|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Back to the Future:
Reflections on the Brief History of Video Moviemaking
(Originally published in ICG Magazine, September, 2001. Reprint courtesy of ICG Magazine)
by Russ Alsobrook, ASC
Scan the pages of any popular film magazine, professional cinematography journal, or even the entertainment section of the local newspaper, and you see a flood of ink devoted to the hot, new trend of shooting theatrical motion pictures on videotape. All of a sudden, everyone and his brother's dog is making a "digital film"—is this the ultimate oxymoron? Here are a few examples:
"Technological developments in the last two years have finally made the conversion of video into high quality professional motion picture film a reality. Motion picture photography with a totally electronic camera is here...TODAY!"
"The executive board of local 659 is urging its members to learn all they can about operating these electronic marvels."
"This is just the beginning of the revolution in electronic motion pictures."
"Sony has a 2000-line camera right here in Hollywood."
"Videography's appeal is not confined to the independent producers. Major studios are committing to tape production..."
"The future? Movies produced on tape."
In the midst of this swirling maelstrom of propaganda for "Electronic Cinema," a group of distinguished cinematographers recently met in the friendly confines of the ASC clubhouse. During the spirited conversation about movies, jobs, and the stock market, one revered and much-honored D.P. mentioned that he had just finished shooting a feature on videotape and found the experience so satisfying that he "hoped never to see another piece of film." No, this was not John Bailey, ASC, discussing his digital photography of The Anniversary Party (see ICG Magazine, June, 2000). This gathering took place in 1972, and it was Lee Garmes, ASC, who shocked his colleagues with this heretical announcement. The movie that caused Garmes to embrace video is a little known study of teenage suicide entitled Why? (even the subject matter seems as relevant today as the discussion of film and tape). The venerable Garmes was a master cinematographer with an Oscar on his mantle and over 100 feature films on his resume. His credits include such classics as Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932), both films highlighted by Josef Von Sternberg's bravura direction of Marlene Dietrich. Garmes photographed the first twelve weeks of Gone with the Wind (1939) but remains uncredited for his artful and moody manipulation of the difficult Technicolor process. Mr. Lee Garmes was the ultimate "film guy," a "cameraman's cameraman" who began his career hand cranking black-and-white nitrate film before movies learned how to talk. Yet he was passionately advocating videotape as an "acquisition" medium for feature motion picture production. This little gathering took place almost thirty years ago—the same year the above quotes appeared in print. As the philosopher said, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
"The Future Ain't What It Used To Be..."
By now everyone is familiar with the famous and often repeated 1955 Daily Variety headline proclaiming "Film Is Dead" on the news that Ampex had introduced the first videotape recording machine. It wasn't the first report of film's imminent mortality. In 1947, legendary cinematographer Leon Shamroy, ASC (Cleopatra, South Pacific, The Robe, The Planet of the Apes) made the following prediction. "New engineering developments loom on the horizon...not far off is the 'electronic camera'...that will place a more refined instrument in the hands of the cameraman, an instrument of greater sensitivity and mobility." With the passing of every decade there seems to be a renewed interest in video as a recording medium for theatrical motion pictures. The mid-Sixties saw the first serious attempts to fulfill the predictions of the Forties and Fifties with a process called "Electronovision." (The trend, at the time was to tack on the word "vision" to almost any new theatrical format from "VistaVision" to "Smellovision" in a desperate attempt to counter the growing popularity of Television). John Gielgud directed Richard Burton in the 1964 production of Hamlet using the Electronovision process. It was basically a multi-camera TV-style recording of Shakespeare's opus as performed in the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. Studio video cameras were positioned in the orchestra, boxes, and balconies to mimic the audience point of view. A kinescope film recording was made of the video image for theatrical release.
The "Theatrofilm" presentation of Hamlet preserved Richard Burton's magnificent performance but did nothing for the advancement of videotape as a means to shoot motion pictures. (In the early days of TV, before videotape, the kinescope process was the only way to preserve and distribute programs shot on video. It was simply a film camera aimed at a monitor, re-recording the images fed from the TV camera. The results were less than satisfactory, which persuaded producer Desi Arnaz to shoot I Love Lucy on 35mm film. The director of photography was the eminent Karl Freund, ASC [Dracula, A Guy Named Joe, The Good Earth, Key Largo]. Thus, in 1951, the TV sitcom was born and because Lucy was shot on film, she lives forever in syndication.)
In 1965, two competing film biographies of Hollywood sex symbol Jean Harlow were racing through production, each attempting to be the first on the screen. Harlow, Paramount Studios' version of the cinema siren's tragic life and death was photographed in widescreen color by Joe Ruttenberg, ASC. The Magna Pictures rendition of Harlow was a black-and-white quickie, shot in eight days, live TV style, with Electronovision's vidicon cameras. This kinescope saga hit the box office first, beating Paramount's release by a few weeks, but the audience preferred to wait for the Technicolor portrait of the "Blond Bombshell." The Electronovision Harlow was more of a curiosity than a movie and was pulled from its few bookings about as quickly as it had been shot. Along with a few dusty kinescope prints, the Electronovision cameras were relegated to video-movie history.
"Those 70s Shows"
Returning to 1972, we can recall some interesting scientific and cultural developments. American astronauts made two successful trips to the moon (it was almost routine by then) and sent back live TV coverage of their amazing driving skills. The off-road antics in their multi-million-dollar space buggy were only eclipsed by their amazing zero-gravity golf swings. Earthlings tuned their boob tubes to All in the Family while their kids got hooked on "Pong," the first video game. There was no need to search for Bobby Fischer; he was beating Boris Spasky in the ultimate chess championship. The Godfather made millions of moviegoers an "offer they couldn't refuse" and set new box office records. Exile on Main Street reestablished the Rolling Stones as the "greatest rock-n-roll band in the world." Returning from the Vietnam peace talks, Henry Kissinger promised "peace is at hand." But peace was more than three years away.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Donald M. Morgan, ASC, was shooting a western movie in the dusty badlands of New Mexico. Santee starred Glen Ford, Dana Wynter, and Jay Silverheels. Gary Nelson directed the film that asked, "How long can a man hunt for something that's already dead?" The real question was whether a rough-and-tumble location picture could be successfully photographed on videotape. (I wonder what John Ford's answer would have been?) Morgan and company (including camera operator Ken Lampkin, ASC) would put their state-of-the-art video package to the ultimate test. They used an array of EMI 2001c studio cameras augmented by a specially modified RCA TK-44B for handheld work. Two Ampex VR-1200 videotape machines would record the action. Almost as an afterthought, Morgan decided to bring along his trusty Arriflex IIC and a few rolls of 35mm color film for those situations where the cumbersome video cameras couldn't make it into inaccessible terrain. It turned out to be a wise decision by the location-wise cinematographer. As the picture progressed, Morgan and the director relied more and more on the Arri to bring home the footage. The video cameras had trouble dealing with the high contrast of the harsh western locations, and night scenes lit by campfires and lanterns proved especially difficult for the limited latitude of the plumbicon tubes. Morgan recalls that the campfires blew out and even the smoking barrels of the old Winchesters looked like flame-throwers when recorded on video.
Morgan recounts that his lack of experience with video was a plus when hired for this assignment. When the producer asked what he knew about tape, Morgan answered "that's what you wrap around film cans." Not being predisposed to the limits of video allowed Morgan to try setups that most tape guys wouldn't even consider. When the company needed shots of horsemen galloping across a rushing river, Morgan didn't hesitate to mount the video cameras in a 4 x 4 truck and track with the cowboys through the swollen waters of the Rio Grande. Cable pullers became soaked as they struggled to drag the coaxial umbilical cord that connected cameras to land-locked video tape recorders. Shooting such a sequence would have been much more easily done on film, and as the project continued it became more apparent that videotape and Westerns were not a match made in heaven. Morgan remembers that most of Santee was actually shot on film with less than one minute of the final picture transferred from the videotape original. As he says, "It was a grand experiment that fizzled."
Thirty years later his resume lists over sixty top-notch feature film and TV movie credits including Starman, Christine, Geronimo, and Murder in Mississippi. His photography has been honored with three Emmys and four ASC awards. When asked about the current hype surrounding "digital video," Morgan likes to put it all into perspective by telling the story of his first job in Hollywood—as an employee at CineColor Film Lab. One day, while barely into his first week on the job, a grizzled laboratory veteran asked why he would even consider pursuing a career in the film business because "film" would cease to exist in a couple of years. Morgan says that ever since that day he's been "afraid for his career." That day was forty-eight years ago and Morgan's illustrious career shows no signs of winding down.
Far removed from the open spaces of New Mexico, another experiment in videotape production was taking place on location in Long Island, New York. The Joseph Papp production of David Rabe's plays Sticks and Bones received its screen translation as a CBS movie-of-the-week by iconoclastic director Robert Downey (Putney Swope, Greaser's Palace). Cinematographer Peter Powell used a Norelco PCP-90 video camera for the handheld, film-style, semi-documentary shoot. The crew combined film and video professionals and by most accounts it was a successful melding of techniques. According to first assistant director Robert J. Koster, "Sticks and Bones was an inkling of what the future had in store for us."
"Electric Avenue"
The winds of video tend to blow hot and cold over the years. After a few experiments in the early Seventies, the idea of video as a replacement for film lay dormant for another decade. By 1982, the concept of an "Electronic Cinema" once again whipped through Hollywood like a Santa Ana wind in the dog days of summer. Bananarama sang about the "Cruel Summer" while the Clash "Rocked the Casbah" and the Pretenders were "Back on the Chain Gang." Boy George and Tootsie were both having gender identification problems while E.T. found himself geographically challenged and needing an interplanetary cell phone. Actors from Hollywood's "Golden Age" still had spunk as Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda won Oscars for their touching performances in On Golden Pond.
Francis Ford Coppola directed One from the Heart from inside his 28-foot Airstream trailer designed as a complete "Image and Sound Control Center" complete with editing suite, kitchen and Jacuzzi. Aside from the Jacuzzi, the most unusual new piece of equipment that found its way into virtually every aspect of production on One from the Heart was the computer. From word processors in the script phase to budgeting, scheduling, storyboarding, sophisticated video taps with playback and instant editing, the newest in silicon technology was being integrated into the Hollywood system. Infatuated with the high-tech convergence of computers and video, visionary Coppola and some of his cohorts went so far as to make the following prediction. "In a few short years, high-definition video cameras and recorders with image quality superior to that of 35 millimeter film will eliminate film altogether from the moviemaking process." Garrett Brown recalls that Coppola wanted to drag the medium into the twenty-first century and looked forward to an "era when movies will be digitally recorded as high-resolution video; edited by computers juggling trillions of binary numbers, and distributed by...satellite to exhibitors." Coppola's master cinematographer on Heart was Vittorio Storaro, ASC, who commented that "One of Francis' first ideas was to shoot the entire picture on videotape and transfer to film, but I refused to do that because I don't think that today the quality of the transfer...is good enough." But, he added, "there is no question that in a few years the movie business will be totally changed, as the electronic system improves more and more." Two decades later, it appears that Coppola's dream is getting closer to reality every day.
The interest in "Electronic Cinema" around 1982 spurred development of two video cameras that promised to put "film-less" moviemaking into the hands of filmmakers. Ikegami offered the EC-35 camera, which claimed to be the first "electronic cinematography camera that matches 35 millimeter quality." Aimed primarily at cinematographers working in television, Ikegami claimed a contrast ratio of 100:1 as compared to only 20:1 for other video cameras and a fully automated setup box, which aligned the camera in seconds and eliminated the need for a video engineer. The EC-35 did resemble a movie camera—from the focal plane forward with its prime lenses, follow-focus, matte box and other film-style accessories supplied by Cinema Products. CBS produced Kudzu, a half-hour, single camera comedy pilot with the EC-35. Kudzu's producer-director had high praise for the "phenomenal camera" and claimed that "video production is here. Shows are going to be shot that way, and that's all there is to it." Even so, the little hybrid camera never found a niche in the film-dominated TV world.
Panavision, in a joint effort with Commercial Electronics, Inc. (CEI), introduced the Panacam Reflex, which promised to be "the first and only actual motion picture camera that photographs on tape instead of film." The Panacam combined state-of-the-art video innards with all the bells and whistles of the world-renowned Panaflex line of 35mm film cameras. On first glance, it was impossible to tell if this was a video camera, since it looked more like a Panaflex than any tape camera then in use. The camera even offered an optical reflex viewing system, light years ahead of the fuzzy black-and-white TV-tube-mini-monitor eyepieces that video cameramen were forced to squint into. (When will Panavision design an optical viewfinder for their 24P camera?) However, the Panacam Reflex was an idea whose time had yet to come. For all its hype in the early Eighties, the video revolution did little to upset the status quo. On the occasion of the Panacam's release in 1982, Panavision's own visionary—the late Robert Gottschalk—provided what is probably the most accurate and eloquent assessment of the great film-video debate. "The Panacam Reflex," he wrote, "is truly the film cinematographer's video camera. But video is video and film is film and both have their distinctive and definite places."
As the Eighties progressed, technology developed at a fevered pace. Time magazine's "man of the year" was totally PC—the personal computer. The Apple Macintosh took a big bite out of the computer market when it debuted to rave press reviews in 1983. Ridley Scott made TV history with his "1984" commercial for Apple computers. Sony introduced the Betacam in 1983, quickly leaving its rivals in the dust. (Does anyone remember the Bosch Quartercam, Panasonic's Recam, or the Ampex "portable" one-inch VTR/camera combo?) Component video was here and HDTV was again making waves.
Giuseppe Rotunno, ASC, was the first cinematographer to shoot a full-length feature film on High-Definition TV. The 1987 film was Julia and Julia starring Kathleen Turner and Sting and was produced in Italy by Radiotelevisione Italiana. "I am not an electronic person," proclaimed the world-class cameraman who had photographed the Fellini classics Satyricon, Amarcord, Roma, and Casanova. But "Pepino" wanted to try something new, so he tackled this format with gusto. In many ways, he claims, it was a step backwards from current film technology; the ASA was only about fifty, as compared to 400 for film, and the camera tubes were plagued by "comet-tailing" when bright lights were included in a moving shot. Lumbering cameras, bundles of cables and delicate tape recorders hampered the portability that filmmakers had become used to. He also found it more difficult to achieve rich blacks and clean whites, even though the final prints were treated with Technicolor Rome's ENR process. Julia and Julia did not herald a new era of Electronic Cinema. Rotunno spoke for many film artists when he offered his opinion on HDTV, "I prefer the film and not the tape."
Raising Kane–A Celebration
Jump cut to 1991 as Citizen Kane celebrates fiftieth birthday! The 1941 classic is often touted as the greatest movie ever made and seems to grow in stature with each passing decade. During a year that feted this masterwork by Orson Welles, Gregg Toland, ASC, and all their brilliant collaborators, HDTV was once again in the news. The new decade saw another debut party for Hi-Def, although by now she was getting a little long in the tooth to be a debutante. But this was going to be the year of HDTV in all its glory. Every trade show from NAB to ShowBiz Expo found a Hi-Def camera trained on a beautiful bouquet of flowers. Steven Poster, ASC, shot more tests and demo footage of HDTV than any cameraman in history. Sony opened their High-Definition Facilities, Inc. on the Columbia Pictures lot in Culver City. REBO of New York and Hollywood Center Studios combined forces for their Hollywood High-Definition Resource Center located in the heart of Hollywood. Only ten years before—on this very same lot—One from the Heart director Francis Ford Coppola was building the studio of the future—a studio built around computer networks and video imaging. In 1991, Coppola's enthusiasm for video remained undiminished. While engaged in the production of Bram Stoker's Dracula, he reiterated his belief that "film is a medium in the apogee of its development...the future of the cinema is going to be electronic."
"Electronic Cinema" has certainly come a long way from 1964's presentation of Hamlet in "Electronovision." By the way, that was the same year that Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) began tinkering with HDTV prototypes. We have seen over thirty-seven years of development, promise, and evangelical hype while the world still awaits the second coming of television and a new era of motion picture production. Granted, a few geo-political-economic squabbles and some technical standard glitches have hindered the full flowering of Hi-Def, but somewhere, sometime a "Grand Alliance" will surely work things out. In the meantime, filmmakers wanting to splash the silver screen with video images decided to bypass the whole HD issue. The first shots of the new video revolution didn't take place in Hollywood but across the pond in Denmark. Director Thomas Vinterberg and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle grabbed a home video camera and stormed the bastions of traditional moviemaking with their unflinching gaze at one of the most dysfunctional families ever put on film or video (or is it both?). The Celebration (1998) threw out all the rules of cinema, except the very strict edicts of the "Dogme 95" manifesto, which proclaimed that a movie must be shot handheld, on location, with no artificial lighting, props, wardrobe, or music. This now famous "vow of chastity" was signed and promulgated by Danish directors Vintenberg, Lars Von Trier (The Idiots), Søren Kragh-Jacobsen (Mifune) and Kristian Levring (The King is Alive). Worldwide, the Dogme aesthetic has been furthered by filmmakers like Jean Marc-Barr (Lovers, France), Harmony Korine (Julian Donkey Boy, U.S.), Daniel H. Byun (Interview, Korea) and José Luis Marquès (F**kland, Argentina). Originally not intended as a "digital video" manifesto, it has become the call-to-arms for legions of young "filmmakers" armed with DV Cams and home computer editing kits. Motion picture production has indeed entered a new era—the "garage band" studio system is here.
At the opposite end of the cinema spectrum, intergalactic producer/director George Lucas has completed principal photography on Attack of the Clones—Episode II of the Star Wars saga—using Panavision 24P Digital Video Cameras. He promptly announced that he would never shoot another film "on film." Lee Garmes, ASC, couldn't have said it better—some thirty years ago, that is. The same pronouncements of celluloid's demise have echoed throughout the halls of filmdom for at least fifty-five years, perhaps longer. Has the time come to "check the gate" and move on? Stay tuned, this show is about to get really interesting.
Russ Alsobrook, ASC, was born in Hollywood. He became a classic and New Wave movie buff in high school, at which point he also began shooting 8mm films. He began his career as a P.A. in 1969 and spent the next three years working on nature films. From 1972 to 1979, Alsobrook was a staff cinematographer for a company that produced industrial films and commercials for Chrysler. He likens that experience to boot camp for a cinematographer. Since 1979, Alsobrook has worked extensively in television, lensing documentaries for PBS, ABC Television, and private foundations, as well as telefilm remakes of Disney classics such as The Love Bug and sitcoms such as Freaks and Geeks.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
