Zoetrope Studios would be the first electronic movie studio, ultimately with digital cameras, editing machines, and projectors. And that wasn’t all. It would combine the future with the past, and would be run like the old Hollywood studios, with contract actors who benefited from acting, singing, and dancing schools right there. Young junior high apprentices would come in through the gates to work a few hours a day in the subject of their interest: acting, art, sound, music. It would be a kind of paradise—if only I could pull it off before the grim reaper of the Apocalypse Now reality could be beaten to the punch.
It was then that I proclaimed that I would do One from the Heart, set it in Las Vegas, and I compromised with myself by making it a semi-musical, not with the actors singing songs, but with Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle, singing an original score as “musical narrators.” Just reminiscing upon all this is making me excited once again! No matter that I really didn’t have a bulletproof script; and of course I didn’t want to do something so logical as just go to Las Vegas to shoot the story; I wanted to produce and execute it live, do a live performance much as John Frankenheimer did in the Golden Age of Television. I realized that at that time, this being 1981, there did not exist a television camera that could replace film negative and fill that important role, that of the camera. But I could and did fit the viewfinders of our standard film cameras with television cameras, so although the master negative would remain the standard 10-minute reel of film, I could see, edit, mix the sound, add music, and produce it live at least 10 minutes at a time.
When I was a UCLA student back in 1961, I was given the wonderful opportunity to visit Paramount Studios to watch Jerry Lewis direct a film called The Ladies Man. I always liked movies he directed and starred in because they were eccentric and did unexpected things. I remember that it was his birthday when I visited his set, and as always, I was ravenously hungry. It was memorable because there was an enormous birthday cake that was to be cut up and eaten, and it was a chance to see the amazing set of a girls’ boarding house with the fourth wall sliced away. I also got to see his brilliant use of TV cameras mounted on viewfinders and recorded on 2-inch Ampex video recorders—so he could review the last take he did on a playback. Eventually, the big cake was cut up. I got as close to it as I could, and I tried to be courteous and kept handing off the slices to the folks not fortunate enough to be as close as I was. Of course, when I handed off the last slice I realized the cake was all gone, and in the end I never got a bite of it myself. But I always remembered his viewfinders and video recorder and wondered why that idea was never used afterwards by anyone else. Now One from the Heart would benefit from this idea, and as a result the whole industry would learn, from my failed experiment, to use video assist.
We had nine big stages at the studio, and my great production designer Dean Tavoularis and his team filled them, one by one, with their replica of Las Vegas. It was a sight to see: stage after stage of large and spectacular sets representing—no, not representing—the art department had built Las Vegas, complete with its overwhelming neon reality, right there in this old studio on the corner of Las Palmas Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard. The sets were arranged in order of the progression of the scenes, which meant the actors could go from scene to scene, performing the script live, with the songs being performed live, with final editing, special effects, and sound effects added live. Or so I thought.
What followed was a good example of how when a group of people are listening to a new idea each of them is hearing something different. Vittorio Storaro, no doubt one of the greatest living cinematographers in the world and a wonderful man, who had slogged it out with me in the jungles of Apocalypse Now, and who had shot Bertolucci’s beautiful Il Conformista, came to me and said in his charming Italian accent, “Francis, why do we have to shoot with so many cameras, it is so hard for me to light. If we use only one camera, I can go very fast.” And it was then that I made the decision, the only real regret in my life. I had bought a studio and filled nine stages with sets of Las Vegas (when the real Las Vegas was only a 45-minute flight away), I had done all of this so I could shoot One from the Heart live—to fulfill my life’s dream to do Live Cinema. And because I cared so much for Vittorio, and probably also because I was so frightened of what I was attempting to do—I caved in.
MORAL OF THE STORY
Apocalypse Now never did reach the financial ruin I was trying to avoid; but One from the Heart did. People never stopped going to the Cinedome Theater to see the Vietnam film, which eventually paid for itself despite the 21% interest, amazing as that is. But One from the Heart turned out to be like that ping-pong shot your opponent smashes down to the table, which the critics did, resulting in two episodes of Chapter 11—reorganization of a debtor’s business affairs—turning my family’s financial life upside down. My wife and I were taken into a bank boardroom in New York with a large circular table, and were made to spend all day signing hundreds of documents, turning the entirety of our assets over to the bank, necessitating my spending the next ten years making one assigned movie each year.
And I never got to try my hand at Live Cinema.
*Vittorio Storaro for cinematography, and Walter Murch, Mark Berger, Richard Beggs, and Nathan Boxer for sound.
†Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 178.
8
RIP VAN WINKLE
After my financial fiasco with One from the Heart, I resolved to gain whatever experience I could in the medium of live TV. In doing so, I would accept any proposal so that I could learn and even try out ideas to see how it could be different from conventional theater. One opportunity came in 1987 with Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre when Fred Fuchs, her producer, offered me the chance to do one of the shows in their series. The shows were shot in a continuous continuity and not actually broadcast live, but rather what’s called “live to tape.” Nonetheless I thought it would be a chance to work in a medium as close to live TV as possible, and see how the form was different from theater and film, the only two mediums I had worked in. Having produced Paul Schrader’s excellent film Mishima, which featured the startling images of designer Eiko Ishioka, I was also curious what a collaboration between Eiko and myself could accomplish.
Of the scripts I was offered, “Rip Van Winkle” seemed the most interesting, and I was anxious to see how well I could do with this classic story. I tried as best as I could to give the story an imaginative style using theatrical devices. For example, to depict the element of the mountain in the Hudson River Valley, I staged a group of actors huddled with a blanket over them and composited it into the scenery, so that the mountain could shiver in the cold and wilt in the heat. At the same time, I attempted to understand and make use of the technology unique to television.
The show ended up pretty weird—and while I never really heard if it was liked at all, my impression was that it was considered just that, weird, and the reaction was not the best. But “Rip Van Winkle” remains my lone commercial foray into something akin to the live television tradition. After many years of wondering how okay or just plain bad my little venture into Live Cinema with “Rip Van Winkle” was, I just did come across this notice by one Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, which appeared on the A.V. Club website:
Having re-watched “Beauty and the Beast,” I decided to finally check out one of the last episodes, a handmade “Rip Van Winkle” directed by Francis Ford Coppola with Harry Dean Stanton perfectly cast in the title role. Of course, I’m now kicking myself now for not having seen this delightful and goofy piece of small-screen art earlier. With its primitive video effects and the faux-naïve, theatrical production design by Eiko Ishioka, “Rip Van Winkle” is a crayon sketch for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Not coincidentally, the two were produced by Fred Fuchs, who became president of Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios after Faerie Tale Theatre went off the air.
9
THE QUESTION OF STYLE IN THE CINEMA
There are any number of styles one is able t
o choose in the movie business—as long as it’s realism. Maybe I’m being sarcastic, but it is quite rare that a producer and financier will willingly go along with a director’s choice to work in an unusual style unless that director is so “hot” that they may work however they wish and with whatever style they choose.
REALISM
Realism has always worked to blow everything else off the stage, cut everything else out. At the end of the nineteenth century, realistic painted sets and lighting came to dominate the way plays were produced in America, as when James O’Neill toured the states with his stage adaptation of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo.
The following account, as told in Robert M. Dowling’s thoughtful book on Eugene O’Neill, chronicles the story. “With sole proprietorship of the play as of the 1885–86 season, James O’Neill [Eugene’s father] would perform the role to packed houses for almost thirty years,” Dowling wrote, “earning him a profit of nearly forty thousand a year. Like Edmund Dantes, James had escaped from a prison of his own—the prison of poverty.” Not all of his 6000 performances were praised, however. On December 31, 1887, The San Francisco News Letter wrote a less than favorable review of O’Neill: “In his hands the romantic story has degenerated into an extravagant melodrama. . . . He is reaping the pecuniary profit of his business sagacity, but it is at the cost of art.” According to Eugene O’Neill, “My father was really a remarkable actor, but the enormous success of Monte Cristo kept him from doing other things. He could go out year after year and clear fifty thousand in a season. He thought that he simply couldn’t afford to do anything else. But in his later years he was full of bitter regrets. He felt Monte Cristo had ruined his career as an artist.”
I find it interesting that the theater in the late nineteenth century was formulaic, just as our studios’ films have become. This was evident in the scenery, in that everything was as real as could be in a proscenium stage. You can understand why O’Neill’s playwright son, the only American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize in literature, wanted to free the theater, to bring everything back: masks that the Greeks had used, soliloquies, choruses, asides, mute shows, epilogues. It was inspiring to me because Eugene was a play-maker who wanted the American theater to be reborn. Channeling his father’s frustration, he would cast aside the constraints of “realism” and “selling out,” while turning his life into art. How moved was I when I read: “Some of the earliest words O’Neill remembered his father uttering were ‘The theater is dying.’ ”
Cinema, like theater of the late nineteenth century, is now completely codified, so that no matter what you do, it will immediately be assigned to a genre. Now in the Netflix and online content era, these classifications are used to rate and access films, and usually the lists of choices are offered by genre: drama, comedy, horror, romance, and so on. Further classifications may go to screwball comedy, coming of age, suspense, mystery, etc.
As to the style the filmmakers may have chosen, there remains—as in theater at the turn of the century—the all-powerful realism. The early German cinema was long on expressionism, the French and Spanish worked in surrealism, and one might also say a film was in a theatrical style, or classic style. Citizen Kane possessed a theatrical style of its own that worked. I remember the producer Robert Evans always telling me, when I was working for him, that he wanted a “movie-movie” style, with elaborate camera moves and thrilling action scenes. At one point during the making of The Godfather I heard he was bringing in an action director to give the film more of what he craved, and I spent the weekend with my nine-year-old son helping me run after “Connie” (played by my sister Talia), hitting her with his belt to reinvent the scene where Carlo beats Connie, in the hope of forestalling the dreaded action director from actually coming onto my set. But no doubt there are many style possibilities the director may choose from, and I would think that they are all there to be used as well in the Live Cinema category.
Movies, especially as reflected by their art design and camera style, also fall into such categories as handheld look, classic look, elaborate moving camera look, or combinations of these, and the settings can be naturalistic, minimal, or expressionistic. Since the invention of the Steadicam, there is now the one-shot look. Prior to that ingenious device, filmmakers managed a one-shot look by using the camera “hand off,” such as in the great Russian film I Am Cuba.
All this still applies to Live Cinema. However, each choice brings up the issue of how one pulls it off in this demanding format. For a handheld camera style, you’d only be able to use green screen chroma key with any number of motion-control systems, adding expense and complication to an already very complicated process. Any kind of constructed, textured, and painted scenic settings work as well for Live Cinema as for classic cinema. Theatrical settings can be used for live television, but become more problematical for Live Cinema, which is less forgiving about painted or theatrical-type sets. So whereas any type of style can be chosen, the actual implementation of a production in Live Cinema makes great demands and may bring problems to the effort. These are pretty much all solvable, but the continuity of live performance no doubt requires of the production more precision than conventional start-and-stop cinema. One experiment I was curious to do was to use the standard television stylistic devices: the two-box, three- and four-box so familiar on CNN, or the commentator with headphones explaining what is going on in a football game. I note now that I didn’t try these devices in my UCLA workshop, so probably I felt this was too strong a TV convention to suit my purposes. I want to ruminate on this experience a little more to figure out if I know another way to make use of these devices without their being such an obvious reference to TV news and sports.
I’d say that Live Cinema demands far more precision than movies, theater, or television. In conventional moviemaking, there is always a succession of takes, which gives you the chance to get one perfectly. In theater, with its nightly performances, there are always the nights when the show goes wonderfully or terribly. In television, which covers the event, there is always alternate coverage that might catch what the intended shot missed.
I’d guess that extreme naturalism might be the most difficult style to work in for Live Cinema, because it depends on a variety of locations—places not easily constructed or evolved through compositing or special effects and really only achievable in conventional cinema by actually going to those chosen places and doing one shot at a time. Often those places are not close together, and Live Cinema requires they be not only close together, but arranged in such a way that the actors can move between them quickly one way or the other within the time of the performance. This was done in Lost in London by shooting the entire project entirely within a few blocks of London.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE GORDON CRAIG PANELS
I still have the desire to take the Gordon Craig panels that I used at UCLA and create a way of thinking of the scenic component as being realistically textured, yet still modular. That would mean my settings would be assembled out of modular units, panels or flats that could, if desired, be painted, textured, or (using the many new forms of stagecraft) molded, vacuum-formed, or printed upon, maintaining the movability of the Gordon Craig idea, so that entrances and exits of actors and placement of cameras and lighting instruments could be accommodated. This is assuming that the unity of the overall production is not readily accomplished in a conventional set. Any story that plays mainly in a single set (12 Angry Men) or complex of sets (On Golden Pond) can be solved in the same way as conventional cinema, with perhaps the addition of some pre-shot footage (stored on playback servers like the EVS), even pre-edited supplementary sequences.
In any case, the essence of cinema is montage, and the shot is the basic unit—and that determines for me how I would manifest the style of future projects.
MONTAGE
Shots are like subatomic particles that behave in many different ways, depending how aggressively you use them and at what temperature. The fact that you have isol
ated the work to its basic units liberates the way you choose to put them back together. The shot implies and necessitates that you do something with it. You now have something that you can build with, and you can begin to express ideas and emotion through the magical world of montage. Now that we know it is possible to view the Live Cinema performance as an accretion of many defined and specific shots, it would be a sin to not use them as parts of the cinematic language of montage. With coverage of a drama, your choices are limited: view the person who is speaking or listening, see the whole group when it’s best to follow their action. The choices are few, because the shots are only coverage of the elements of a scene—not true shots that are composed to stand on their own. Certainly, shots are like bricks in a wall, and you can build a logical sequence of events, going in order, each one supplying a bit of the information of the whole. In the early silent films, that is precisely what was done. For example, James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon, the epic 1923 story of wagon trains making their way west to Oregon and California, was told one shot at a time, occasionally with a superimposition of shots, but each shot was the part of the story relevant at that moment. The shots revealed the action: they gave us a grasp of what was happening, and the ability to understand what would happen next. The tempo of cutting might quicken as the action did, but generally one shot following the next gave you the unfolding of the story.
Live Cinema and Its Techniques Page 7