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Ophthalmologist and photograpaher:
 Dr. Howard Schatz was a much-respected ophthalmologist and retina specialist at UCSF for 20 years. He took pictures on the side, but after his kids graduated from high school, he and his wife decided to take a year's sabbatical, move to New York and focus on photography full time. (see photo on right:Edie Falco of "Sopranos" fame accepted the challenge to pose as various characters).
"That was Oct. 1, 1995, and we haven't looked back,'' Schatz says.
Now Schatz has developed a career as a photographer that goes from strength to strength. An example from his most recent book:
Nestor Serrano plays macho guys in movies and on TV -- thugs, cops, corrupt prosecutors. In Howard Schatz's new book of photographs, "In Character: Actors Acting,'' he's a wrist-flapping gay wag, flirting, gossiping, flipping off his jealous boyfriend.
"I tried to get them to do things I hadn't seen them do,'' says Schatz, who directed and photographed 100 character actors for this likable coffee-table book, his 16th. Pictures of each performer appear in two-, three- and four-face compositions that tell a little story or capture contrasting emotions. They're set off by the artists' comments on the craft of acting, the joy and terror of it, the electricity of live theater and the limiting aspects of film. Many of the images are on view at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum.
Playing against type was part of the dare and the actors seem to have enjoyed the challenge. There's F. Murray Abraham, playing a teenage girl who gets to go backstage at a Justin Timberlake show. That gleeful face turns stern and sullen when Abraham becomes the father of a boy caught stealing a neighbor's car. Schatz took about 20 shots of him as the hysterical teenager "and each one was funnier than the next. He went crazy,'' says Schatz, who used about 400 of the 20,000 images he shot for this book.
Schatz spent about 2 1/2 years working on "In Character,'' in between doing the commercial gigs that pay for "the personal books.'' He'd always been fascinated by the creative process, actors' ability to "start from nothing and come up with something that's meaningful or funny or compelling or painful.'' They "create another human being, a force, a physical presence, projecting feelings.''
He sought out mostly character actors whose performances onstage, in film or on the tube moved him over the years. He'd seen Bosco on Broadway and in "Working Girl''; Dan Hedaya's performance in the Coen brothers' "Blood Simple'' had stuck in his mind. In the end, Schatz and his wife, Beverly Ornstein, a onetime KQED producer who helps produce and edit his books, got pretty much everyone they asked. Nobody got paid for the two-hour session.
Sometimes Schatz took five shots of each scenario, sometimes 20. "It depended on the actor, how creative they wanted to be and how much they could get into it,'' says Schatz, who studied each performer's work and cooked up situations for them the night before the shoot. "I would throw out a word or an idea or respond to something they said. I sometimes took off on stories they told me during the interview and had them play who they really were, or the other person, or an observer.''
Harris had recently read an obituary of a long-ago lover. Schatz asked her to summon up for the camera the way she felt reading it. She gazes down reflectively, her fingertips touching her lips. She sheds a tear playing the wife of a man confined to an assisted living home who can't remember her name. Martin Landau got teary, too, as a man listening to speeches at his 50th wedding anniversary bash. In another guise, he cackles at a dirty joke.
"He was doing these things one after another, like swinging at curveballs and sliders. He was fabulous,'' Schatz recalls. "That's why I asked for his wife. I went off the deep end. It was a sudden idea. He said, 'I can't do it.' I said, 'OK.'
"When I do photography like this, I call it falling in love. There's an emotional bond. I fell in love with everybody. When the actors walked out, we both felt we'd been through something together. Like we were victims of a bank robbery,'' he adds with a laugh.
"We go to bed giggling at night over the adventure, the challenge, the thrill. It's scary, it's hard, but it's exciting. Doctors are alpha males in their office; they're in charge. If I picked up the phone and said, 'This is Dr. Schatz,' the person would come to the phone. Now, when I say, 'This is photographer Howard Schatz,' I'm lucky to get a phone call back. That's just the way it is. But it's great.''
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