Script Supervisor & Set Photographer For Prime Directors Was 70

Mary Cybulski, a veteran script supervisor who labored on Ang Lee’s Life of Pi and The Ice Storm and lots of different movies and in addition served as a set photographer for a number of high administrators, died November 8 of glioblastoma multiforme. She was 70.

Along with Lee’s movies, Cybulski was a script supervisor on films from Stephen Frears, David Mamet, Jodie Foster, Jane Campion, Charlie Kaufman, M. Night Shyamalan, Tony Gilroy, Nancy Savoca, John Sayles and others. She additionally authored Beyond Continuity; Script Supervising for the Modern Filmmaker, a guide that many contemplate the bible for the career.

About the position of a script supervisor, she wrote: “Our specialty is storytelling. It is our job to understand the bones and the spirit of the story. We imagine all the little bits of the movie we are making: what they look like and sound like, how they move, and how they impact each other when they are put together. We carry around a living, growing movie in our imagination.”

Said Lee of Cybulski work on his Palme d’Or-nominated 1997 movie: “On the set of Ice Storm, I felt she was mothering the whole thing. She’s like mother/courage, providing warmth and courage. I totally understand why she was a downhill ski racer. She’s a daredevil. So she’s two things together, warmth and courage, and, of course, talent.”

Her dozens of credit as script supervisor additionally embody Syriana, Mad Dog and Glory; Too Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar!; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Maid in Manhattan; Best Picture Oscar nominee Michael Clayton; Synecdoche, New York; Lady within the Water; The Last Airbender; Eat Pray Love; and 2011’s Arthur.

“As the script supervisor on Synecdoche, New York, Mary was the calm, clear presence at the center of a confusing storm of warehouses within warehouses and characters playing actors playing characters, the film’s writer-director Kaufman said. “There was always a crowd of crew and cast around her asking, What the hell is going on? Mary even made an extraordinarily detailed map of the Matryoshka warehouses to guide us. At the end of production she drew the map on a t-shirt for me. Mary helped me so much. She was brilliant and kind, and I loved her.”

In 2010, Cybulski started a brand new profession as a set photographer, occurring to turn out to be a go-to shooter for filmmakers together with Martin Scorsese, Judd Apatow, Todd Haynes, Terrence Malick, Jim Jarmusch, and Steven Soderbergh.

Cybulski additionally directed one movie, Chicago Cab, together with her husband John Tintori. It earned her a nomination within the New Directors Competition on the 1997 Chicago Film Festival.