But a change of thinking arrived with the influx of postwar talent. The new television directors, such as Arthur Penn, who had recently been discharged from the armed services, remembered that they knew young writers in the service with whom they had worked. Many in the new industry thought that they’d have nothing to lose by letting these recently discharged young playwrights try their hand, writing about anything they wanted to. The soon-to-be famous writers included the likes of Paddy Chayefsky, JP Miller, Gore Vidal, and Rod Serling, and their work, contemporary and intimate, was incendiary in this new medium. Thus began the Golden Age of Live Television. Sidney Lumet told me that when he was recruited from the theater to work on Danger for CBS, he encountered an exciting TV director, to whom he was assigned as an assistant, and his own assistant was an even younger man named John Frankenheimer. One day their boss, this first whiz director of television, told them, “Well boys, I’m going to audition for a new musical here on Broadway.” That man was Yul Brynner, who would then land the starring role in The King and I, enabling Lumet to be promoted to director, and Frankenheimer to be stage manager.
The “live” period that ensued is duly memorialized as the Golden Age of Television. Extraordinary live productions such as Marty, Days of Wine and Roses, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Patterns, and The Comedian will be forever treasured as classics.
Of the directors of live television, John Frankenheimer tended toward a more cinematic style, as he aspired to be a film director. His live productions were in my mind the beginning of what I’d call Live Cinema, as they told their stories not only with the finest of acting and writing, but with exciting cinematic shots and editing. Although Frankenheimer wasn’t chosen to direct the later film version of Days of Wine and Roses, his live television version with Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie is to me far more moving and emotional, due to the immediacy and the heartbreaking reality that live performances gave the story, combined with Frankenheimer’s cinematic vision.
I’ll never forget one day in the mid-1950s when my mother came to my room to say that my father was on television. I ran down to the television in his studio two floors below, and there he was—playing the flute on our TV. But I turned around, and there he also was, sitting at his piano watching the broadcast. It was astounding. He explained that the program had been recorded on the new Ampex video recorder (with young Ray Dolby on the team) and it was absolutely impossible to know it wasn’t live. The Ampex video recorder came out in 1956 (the year before Frankenheimer’s The Comedian was broadcast), and was followed by Toshiba’s video helical scan tape recorder in 1959, which solved the problem of tremendous bandwidth required by video by means of a rotating pickup head. For me, The Comedian is the masterpiece of Live Cinema because it was shot in a cinematic style, and everything it did, it did in a great live performance. The shows possessed a life and reality in their performances that made them memorable. Frankenheimer went on to do more major productions, both live and pre-recorded, some for Playhouse 90, such as The Turn of the Screw, starring Ingrid Bergman, and a two-part For Whom the Bell Tolls. But with the new video recorder, Hollywood finally caught up with television and economics prevailed as the Golden Age succumbed to edited film production and comedies such as I Love Lucy followed by decades of filmed entertainment.
A NEW ERA OF POSSIBILITIES
More than half a century has elapsed since the end of that exceptional creative period, and television has gone on into any number of areas. Today, sports remain the most popular programming available, and are “live” by necessity. The many awards shows that have slavishly come upon the heels of the Academy Awards are also live. Aside from the phenomenon of all-news stations, following Ted Turner’s brilliant concept of using satellites to create the superstation CNN in Atlanta, and a few live spectacles such as musicals and plays, television entertainment is largely a canned medium.
Interestingly, from the technology that has emerged from sports—satellite feeds and instant replay servers, as well as from a variety of other technologies, which are being introduced monthly—there is a rich array of equipment that could, if desired, be turned to storytelling. The days when television represented a console in the home and film was seen in a movie theater seem to be over. Television and movies are now pretty much the same thing, as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad have shown. Cinema can now be from one minute long to one hundred hours, seen anywhere, in the home, the theater, the church or community center, and anywhere around the world, thanks to satellites and digital electronics.
MY MOST PROPHETIC AND EMBARRASSING MOMENT
My friend Bill Graham, the rock music promoter and actor, always wanted to go to the Academy Awards, so in 1979, when I was invited to be a presenter, I gave him one of my two premium tickets, while my family sat in less well-positioned seats in another area. We both were dressed in tuxedos, and Bill enjoyed the show very much. But I noticed that he had brought with him a bag of cookies which he kept munching on. Never someone who’d sit by idly while another was eating, I reached over to the bag and took one of the cookies and ate it. His face paled and he said, “No, not those.” I had no idea what this reaction was about. Somewhat later, an assistant of the Academy came to the aisle near my seat, and indicated it was time for me to leave and go backstage, in preparation to play my part in the show. I was to be one of the presenters of the “Best Director” award, along with the actress Ali MacGraw. Michael Cimino, a very sweet and shy man, won for The Deer Hunter. I am still too embarrassed to watch a clip of this event, even after so many years. As I stood at the podium about to announce the winner, no doubt feeling weird after whatever was in that cookie, continuously scratching my beard, I blurted out to countless millions of viewers around the world a nugget of future Live Cinema when I said:
I’d like to say that I think we are on the eve of something that is going to make the Industrial Revolution look like an out-of-town tryout. I’m talking about the communication revolution and I think it is coming very quickly. I see a communication revolution that is about movies and art and music and digital electronics and computers and satellites and above all, human talent. It is going to make things that the masters of the cinema, from whom we have inherited this business, wouldn’t believe to be possible.
I will always remember the stunned expression on Ali MacGraw’s face when I launched into that unprompted speech!
A SECOND GOLDEN AGE OF TELEVISION
The period of filmmaking in the 1970s and early 1980s is thought of as a breakthrough in personal expression, and in later years became an inspiration to the next generation of filmmakers who were weaned on Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Manhattan, and some of my films. However, these new auteurs realized at the same time that Hollywood had latched the gate on such a permissive period, and the opportunity to make films in this tradition was over. So they turned to long-form cable television, resolved to make that kind of personal cinema. This led to a second Golden Age of Television, with such productions as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men, and Deadwood, to list just a few. In addition, throughout this entire period, starting in 1975, there was live TV bordering on Live Cinema in the form of Saturday Night Live (SNL).
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
SNL has managed to be both popular and relevant—no doubt popular because it is relevant. It is performed live, and it comes close to being Live Cinema because it often tells a story in a sequence of shots rather than in the simple coverage of a stage event. This is not new; Ernie Kovacs often did this, as did Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and Jackie Gleason. The original Honeymooners comedy show often parodied current events. Certainly these shows are as enjoyable as recorded shows as they are live ones, attested to by the valuable archival versions. (Some of SNL has always made use of recorded portions, even filmed parts, and EVS replay servers.) What, then, is the difference between those two ways of seeing the show? SNL is “live” in essence, because that fact enables it to be immediately r
elevant to current and topical events. SNL’s parody of breaking news is able to incorporate facets of politics that have just occurred. This is the essence of live events: simply put, you don’t know what will happen until it happens.
So SNL is by its very definition a Live Cinema show, just as any sporting event or coverage of a news event must be, whether it’s seen and enjoyed later or not. The popular comedy show is a parody of current affairs and thus must wait for those affairs to show themselves before it can make fun of them. It’s better to view them in the freshness of the moment, but there’s also a second mode, when you see them later. It’s a little like a family photograph, which is enjoyed immediately on the first look, but also sometimes even more so later on when the passage of time has made it “vintage.”
Recently, I saw Woody Harrelson’s Lost in London, shot with a single camera in one night, and broadcast live to 500 theaters. It was, in my opinion, a total success—funny, full of energy, and an amazing display of imaginative technology. It of course got through the “live” issue by being a one-shot film, like Russian Ark, Birdman, and Victoria. I believe it may have been the first Live Cinema event sent directly to theaters, but perhaps that distinction belongs to the magnificent Andrea Andermann production of La Traviata. Harrelson’s “one camera” decision covered imaginative staging without switching cameras, following the impressive acting tour de force of Harrelson and his cast by dragging the audience along on the romp. It proved that if a project is well-rehearsed, the actors are up to the challenge, as this cast certainly was. Lost in London is certainly a milestone in the history of Live Cinema.
THE VALUE OF PERFORMANCE
The tradition of the virtuoso conductor was born in the nineteenth century. Often these artists were attached to the opera house of a particular city, among them Dresden and Berlin, with the benefit of a nobleman’s patronage. Some, such as Richard Wagner, Hans von Bulow, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler, were composers, while others were not. Either way, they remain the closest equivalent to the contemporary film director, given their power over the production and supervision of everything connected with it: decor, staging, chorus and dance, costumes, and of course the acoustics and music. The costly and complex opera productions were something at the level achieved in modern filmmaking, with one major difference: on the night of the first showing, the conductor stood up before the audience, raised his baton, and with its downbeat a live performance began. Often it was something the audience would not forget their entire life. Imagine being present at the first performance of Verdi’s La Traviata, the story of a young man who loses himself in his love for a courtesan, or Wagner’s epic music-drama Tristan und Isolde—or for that matter, imagine if you had been there when Tennessee Williams’s great stage dramas A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie were first performed, or West Side Story, or any first performance of any great classic. Even a great initial failure, like the premiere of Bizet’s seductive opera Carmen or Debussy’s symbolist Pelléas et Mélisande, was memorable. Is that long-held concept of performance worth hanging onto, even when we have evolved to a time where most of our experience of art is canned? All of cinema, most of television, and our enjoyment of music and pictures are now based on recordings.
HOW IMPORTANT IS PERFORMANCE?
As we have seen, the most popular live aspect of television is live performance, and the most popular live television performance is sports. Many traditional forms of live performance are increasingly out of reach of audiences. The theater and opera have more and more become localized, particularly in New York, with ticket prices at prohibitively high levels. Besides, the offerings are rarely contemporary works, but usually old ones with the addition, if you are lucky, of movie stars appearing in limited runs. Rock shows are performed in an arena with tens of thousands of spectators and with very high ticket prices; most likely you are so far from the stage that despite it being a live event, it feels distant and automated, and the live part is hard to get at.
In reflection, I find it very interesting that at the beginning of the 1900s, many serious thinkers and writers were pondering the “future of the theater,” with only scant mention of cinema, which was what the future of the theater was to be. In 1919, George Pierce Baker, a professor of playwriting at Harvard and later the founder of the great graduate program of theater at Yale, hinted marginally:
Today the motion picture show has driven mere melodrama from our theatres, yet who will deny that the “movie” in its present form subordinates everything to action? Even the most ambitious specimens, such as Cabiria and The Birth of a Nation, finding their audiences restless under frequent use of the explanatory “titles” which make clear what cannot be clearly shown in action, hasten to depict some man hunt, some daring leap from a high cliff into the sea, or a wild onrush of galloping white-clad figures of the Ku Klux Klan.
And Eugene O’Neill, Baker’s student at Harvard, who sought the future American theater in many theatrical techniques from the past, admitted that “a stage play combined with a screen talky background could make alive visually and vocally the memories, etc. in the minds of the characters.” This was a concept he would abandon, but return to with his 1942 one-act tour de force Hughie. “Talkies,” O’Neill believed, had the potential to be “a medium for real artists if they got a chance at it.”
Curious, I went through book after book, among them Kenneth Macgowan’s The Theatre of Tomorrow, William Archer’s Play-Making, and Edward Gordon Craig’s On the Art of the Theatre, and realized that the authors worried about the loss of traditional theatrical methods, such as the prologue, the soliloquy, asides, and masks, chorus, epilogue, and mute show. But the truth was that the theater wasn’t going to move more to its past, it was going to move closer to something that for many years was staring it right in the face: the movies! Wherever you may go to experience a modern theatrical production, whether it be London’s West End, New York’s Broadway, or Germany’s Bayreuth Festival, you can’t escape the productions’ attempt to be cinematic, to use projections to somehow attain the effect of the “close shot” or “weird angle,” of the universe, or to borrow, as best as they can, the cinematic lexicon. I look at this attempt as theater trying to be movies, and then wonder if I am so crazy to want movies to take back the performance element of theater.
*I was fortunate to work with Fred Coe on the script of This Property Is Condemned, and over time I’ve come to realize that he was the pivotal figure behind the first Golden Age of Live Television.
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THE ACTORS, ACTING, AND REHEARSAL
In the experimental workshops, I noted to myself emphatically that “the actors are the least of the problem.” Yet in the film business, it is often the actors, especially the stars, who become the focus of the production’s problems. You’ll hear that they don’t know their lines or are difficult, late, and critical of the script or production realities. Much of this is because actors, and indeed the stars, tend to be lovers of acting and cinema, and are the best bet of all movie-making personnel to become directors themselves: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, Ida Lupino, among an endless list of others.* Thus their criticism and insights about the way the film is going, or about the script, are often justified. When first considering a format where actors must be able to know the entire script by memory, people (oddly) will ask, will the actors be able to do it? Of course we all know that traditionally the cast of a theater production does just this, and it is expected of them. It all comes down to the rehearsal, which, regrettably, often isn’t a part of the movie production.
Let me explain how my workshops went. Both had rehearsals which lasted about a week. These were not unlike rehearsal periods in the theater, with read-throughs, stumble-throughs, run-throughs, and dress rehearsals. Once inside the rehearsal or Actors Room, as I call it, one rule is paramount: the cast must always be in character. (Another is “Abandon fear, all ye who enter.”) The actors must use the characters’ nam
es while addressing each other, and I do the same. They cannot say things like “My character just loves ice cream,” but rather, “I love ice cream.” Surprisingly, being someone other than yourself through an eight-hour day is exhausting, and some slip out of it, reverting to discussing their character in the third person, but that is strictly discouraged. The rehearsal period is a workout, and like any exercise it is eventually rewarded with a developing sense of the character that is being played.
For me, rehearsal is composed of a variety of exercises, improvisations, games, and staging efforts, and I have endeavored to make use of the same basic rehearsal process throughout my filmmaking career. I feel it’s important that the day’s work is a pleasure, and I always vary the activities so they’re never boring and provide a real active workout—in character building. The rehearsal room contains a set of rehearsal furniture: lightweight chairs of a single type, and card tables. They are easily dragged about, and form endless combinations to make up all rehearsal possibilities. Two or three chairs can be a couch, four chairs a car, two tables can be a dining table, and combinations of these basic elements can be imagined to be anything needed to stage the scenes. Along one wall I always have one or two banquet tables covered with hand props: a telephone, some plastic cups and dishes, a camera, a cane, and so on. And near to the rehearsal prop table is a rack with hats of many types, and a few pieces of wardrobe: a shawl, a boa, and a few jackets. Other than the rehearsal furniture, the prop tables, and the rack of clothing, there is nothing in the room aside from the assembled cast.
Live Cinema and Its Techniques Page 3