Biography

Ray June's experience as a cameraman in the US Army Signal Corps in World War I helped him become one of the top cinematographers in the industry. He did some of his best work at MGM, and helped develop what became known as "the MGM look": a rich, elegant, glossy veneer that set that studio's product apart from every other. Even an inexpensive "B" picture from MGM often looked better than many of its competitors' top-rank "A" pictures, and June was one of the men responsible for that.

- IMDb mini biography by: frankfob2@yahoo.com

Ray June was a seventeen year old young man when the great silent director Theodore Wharton and the (Chicago based) Essanay Film Company came to Ithaca, New York to film a football inspired film on the Cornell University Campus. Wharton, enthralled with the area and its people came back the following year and set up Essanay's East Coast Studio to make pics with Francis X. Buschman and Beverly Bayne.

By 1915 Wharton had broken off on his own with help from fellow filmmaker and brother Leopold. After an overwhelming success from making the Exploits of Elaine, their second serial The New Adventures of J. Rufus Wallingford, a series of 14 two-reel episodes was green lighted in 1915 with twenty year old Ray June and eighteen year old Levi Bacon as the cinematographers. Though obscure now, the Whartons were renowned directors at the time always thinking outside the box and wasted no time in the process.

Ray went on to photograph a number of Wharton productions before WWI took him away from Ithaca. Ray filmed the great (controversial) war preparedness serial Patria in 1917 then The Great White Trail in 1917 and The Eagle's Eye and The Missionary in 1918 all serials besides the many shorts shot in between.

This was a training ground that earned Ray a Phd way before he hit Hollywood by storm.

- IMDb mini biography by: James Loperfido