Richard deFrenes, camera pioneer

Richard deFrenes helped make possible the first handheld cameras to show both Rocky Balboa and Ron Jaworski getting the punk beat out of them, then triumphing.

"Dick was the Thomas Edison of NFL Films," Steve Sabol, the firm's president, said in a statement yesterday, marking Mr. deFrenes' passing. "He was a brilliant engineer, a tireless technician, and an ingenious inventor."

Mr. deFrenes, 78, who died of lung cancer Sunday at his home in Schwenksville, was director of camera technology when he retired in 1996 after almost 22 years with NFL Films in Mount Laurel.

But his work there was not Mr. deFrenes' only significant accomplishment.

Garrett Brown, inventor of Steadicam, the handheld camera first used in filming Rocky and then NFL games, said in an interview that Mr. deFrenes "was maybe the only guy in the country that would have had the skill and the nerve" to help make that camera.

At NFL Films, Sabol wrote in an e-mail, Mr. deFrenes "designed cameras for us, then built them himself and maintained them."

"His combination of technical expertise and common sense made him an invaluable asset to our camera department.

"I never met anyone like him. He was the first of his kind and the last of his kind."

In the early 1970s, Brown was working out of his film studio in a barn in Gradyville, Delaware County, on what would become the Steadicam.

"It's a camera stabilizer that lets you run and walk and climb stairs without the shakes," Brown said. "And it has by all accounts revolutionized the movie business."

He said Mr. deFrenes' contribution was "to bore a giant hole in my French-made camera and poke a fiber-optic viewfinder right into the midst of its whirring components.

"And he pulled it off. . . . I was able to see what I was shooting and soon after made a film demo that knocked them on their ear in Hollywood."

Brown said that "Dick was very kind to me, had never heard of me, had no reason to put himself out."

"I think he just liked the nerve of my project."

As Steadicam operator, Brown said, he worked on many movies, beginning with Rocky in 1976 and retiring after Birth, starring Nicole Kidman, in 2004.

Born in Wilkes-Barre, Mr. deFrenes attended Friends Select School in Philadelphia and the Pennington (N.J.) School

After military service at the Naval Photographic Center in Washington, he became an animation cameraman at his father's Philadelphia firm, deFrenes Co., in the 1900 block of Buttonwood Street, until it was sold in 1963.

A daughter, Hope, founder and production director of Montgomery Theater in Souderton, said Mr. deFrenes had serviced and repaired photography equipment in an outbuilding at his Schwenksville property until joining NFL Films in 1974.

In retirement, he focused on the model railroad in that outbuilding while being an officer for the Logan Model Railroad Club in Souderton.

Besides his daughter Hope, Mr. deFrenes is survived by his wife, Bertha; son J. Richard; daughter Heidi; a sister; and five granddaughters.

A visitation was set for 10 a.m. Monday at Jerusalem Lutheran Church, 311 Second St., Schwenksville, before a funeral service at 11 there.

A lunch is to follow at the Upper Salford Volunteer Fire Company, 782 Old Skippack Rd.