Leonard Lipschitz was born on May 18, 1940 in Brooklyn. His father Samuel ran his soda shop, but Leonard died when he was 12 years old. Teletype his operator, his mother Carrie (Hybel), later changed her surname to Lipton.
His mother took him to grand old movie theaters in Brooklyn, such as Ambassador and Paramount, and his father brought home a toy projector to spark his passion for filmmaking. Leonard quickly assembled it himself using aluminum foil, toilet paper rolls, and a magnifying glass.
He entered Cornell University with the intention of studying electrical engineering, but soon switched to physics, feeling more free to experiment.
After graduating in 1962, he got a job at Time magazine in New York and became an editor of Popular Photography. After his work, he headed to a small theater in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights section, where he and some friends screened the latest films emerging from the city’s underground movie scene.
He did much the same thing in California, but he didn’t need a day job. He wrote a weekly film column for the alternative newspaper, The Berkeley Barb, and made several short documentaries shot on 16mm film.Let’s make a thousand parks bloomabout the clashes over People’s Park in Berkeley, and “children of the golden westrambling, poignant portraits of his counterculture friends.
In addition to “Independent Film Making”, Mr. Lipton has produced “The Super 8 Book” (1975), “Lipton on Film Making” (1979) and “Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion” in 2021. I have written several books. “The Magic of His Lanterns to Imaging Techniques from the Digital Age” is his 800-page work on the history of filmmaking.