeckis years, and a turn with Spielberg
In 1984, Cundey teamed up with a young director named Robert Zemeckis on Romancing the Stone. It was the start of one of the great partnerships of the 1980s. Cundey shot all three Back to the Future movies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which earned him an Oscar nomination, and Death Becomes Her.
Those are not easy movies. Roger Rabbit required live-action footage built to have cartoons drawn into it later. The Back to the Future sequels required the same actors to share the screen with themselves. Cundey became known as the guy who could solve impossible technical problems with a camera.
That reputation led him to Steven Spielberg. Cundey shot Hook in 1991 and then Jurassic Park in 1993, a film that blended practical animatronics with computer-generated dinosaurs in a way audiences had never seen before. In the Den of Geek interview, Cundey remembered Spielberg as a director who met every unknown with the same question: “how do we fix it?” He also recalled the headache of lighting the famous kitchen scene, where brushed stainless steel bounced light in every direction.
Fun fact: Cundey even appears briefly in Jurassic Park, playing a boat mate. He also has a cameo as a photographer in Back to the Future Part III.
The detail that changes the story
Here is something many people get wrong about Cundey’s career. He was never really Spielberg’s go-to cinematographer.
The same year Jurassic Park came out, Spielberg made Schindler’s List with Polish cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. Kamiński has shot every Spielberg feature since. So Cundey’s Spielberg chapter was always going to be short.
The same thing happened with Zemeckis. After Death Becomes Her, Zemeckis made Forrest Gump with a different cinematographer, Don Burgess, and kept working with him for years. Cundey’s two biggest directing partners moved on at almost exactly the same time.
That matters, because in Hollywood, cinematographers often rise and fall with the directors who champion them. When those relationships end, even a legend has to start building new ones.
Then came Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves
Cundey still had plenty of big jobs in the mid-1990s. He shot Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, which earned him nominations from the American Society of Cinematographers and the British Academy. He shot Casper, The Flintstones, and Flubber.
He also had a connection to the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids franchise. He had been the director of photography on Honey, I Shrunk the Audience!, the 3D attraction at Disney’s theme parks. So when Disney decided to make a third feature film in the series, it handed Cundey the director’s chair.
Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves arrived on March 18, 1997. According to Disney’s D23 encyclopedia, it was a far more complicated production than it looks, with roughly 400 composite shots making up about 40 minutes of screen time. It was also historic in a way most people do not realize: it was the first live-action Walt Disney Pictures movie released straight to video. It reportedly cost around $7 million, was shot in about five weeks, and sold strongly on home video.
It also turned out to be Rick Moranis’s last live-action role for decades. He stepped away from acting to raise his kids, and he is only now set to return in Spaceballs: The New One.
Critics were not kind, and the movie never escaped its direct-to-video reputation. In the 2008 interview, Cundey said he was “hoping to do a little more directing.” It never really happened. He later worked as a second unit director on Deep Rising and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, but Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves remains his only feature as director.
The working years
After that, Cundey’s career looks less like a fall and more like the life of a working professional.
He became a favorite of writer and director Nancy Meyers, shooting The Parent Trap, What Women Want, and The Holiday. He shot Joe Dante’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action. He shot Garfield: The Movie, Camp Rock for Disney Channel, and The Spy Next Door with Jackie Chan. In 2017, he shot Home Again, the directorial debut of Meyers’s daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer.
And yes, in 2010, he shot Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster, which premiered on Cartoon Network on October 16, 2010. It was directed by Brian Levant, who had worked with Cundey on The Flintstones and The Spy Next Door. In other words, it was not a random gig. It was a job with a director he knew.
There is a lesson in that. Big-name directors get to choose their projects. Most cinematographers, even great ones, are hired guns who go where the work is and where the relationships are. Kids’ movies, family comedies, and TV films are steady work, and they often come with real technical challenges. Jack and Jill, for all its reputation, relied heavily on split-screen and motion control so Sandler could act opposite himself. That is exactly the kind of puzzle Cundey had been solving since Back to the Future Part II.
The question nobody can quite answer
Still, it is fair to ask the question that bugs a lot of fans. Why didn’t Hollywood do more with this guy?
Consider this. When Blumhouse revived Halloween in 2018, it brought back Jamie Lee Curtis, and it brought back John Carpenter to work on the music. It did not bring back the man who shot the original. That is not a knock on the people who did shoot it. But it says something about how quickly the industry moves on from the craftspeople behind the camera, even when their work is iconic.
Some of it is generational. Directors tend to work with cinematographers their own age, and the industry’s shift from film to digital changed which skills were in demand. Some of it is just how careers go. But it is hard to look at Cundey’s résumé and not feel like his talent was underused for a stretch.
The comeback nobody saw coming
And then came the twist.
In 2022, Cundey shot two episodes of The Book of Boba Fett for Lucasfilm. In 2023, he shot three episodes of The Mandalorian. One of them, “Chapter 20: The Foundling,” earned him an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Cinematography for a Series, according to StarWars.com.
Think about that. The man who shot Halloween in 1978 earned an Emmy nomination for a Star Wars show 45 years later. In between, he collected a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 2014.
Cundey turned 80 this year. His career had a stretch of direct-to-video sequels and Scooby-Doo, sure. But it also gave us some of the most iconic images ever put on film: the T. rex, the DeLorean, Michael Myers, and, eventually, Grogu.
