Current live television usually involves a play or musical produced on a theatrical basis, with a defined set and if possible, one with a sense of unity, such as a courtroom drama, or a play in a definable setting, such as 12 Angry Men or On Golden Pond. I realized that I had imagined my piece within the logic of some kind of scenic setting, but given the fact that I had only some basic furniture, props, and no real sets (see Chapter 5 on sets), I began to create shots for their own sake and diminished the logic of the sets. For example, I needed a shot in which the wife is in bed and the phone rings and the husband answers it, and tells his mother he’ll be right over. The gymnastics to do this shot was in fact totally illogical in terms of where the husband and phone were relative to the bed and the awakened wife.
This simple adjustment told me that the set is not important, or is certainly secondary to the shot. That meant that what normally in television is covering the actors could now become something more powerful: shot creation. Whereas usually the director takes the camera and puts it where the actors are in the set, setting the camera on the scene, with the actor and set covered in it, now the set and actor would be manipulated within the camera frame to create the most compelling shot. The camera does not struggle to adapt itself to where the actor is placed in the set, but rather the actor and set are manipulated to create a shot within the camera’s view. This implies that the scenic designer, rather than giving the scene a defined set as in live television, provides scenic elements that can be added to the actors within the shot. In effect this means that the succession of shots, much like the storyboard in the preparation of an animated film, is created with the actors themselves going from one shot to the next in performing the story.
Hitchcock knew this with his use of oversized props to enable his shot designs, but there are only a few instances in the history of cinema or television in which this is the method. In the mid-1940s, J. Arthur Rank studios in London briefly attempted a system of production known as Independent Frame, developed by David Rawnsley, in which the shot was pre-designed (much like a Disney storyboard) and the setting for each shot was erected on a rostrum that could be shot in mass-production style (using elements of rear projection). However, this system was created to reduce the time and money to make movies and not to enable live performance. Only a few movies were ever made on the system. I once tracked down Richard Attenborough, and asked if he remembered much about the Independent Frame film he had appeared in as a young actor. He told me that the actors felt very confined working in the pre-designed shots, and ultimately the system was abandoned, and yet the clever rostrums long remained a useful tool at Pinewood Studios.
WHAT GIVES LIVE TELEVISION ITS PARTICULAR LOOK?
When you watch a live television production, or for that matter any televised dramatic or musical show, whether it is recorded or live, you know immediately that it is television. Why? Certainly, when movies are shown on television they still look like movies, so it’s not an issue of the transmission per se. The reasons are several. First, live TV tends to use multiple cameras that rely on big zoom (telephoto) lenses allowing the camera to frame both close and long shots without changing position and helping prevent one camera from seeing another. This is how coverage is achieved in television, whether for a soap opera or a live musical production. These large lenses have many layers of glass and require a lot of light, making a large overhead lighting grid essential. Not only do such grids provide enough light to enable these lenses to function, but they also satisfy an executive dictum that the scenes of the show be well and evenly illuminated.
Cinema lighting is very different, in that shots are done one at a time; a single camera can be placed close to the subject without fear of its being in front of other cameras. Often, flat (not zoom) lenses can be used, which are faster (much more sensitive to light), so over-illumination is not required, and the lighting can come from the floor rather than from an intense overhead grid. This means that a floor lamp or normal light appliances are sufficient to illuminate the scene; or light coming in from the windows or other floor-level lighting can be used, providing a beautiful balance of light and shadow, instead of the blasting light that an overhead lighting grid provides. It is this more cinematic lighting, along with the careful composition of shots, that gives the piece a cinematic look.
Certainly, not using zoom lenses presents other issues, since often these more normal cinema-type shots are in fact in the view of the other cameras; even if the cameras are well hidden, their shots are actually a compromise from those the director might prefer. This drawback was less apparent in the OCCC workshop because there were no actual sets, and it was relatively easy to hide a camera by putting it behind a plant or piece of furniture. But in the UCLA workshop, there were more formal sets, and although it was possible to hide the cameras, I found myself frustrated that I could not get the best shots, or at least the shots I wanted, because usually the camera would be smack in the middle of other important shots. This was definitely a limitation, although various solutions to this problem became apparent, and if there ever is a third workshop, I will employ some of these ideas to solve the problem.
In the UCLA workshop, I learned that I must find a method to enable fewer cameras to yield more shots. With this simple step, for example, reducing what were nine separate cameras to perhaps three, the job of placing them and hiding them from each other would of course be much easier. So, next time around I would have a number of 8K cameras, meaning cameras of more than four times the sharpness, resolution, and quality, and derive from one 8K master shot a number of closer shots. If I were to successfully hide one of these cameras, coming from a reverse angle, that angle opposite from where other cameras were aimed, electronically I could derive any number of closer shots, in addition to the primary master shot (the widest shot possible). So at my multiviewer (controls), I would see perhaps four individual closer shots all coming from that one hidden camera, and could choose at will which to use.
A few years ago, I watched Amnesia, a film by the fine director Barbet Schroeder that I quite enjoyed. It was shot in Ibiza, off the coast of Spain, and was about his mother. I thought it beautiful and effective, but was surprised when Barbet told me it had all been shot on an 8K camera, all in master shots, and that the various shots used for coverage—close-ups, two-shots, etc.—were all taken later from the master views. It reminded me of a book we studied in film school, The Way of Chinese Painting, in which it was demonstrated how a large painting could be broken up into many closer compositions that were very beautiful.
Essentially what Barbet was telling me was that all the shots in his film were recomposed out of a single high-resolution master shot, and thus were totally clear and in focus and acceptable as the shots of his film. What this would mean when one worked in Live Cinema is that rather than trying to hide seven or eight cameras in a scene, one could shoot one 8K master, or perhaps two or three 8K masters. This would mean far fewer cameras to hide, while during the performance, one could see the pre-conceived coverage or closer shots on the multiviewer, just as I was doing with nine cameras. I imagine that all the coverage from the perspective of one master might become boring or obvious (though I hadn’t felt that way during Amnesia) and thus two masters would give your perspective variation. It doesn’t answer how the camera in the reverse position could be made invisible other than by very cleverly hiding it in the set dressing or walls, or, as I did at UCLA, pre-shooting those difficult angles.
WHY EVEN TRY DOING LIVE CINEMA?
I must admit that during the workshops this question remained always present in my thoughts: Why even try doing this? Why give up the control the director has with classical cinema just for the sake of achieving the expressivity of live performance? If I achieved a truly cinematic look and result, and if my Live Cinema performance looked like a movie, then why didn’t I just try to make this as a normal movie? What, in fact, does the live performance add? And how does the audience even know that the work is being
performed live? Consider how you feel watching a televised baseball game, thinking it’s really in the middle of the fifth inning and the score is tied, when you discover that, in fact, the game is over, and your team won. Immediately the game is like yesterday’s newspaper: dead, flat, and unwatchable. What is the difference between knowing it is really live or prerecorded? Because the cinema, like theater before it, is only relevant in the experience it gives to an audience. What can the director do to make the live performance more apparent and enjoyable? In my second experimental workshop, all I was trying to do was to make the performance feel and behave just like a movie. Thus, I wasn’t concerned about people accepting it as such, saying, “So what if it were live! It just seemed like a movie—I didn’t even know it was live.”
Several things occurred to me. First, the few mishaps and flaws in our second workshop performance were, in fact, telltale signs that this was a live performance, and thus some people actually felt the miscues were a blessing. This made me wonder if the director of Live Cinema should endeavor to put certain obstacles into it, so that during the performance the actors would intentionally be confronted by the fact that an essential prop had been left out, like a stepladder; or, perhaps, a direction given which in the moment would be near-impossible, or an actor in the moment of performance would discover a new obstruction he had to overcome. Perhaps that would give the show little crisis moments so that the audience would revel in the live nature of things (more on obstacles later).
Each of my two workshop broadcasts began with a black card explaining the nature of the production, but perhaps there should be moments beforehand, along with this statement, in which clips of various behind-the-scenes preparation are shown—the various settings, cameras, crew, and situation, drawing you into the expectation that this will be a live presentation. Just as with live baseball, much of your enjoyment is in your mind, your awareness that the performance in all its flaws is live. Perhaps if you see and know that everyone is getting ready for a live show, one in which no one yet knows the outcome, and your watch is synchronized with the actual time, then you’ll feel it’s live and thus be on pins and needles, wondering if it can all be pulled off and come together.
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A SHORT HISTORY OF FILM AND TELEVISION
While the Scottish-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell is known for his innovations in the transmission of sound, he was also interested in the possibility of using electricity to see things from a distance. Bell’s telephone was actually intended to be an aid to deaf people trying to learn how to speak. He wanted the instrument also to transmit pictures, in order to help those who couldn’t hear. The difficulties of electric pictures were more daunting than sound alone, and it is said the idea was abandoned. I own a copy of the June 4, 1908, issue of the British science journal Nature, where the idea of electric television is first formally mentioned, called at that time “Distant Electric Vision” by English scientist Shelford Bidwell in his article “Telegraphic Photography and Electric Vision.”
The idea hardly belonged to Bell or Bidwell alone, but was being investigated by scientists of many countries, including Russia, France, and Japan. The mechanical basis of “distant electric vision” produced unsatisfactory and unclear images, but in a response to Bidwell’s article, another scientist, the Scottish electrical engineer A. A. Campbell-Swinton, stated the problems could be solved by two beams of cathode rays. This is precisely what the great Russian scientist Boris Rosing was pursuing, aided by his student Vladimir Zworykin. Independently, in the 1920s, a fifteen-year-old American, Philo Farnsworth, sketched his plan for electronic television on the blackboard of his high school. He went on to develop and patent it, leading to a long and difficult conflict with RCA, who had hired Zworykin, and used the full force of their power to wrest the patent away from Farnsworth.
But in a quirk of progress, it was the motion picture that first came to the public. Inspired by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments with motion, “moving pictures” were made using a special camera called the Kinetograph by the American wizard Thomas Edison; the French Lumière brothers continued these advances by projecting such images on a large screen— giving birth to the cinema. Surprisingly, Edison’s motion picture emerged in 1893, some years after mechanical television was introduced, so that when modern electronic television finally emerged in 1927, it had learned its visual language and artistic landscape from the film industry. What might have happened if television had appeared first? We will never know.
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Once RCA had introduced its new perfect form of “Distant Vision”—officially replaced by two words, tele and vision, one being Greek and the other Latin, Tele-Vision—it quickly assumed the enormous popularity that commercial radio had earlier enjoyed in the 1920s and 1930s. American television adopted the use of “commercials,” which AT&T had fostered and which had proven so effective in radio. Even David Sarnoff, who was chairman of RCA and later NBC, was first skeptical and then surprised that the new medium would follow this model. He and other leaders around the world assumed that broadcasting, both radio and television, would be a cultural medium for their respective nations, but the draw of radio sponsorship by soap and breakfast cereal companies proved irresistible. Television slavishly followed the commercial precedent of radio, and programs were presented by sponsors in the United States—the only country in the world to do so.
Television remained impossible to record and edit beyond the crude method known as the Kinescope, in which a 16mm film camera was set up to photograph the cathode ray screen. The Kinescope yielded a poor quality, and was mainly used to enable time shifting between the time zones of the vast United States. Moreover, the flat-rate pricing charged by AT&T for the long-distance lines necessary to connect the country favored companies with many hours of programming, and forced pioneer networks such as the scrappy DuMont Television Network out of business. An actual television tape recorder wasn’t developed until 1956—with cumbersome video editing systems soon to follow.
Film, on the other hand, could be shot, mulled over, and easily edited—and from this basis the early film directors pioneered many innovations that television was later to follow: the close-up, parallel editing, and montage. In the fertile days of silent cinema, artistry flourished. Producers were glad to have two 20-minute reels of anything they could show to the crowds rushing to the nickelodeons, putting filmmakers in a position to experiment. In Germany there emerged a concentration of great talent, which congregated at the UFA studios in Berlin and turned out masterpieces that will live forever. G. W. Pabst, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Ernst Lubitsch, among many others, were exploring this new art form with passion and imagination. In fact, the work of telling a story through pictures was gaining such impressive ground that Murnau later said, “The talking picture represents a great step forward in the cinema. Unfortunately, it has come too soon; we had just begun to find our way with the silent film and were beginning to exploit all the possibilities of the camera. And now here are the talkies and the camera is forgotten while people rack their brains about how to use the microphone.” Even the young Alfred Hitchcock was sent to make a film in Germany, where he wandered around the UFA studios, watching and noting well the extraordinary things going on, which he was to make effective use of throughout his long career.
The history of movies went quickly from the nickelodeon and simple two-reel features to beautiful works of art flowing from Berlin in the 1920s, then from major cities and eventually from Hollywood. Because television in its earliest form could not be recorded or edited, the purposes proposed for Distant Electric Vision were quite different from film, and very limited. It was thought to be useful for people to see and talk to a loved one far away, much like today’s FaceTime, or for police to check a suspects lineup in a distant city, or perhaps to witness a political or sporting event. Television was greatly limited because of the quality of its picture, owing to its mechanical basis, but ultimately it was t
o emerge as an electronic medium due to the work of Boris Rosing, Vladimir Zworykin, and quite independently, high school student Philo Farnsworth.
In 1934, Farnsworth, financially stressed from his long legal battle with RCA, licensed his patents to Germany, enabling the emerging Nazi regime to later make use of television for propoganda during World War II. Great Britain, meanwhile, was still tied to the mechanical television of John Logie Baird, the Scottish innovator and engineer, who began broadcasting in 1927. There was a heartrending moment when Baird came face to face with Farnsworth’s electronic screen, and saw for himself that his own system was antiquated and inferior. Thus the era of electronic television began, with the giant RCA, which had obtained the Zworykin patents and was fighting against Farnsworth—until they broke the young genius’s spirit. As with so many histories of scientific development, the path was paved with tears.
THE FIRST GOLDEN AGE OF TELEVISION
Television in America began in earnest at the conclusion of World War II, just as many young GIs found themselves in New York, Chicago, and other major cities. Many who had participated in the artistic units in the army, touring theater efforts, and even the signal corps were anxious to find employment in the new industry. Those who came to New York found an especially fertile place to begin. The New York theater was also resplendent with fine actors who worked mostly in the evening, and so were available for rehearsal in the mornings and afternoons, and had Sundays free to shoot. A few studios were set up in the city, one famously at the top of Grand Central Station, another, DuMont’s, at Wanamaker’s department store at 9th Street and Broadway.
At first, good material was hard to come by. The powerful film industry, wary of this new form of entertainment, was resistant to any cooperation unless they were able to buy into or control the new art form. For forty or so years, the motion picture studios had been optioning and buying all the available literary materials—novels, histories, and plays, as well as all rights of their authors. Little was available to the talented young television producers, such as Fred Coe,* who had come from the Yale School of Drama, to put into production. At first they tried classics, public domain material such as Shakespeare, but such programming suffered in comparison to the high-quality and exciting material accumulated over the years by the competing film industry.
Live Cinema and Its Techniques Page 2