Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

  One last thing--it might be worth making a small equivalent of a teeter-totter, but instead of being on a one-way hinge, it would be on a sort of ball-bearing gimbal. And an operator would be down out of camera view and able to shift it, so that Bimbaum would literally be able to float a little bit. His movements would become imperceptibly unreal, and I mean imperceptibly. I would hope you wouldn't be quite conscious of where the effect was coming from--but it might add to the magic quality of the haircuts.

  I never thought a whole lot about production design when I was working on Da Vinci. I tend not to fret overmuch on most technical aspects of a finished film when I'm writing. But when Walton began discussing the problems of wigs, I realized again just how much we are, all of us on a film, dependent on each other.

  I have no way of knowing how fresh his comments were to you, but they sure as hell were enlightening to me. And helpful. For example, his notions on how to make the haircuts work.

  None of those changes are remotely threatening to a screenwriter because nothing threatens me unless the alterations affect the spine of the piece. The haircuts I wrote can be executed any way at all--just so the magic stays. The magic is what's crucial. And what I was writing was the best I could do, but all it was was an indication to the other technicians of what the thrust of the sequences were to be.

  Clouds on the ceiling, leaves in agonizing slow motion--wonderful, I say. I don't care if we go to the Nile or the Amazon--all that shot was meant to say was this: We're building, we're heading toward climax.

  And speaking personally, I'll never think of the haircuts again without seeing old Bimbaum, scissors in hand, concentrating fiercely, and at the same time floating, floating somehow, as if he was subject to special and different laws than the rest of us plodders down here....

  Cinematographer: Gordon Willis

  Gordon Willis began to learn his trade while in the Air Force. He shot documentaries and, when he got out, in 1955, became an assistant cameraman. His first feature was End of the Road in 1969. Since then, he has been constantly busy, and among his films are:

  The Godfather

  The Godfather Part II

  The Paper Chase

  Klute

  All the President's Men

  Annie Mall

  Manhattan

  ON THE FUNCTIONS OF THE CINEMATOGRAPHER

  The lighting of a scene is certainly my chief function. The setup of the shot is my other main job, and that's done in tandem with the director.

  If you have ten places to shoot an actor in a room where he's doing something, the ideal thing is to make the right choice of setup. Once you make the right choice, that's ninety percent of what you're doing. In other words, the shot will do the job.

  ON WORK HABITS

  For the director to get the most out of me and for me to be able to do my job well, I should come on a minimum of a month before shooting. If it's a complicated picture with a lot of locations and things to discuss, it should be more--say, six weeks.

  During that time, you generally have fragmented talks with the director. And you constantly discuss things with the production designer. A lot goes on--a lot of time gets sucked up going to locations, studying them, coming back. And then generally there are budget problems here, so stuff gets cut or added or whatever. The more you know about it, the better you're able to function.

  ON THE "LOOK" OF A PICTURE

  Every picture that I photograph ends up with a "look" because that's what I do. I mean, I'm visually oriented. But that "look" comes out of the story reference. It never comes out of "Let's give this picture a look."

  ON WORKING WITH DIRECTORS

  Ideally, you want to go through the script with the director scene by scene. It's really a visual editing process. The director will say, "This is what I want to achieve here and this is how I want to achieve it," and I'll discuss what I think.

  You've got to find out what he wants to do first of all, and then, second of all, you've got to discover if it physically functions. Has he put himself in a position where the logistics make it impossible to accomplish the movie? That happens.

  A good director and a good cameraman are supportive of each other--they're constantly giving each other information. Essentially, you're working as an extension of the director. What you're trying to do is fulfill the idea, fulfill the vision, then extend the idea to the best possible lengths--you want to make the movie wonderful.

  ON "DUMP TRUCK" DIRECTORS

  There's a lot of what I call "dump truck" directing. That's when you take a long shot and a medium close-up and a close-up of every actor and every angle of the scene. You end up with a dozen pieces of film over and over again but you don't have a vision of how anything is supposed to cut together, no vision of what the movie is supposed to be at all.

  Then you dump all that film in the editor's office and they make the movie. I don't think you can make a good movie that way, because it doesn't come from the ground up. That's not directing, that's just coverage.

  THE TRICK

  Generally, the trick on a movie is to take something that's often very sophisticated and reduce it to something very simple. So that it reads out in a good way to an audience. That's hard, because not too many people understand simplicity: They equate it with "no good."

  ON INTENT

  I think it would be smart for the screenwriter, just on a flyleaf, to include a page about his intent. That one page could be very helpful--what the intent is, what the story is.

  Because sometimes, during shooting, people get lost. They think they understand but they lose their reference points somewhere in the middle of a movie. One thing I'm proud of about myself is that I generally don't get confused because I set my sights on something before we start. Then maybe in the middle I'll say, "This wasn't the idea before, it's not the idea now, we're going the wrong way, we're making another movie."

  Shooting is a difficult time--there are a lot of people around, a lot of last minute decisions to be made, it's easy to get lost, and it's physically very tiring. I always say that making a movie is digging coal, but people don't understand that.

  ON DA VINCI: SHOOTING THE HAIRCUTS

  The haircuts would require a great deal of thought. How do you make them magical? The director might say, "Well, I want hair flying everywhere," but that would be wrong, I think; that's not it. The second haircut, that's a sequence I would have to chew on for a long time.

  I've got an idea for the first haircut though; I may be wrong, it's just a notion, but what if you didn't see Bimbaum at all?

  You deal with the kid and you deal with the haircut but you never see the barber. All you hear is his voice. You see the scissors and you see his hands. The scene goes on like you have it--Willie's having the conversation with Bimbaum. And you're hearing Bimbaum. And all the slaps on the head and that business, the measuring the head shape.

  But all you see are the scissors and the pair of hands. The hands coming in and out. The voice discussing it. The hands should be different--short and stocky or long or whatever. Wonderful hands.

  If you did it that way, I hope it would still be magical and you'd have someplace to build for the second haircut. You wouldn't have any special effects this way, no sparklers or opticals. But maybe you'd have introduced something strange and magical. The magic might come out of what you don't see. You haven't done anything creative yet--it's what's written, except you've selected a way of showing it. Scissors, hands, a man talking. Isn't that already interesting?

  ON DA VINCI: SHOOTING BIMBAUM

  I think Bimbaum should be shot always a little off.

  For example, if you went with the notion for the first haircut, then you don't actually see him until the kitchen scene that night. I wouldn't do anything to intrude here--rather than lighting him differently from the others, maybe the shot structure would be different.

  What I mean is, shoot the family in close-ups or medium close-ups and the talk goes on--"Guess what, we have a boarder
and he's going to live upstairs," whatever the dialog is. But maybe I'd keep Bimbaum in the doorway and shoot him full-length, head to toe. So you see him, but he's not one hundred percent there. He doesn't have the same presence in the kitchen that everybody else has. But you'd have to be careful that he didn't become an intruder, he shouldn't be threatening. Just slightly different.

  If you wanted, you could go the opposite way in the kitchen scene at the end where he's told he's got to speed up. They're all sitting at the table, and you could shoot the others with their plates in front of them--your average three-quarter eating shot. But when you go to Bimbaum, you could shoot him from under the chin up, so that now he has a full head and they're more distant.

  The danger in Da Vinci would be getting it too complicated. You want to keep it always as simple Americana, structurally and visually. But you also want to keep Bimbaum, without drawing attention to it, slightly different, always a little bit strange....

  I'd never met Gordon Willis before our interview, but I'd followed his career more than any other cameraman, I suppose, because he's been involved with so many outstanding pictures. And he sure didn't disappoint me when we talked.

  Of all of us who work in movies, the world of the cinematographer remains for me the most mysterious. Of course, I'm not around much during principal photography, but even if I were, it's beyond me. But they are always--the good ones, at least--crucial. I've always felt, for example, that Willis's shooting of All the President's Men was the basic reason the movie worked.

  And I don't know about you, but I'd love to see the first haircut done his way. Just Bimbaum's voice, and his silver scissors, and those hands, moving in and out of frame, making their magic....

  Editor: Dede Allen

  Dede Allen began her editing career with Columbia Pictures in the early forties. It was not till 1959 that she was given the opportunity to edit a feature film, Odds Against Tomorrow. Since that time, she has edited the following films, among others:

  The Hustler

  America, America

  Bonnie and Clyde

  Rachel, Rachel

  Alice's Restaurant

  Little Big Man

  Slaughterhouse-Five

  Serpico

  Dog Day Afternoon

  Slapshot

  The Wiz

  Reds

  ON EDITING

  Editing is not taking out, it's putting together. It's taking a story, which has been photographed from many different angles and, very often, in many different takes, and making it play in the best possible way that it can.

  I'm sure it's very much like the process of writing. I can't do anything unless I know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. In other words, how do you cut a scene until you know what the scene's about and why you're putting it together in the way you are?

  ON CONFIDENCE

  I start every picture thinking that I'll fail, that I'll never be able to do it, that I'll forget how to cut. I won't know how to do it, I'll let it down. You get very moody when you're working on a picture. Certain things you can cure and certain things you can't--I'm fifty-eight years old and I still bite my fingernails.

  ON THE FIRST CUT

  I like to come on a film as early as possible. I like to come on when they start shooting and I like to edit the film as it shoots. The first cut for me is the most important. I like to have that done within a few weeks of when the film has finished shooting. It may be half an hour longer than the final film will be. You start with this amorphous first cut, which is usually lugubrious, long, terrifying--it sends the director home with the shivers. You've got everything in there and it's atrocious from a storytelling point of view, because everything's said over and over and over.

  ON THE ATMOSPHERE IN THE CUTTING ROOM

  The cutting room is a place where an atmosphere can be created in which a director can be as insecure as he is ever going to be or could possibly want to be, and know he's not going to be exposed to anything but people who want to help solve problems.

  On any film, problems develop in the writing of the screenplay and the shooting of the film that eventually have to be solved. The cutting room is the last place where any problems of story or acting or directing that have accumulated along the way can be fixed. The buck stops in the cutting room.

  Every picture has what I call a "soft underbelly." There are always areas of difficulty where we flounder, and I think the director has to be given the right to go ape-shit crazy--and they've got to be given it with no smart-ass solutions of "Ah-hah, so you didn't know." In other words, they've got to feel comfortable being insecure. Just the way you might have to feel insecure in your writing.

  ON DA VINCI IN GENERAL AND MORRIS IN PARTICULAR

  I think Morris, the father, came off as a much richer character in the story. In the screenplay, I had very little feeling for Morris emotionally. I miss a feeling of loss on Morris's part.

  Small point--wasn't it the postman who had the head like a nose and Bimbaum made him beautiful? That's the word Morris uses in the story: "beautiful." In the screenplay, you changed it--here he says, he made him "cute." That alters the meaning. "Cute" is a slightly downputting remark on the part of Morris.

  Look--Willie gets a marvelous gift from Bimbaum. But he also gets a gift from Morris that I can see so clearly in the story but not in the screenplay, which was that Morris really understood what an artist was. In the story there are days and days spent in the living room where they're discussing haircutting--the father wants to be an artist, too, he wants to be more than a technician. And he isn't. But you get the feeling that maybe he could have been. Otherwise, why would he spend all this time talking with Bimbaum? In the story, that's one of the strong sequences, where the father is so excited about this artist he's brought home, this nasty old man.

  I think the feeling of loss would be greater if Morris had given more of himself to his relationship with Bimbaum in the screenplay--and then deprived himself. Because what he's doing is cutting himself off from his son. He's going to have a son who's going to grow up and be Bimbaum.

  ON THE PORCH SCENE

  I would want to try and strengthen Morris; I would like to give the feeling that he's more than just a fixture there in order to hire and fire and get mad.

  That scene on the porch, the one where Willie's playing checkers with his friend and Emma comes out and says she can't take it anymore in the living room. "Ten days--how long can you talk about head shapes?"

  I don't like Emma just telling me what's going on in the other room. If it were shot exactly as your screenplay indicates, we couldn't do much.

  But I would like there to be coverage so we could shoot where the real life is--inside. We don't have to play the porch scene as crisply as you've written it. I want to see Morris. I want to give Morris credit for having the potential so that when we know that Willie is going to become an artist, that there was something about Morris that also could have gone that way but didn't. I never got that feeling because of the way the screenplay concentrated on the foreground.

  As I listened to Dede Allen talk, it was a wonderful moment for me--because I think she's dead right, I had damaged Morris.

  And as she went on, a whole bunch of images, images I'd never imagined in the writing, hit me. What if the porch scene began where it does--but then concentrated on the living room?

  --what if Morris were holding his scissors at a certain angle, and Bimbaum came over, slightly adjusted the angle of Morrris's arm? And Morris tried to get it right. But no, another slight arm adjustment.

  --or what if we were looking at a bunch of roughly drawn head shapes and Morris pointed to the wrong one and Bimbaum shook his head, corrected, pointed to the proper one, and we could see Morris's frustration. He's trying, he's trying like a son of a bitch, but it just eludes him.

  --or what if, during the final haircut, instead of just being inside and Morris storming through the door, announcing how many minutes to go, what if we punch up those "pacin
g" shots of Morris to show just how difficult a moment this was for him? He was suffering just like Willie was suffering, just like maybe even Bimbaum was suffering.

  All that may help. I don't think it can hurt.

  I didn't mean to weaken Morris, but when you make an adaptation, you're bound to lose things, some of which are unintended.

  I was writing about this guy who loses a job--that was the structure I was following. So I tightened the material--three haircuts to two--and Morris's reactions changed. In the story, he lets Willie have the second haircut after the rainstorm--in the screenplay he just shouts for Willie to get the hell gone.

  A different screenwriter might have kept the long living-room sequence in the story, might have let there be three haircuts--but I didn't know how to do it without the whole piece unraveling.

  I'm not sure I ever would have come up with Dede Allen's suggestion--something in me says that's an editor's mind at work. They have such knowledge of how you can play a scene, so that it works on the screen but might be confusing on the printed page.

  I also envied her relationship with directors--she's in a sense the end of the relay race and she and her director share one certain knowledge that binds them in a way no screenwriter can ever be: They both know they're on the Titanic together....

  Composer: David Grusin

  David Grusin is a distinguished jazz pianist as well as a record producer. His first movie was Divorce, American Style, in 1967. Since then he has worked on the following films, among others: