Designer James L. Moody died on Monday, February 20, 2023, at the age of 80. Lighting Designer for theater, concerts, and television as well as professor, lecturer, author, and mentor, Moody had an amazing and varied career.
We send our sincere condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues on his passing. His daughter Kimberly posted on Facebook, saying “For friends and family who knew him and would like to celebrate his life there will be two ceremonies, one at his Buddhist temple in Los Angeles and the other with the United States Coast Guard in Oxnard.” PLSN will share those details when we get them.
Owner of Sundance Lighting, Moody liked to keep a hand in and keep working and mentoring. In 2019, he teamed up with Kinetic Lighting, Inc. as a consultant focusing on the company’s education forums and outreach. He brought 50 years of experience in the lighting industry as a USITT Fellow, company owner, international lighting designer, author, and educator. He produced Conversations With… a series where high school and college students to speak with industry professionals who share how they got into the business and answer questions from students about their careers and focus within the profession.
In 2017, he retired as a Professor and Head of Technology & Design from the Theatre Academy at Los Angeles City College, which he had been at since 2002. The Theatre Academy is a two-year Conservatory Program that he led. Moody also loved sailing and served in the Coast Guard.
Moody got his start in television lighting in 1973 lighting Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. He worked on a variety of TV shows including Entertainment Tonight, Jeopardy! Wheel of Fortune, and Hard Copy. All told, Moody worked on more than 6,000 hours of television programming. His efforts led to two Emmy nominations and a team Emmy award.
Honors and Recognition
He was the inaugural winner of the Performance Magazine Concert Lighting Designer of the Year Award in 1980. Moody was a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Science and served on the Technical Production Committee. He was a member of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology and has been Vice Commissioner for Lighting Design. In 2003 received the Joel E. Rubin Founders Award for outstanding contribution to the institute. He was also a Fellow of the United Institute of Theatre Technology (USITT) and was going to be leading a session at the upcoming conference. In 2014, SIU presented Moody with its Distinguished Service Award, stating: “This passion for education and his continued love of SIU shows in the SIU scholarship he established for graduating seniors or graduate students: The Jim Moody Award for Excellence in Lighting Design.”
Mark Varns, a professor of theater and lighting design at SIU, nominated Moody for this award, noting that Moody has and continues to credit SIU with the foundation of his success. Varns praised Moody’s willingness to return to SIU to serve as guest lighting director for SIU productions, to offer master classes and, on occasion, help a student obtain a meaningful internship.
“He has remained a friend to SIU throughout the years and has always been helpful and available to our students during his visits,” Varns wrote in his nomination letter. “I was delighted to be present, along with a number of SIU students, at Moody’s address to the United States Institute for Theatre Technology when he was awarded Fellow status and the Joel E. Rubin Founders Award. During his address, he referred a number of times to the valuable experience he gained, and life lessons learned, while attending SIU. It was a very proud moment, and I was pleased that a number of our students were there to hear it.”
Moody authored or co-authored stories for many industry magazines including Lighting Dimensions, which led to several industry-related books, including: Concert Lighting: Tools, Techniques, Art, and Business Fourth Edition, a textbook now in its fourth edition came out in 2017. Some call the book, ‘the Bible of the concert world’. [The third and fourth editions were co-written with Lighting Designer Paul Dexter.] Critics have praised the book not only for the author’s knowledge of the subject, but also the readability of the text. The Business of Theatrical Design is in its second edition, and he recently wrote Lighting For Televised Live Events with his friend and former Moody Ravitz Lighting business partner, Jeff Ravitz. [In July 2021, PLSN spoke with Moody and Ravitz about their new book.]
In 2012, PLSN sat down and spoke with Jim Moody about his career and the one thing that he found the most rewarding—mentoring others. “I’m a big believer in mentoring,” he states emphatically. “I tell all my students that finding a mentor is important.” Moody himself counted as a mentor in GAM Products Founder and President Joe Tawil.
“Jim is a terrific designer, and he’s done it all,” says long-time Lighting Designer and friend Jeff Ravitz. “He’s done theatre, television, events, and spectaculars. He’s also been an equipment vendor and business owner. He understands design from the inside out, and his instincts are sharp and creative.”
Here’s some background and more information on the life and career of James L. Moody.
James LaRoy Moody was born April 25, 1942, in Joliet, IL. In high school, he sang in choirs and performed in musicals before majoring in advertising at Bradley University in Peoria. Yet by Christmas of his freshman year, he knew he was in the wrong place, so he dropped out and signed up for a stint in the Air Force. The year was 1960. “My grandmother and mother cried when I told them, and my stepfather said, ‘Atta Boy!’” he laughs. He would be assigned the intense, pressure-cooker position as an air traffic controller where, “if you crashed two planes together, you’d go to jail for life.”
“Study Lighting”
Once out of the Air Force, Moody went to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale to study English but got distracted by theater. A visiting professor, Sam Selden, decreed that Moody would be good at it. “Study lighting,” he advised. Moody was far from a starry-eyed youth at this point — he was an older college student who had just recently married, and so demurred the compliment. But Selden wouldn’t let go: “What if I could you get into the UCLA Master’s program on my word alone?” Moody pointed out that he had never lit anything in his life. “To the day he died, he never told me why he said that. What could I do?”
After graduating SIU in 1967, Moody was off to UCLA to study lighting, and there he met Willy Crocken, who was the school’s Technical Director at the time. When he graduated in 1969 with an MFA, Moody was offered the TD position at Valencia, CA-based California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), but Crocken advised against it and would steer him to a job at Berkey Colortran working for Joe Tawil.
For the next several years, Moody lived large: playing with the “toys” the lighting manufacturing company produced by day, and lighting shows at night, which Tawil supported. Moody laughed and said it was the best-of-both worlds scenario, which allowed him to practice his craft and “avoid the usual hump of lighting dance for no money just to get a career started.”
Thinking about those early days, when true concert production was getting more professional, he states that “it was a simpler time —there wasn’t as much competition!” Not necessarily by design, but five lighting giants emerged in the early 1970s coinciding with the growth of big concert tours, and Moody, Bob See, Bill McManus, Tom Fields, and Chip Monck worked their respective regions of the country.
House LD
Moody took a different career trajectory. Rather than doing a lot of concert touring, he let the tours come to him. He got himself hired as the lighting designer for Hollywood’s Palladium, covering rotating concerts of the biggest acts of the time including Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, ABBA, Grateful Dead, and many more. But it was a very different time from today. “I dealt with union followspot guys who hated the smell of ganja. I’d go backstage and ask the band for a set list and get a, ‘Yeah, we used to have one of those…’”
Not content to wing it, he’d listen to the albums of the band he was about to light, get a feel for tempo changes and where solos were placed, and rely on his own experience performing in high school to run the show. There was one other skill that came to be surprisingly useful during this formative period: his years in the military working the air traffic control tower. “I didn’t get flustered. It was key, frankly, to my success.”
He did hit the road occasionally, often with the proprietors of the Southern California rock sound: Linda Ronstadt, Eagles, and Jackson Browne. Then he was in Las Vegas working with the Osmond family, where he picked up on their television-trained talents. This would come in handy for his next big move.
Live TV
How could Moody imagine that what would happen next would be not just another call for a television gig, but would get him involved in yet another important aspect of rock ‘n’ roll history? On September 27, 1973, the lights came up on TV’s Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, and Moody was behind the board. Unusual at the time, the show had bands play live as opposed to lip-synching. “I worked with virtually every band there was for seven years,” he says. “It was an especially investigative period. I wish the lighting books I’d write later were around then!” Instead, he leaned on his mentor and the increasingly tight band of brothers including See, Fields, McManus, and Monck — and take their calls too when they had questions about whatever they had.
Equipment was scarce, and many of these pioneers built their own gear. Moody built a lighting board that was later produced by a manufacturer in England. Building dimmer racks that worked for rock ‘n’ roll was the norm, and the lack of standardized cables needed for a gig kept Moody and other pioneers busy.
Embracing Technology
Throughout his career, Moody has always been quick to embrace technology. When computers started to come into play, he latched onto them and ignored the disdain he got from other LDs. “I’d get ragged on about how a lighting show needs [to be organic], needs to be created on the spot every night, and I’d say, ‘Bull—-! It’s about giving the artist the same thing every night!”
Just as his experience as an air traffic controller would help his career, so did his English studies. Tawil would encourage him to write, and, after a few well-received articles, he penned Concert Lighting in 1989. (The third edition is Concert Lighting: Techniques, Art, and Business).
“I’ve learned so much from Jim over the year,” says LD Jeff Ravitz, who would partner with Moody in Moody Ravitz as well as Moody, Ravitz, Hollingsworth with LD Dawn Hollingsworth. “His strong suit is knowing how to keep it simple, so the design doesn’t get in its own way. Whenever I find myself overcomplicating a design or cue, I channel Jim’s design brainwaves and get myself back on track.”
Later in his career, Moody would go on to teach full time and serve as the head of design at Los Angeles City College, lecturing, writing, and, of course, lighting. He was still lighting about 12 theater shows a year. It was an interesting career that seems to have boomeranged: Plenty of theater lighting designers have made their way into concert lighting (especially in the early days of the industry), or even gone through TV and film; but Moody ended up back in theater. He laughed when that was brought up, saying at the time, “I’ve always gone in the opposite direction of where I saw everybody else going!”
Despite his years of experience, his approach to theater lighting could not be more basic: “I’m a big believer that it’s the director’s show,” he said. “So, if he or she has a vision, I’m going to try to create that vision for them.”
Toggling back and forth between concert and theater is a science. “One of the things about rock is you don’t have a director. The band thinks they are, but they aren’t, really. And there are exceptions: Willie Williams gets in the car every night and replays the show on video with Bono. And there’s my good friend Jeff Ravitz with Bruce Springsteen… but mostly it’s the designer, and you’re being guided by the music and trying to match it and build on that.”
Moody returned to mentoring. “Joe [Tawil] was that person for me, and I’ve done it for many others. I started a mentoring program at USITT — we had a famous lighting designer sitting there, and I overheard some kids stop and say, ‘Isn’t that so-and-so?’ followed by, ‘Oh, we couldn’t bother him.’ I thought, ‘I bet he’d love you kids to ask him something.’ “It’s important to have someone encourage a younger lighting designer and have someone to call to ask a specific questions… or just talk to.” Moody would always take those calls himself.
