Why might Live Cinema be better? I find this difficult to answer. When you look at an on-screen live performance and a recording of it, there’s no difference whatsoever between the two. In the recorded version one is tempted to correct any mishaps or mistakes—sometimes as easily as merely replacing the flawed part with the section from a previous dress rehearsal. So one difference between the two forms is that the recorded and edited version is perfect, whereas the live version may have flaws. I think this is good. Flaws in Live Cinema are like the intentional mistakes in the weaving of Navajo carpets so the evil spirits can get out, or in Persian carpets, so as not to offend Allah, alone who makes perfection.
As I mentioned earlier, one solution might be that the director of the Live Cinema production could intentionally cultivate flaws by lacing the live performance with obstacles. This is something that Spike Jonze seems to have done on his YouTube Music Awards show of 2015. It was a live show, and my nephew Jason Schwartzman was one of the hapless hosts. For starters, the hosts didn’t really have a script or a true roadmap of the show, only some index cards that they could follow. That was already a form of obstacle in that no one was really sure which card would be selected and which way the show might go. Then at one point, without warning, a mother plopped her year-old baby into Jason’s arms (an obstacle). He then needed to move ahead with this little life in his arms, not at all sure if the baby would cry and squirm or remain content. Throughout the show, various other obstacles were provided: In a scene where it was necessary for the actor to climb up to a higher level of the set, the stepladder that always had been there was removed. Within the chocolate layer cake there was an important clue, but the knife that was always there had been removed, and the two hosts had to destroy the cake with their hands in order to get the clue. These suddenly unplanned-for tasks had to be dealt with, and you could see the panic on the actors’ faces as they tried to carry on, not at all sure things would work out. In short, the idea of obstacles as a pre-planned gift of the director to the actors was used to wonderful effect—and certainly made the live broadcast, including a spectacular dance sequence by Greta Gerwig, something very different and enjoyable.
Perhaps, I thought, that is the secret of directing Live Cinema and getting something conventional cinema cannot: by using deliberate and unannounced obstacles, you can invite panic, difficulty, and even failure, periodically treating the audience to witness the actors struggle to get up to the higher level of the set without the stepladder, or observing other moments of embarrassment and struggle. In other words, this sort of becomes a Candid Camera approach, as in the old Allen Funt show, which caught people in awkward situations on TV.
I must think about that the next time out.
13
EQUIPMENT—NOW AND IN THE NEAR FUTURE
Television now dominates entertainment around the world, with yearly symposia and trade fairs attracting millions of eager buyers. NAB Show, the annual trade show of the National Association of Broadcasters, offers the chance to examine and consider adding the many technical developments to the hundreds of thousands of broadcasting entities. In the centers of television production throughout the world, and concentrated in major cities, exists the technical capability to control and manipulate image and sound to a degree that would never have been imagined fifteen or twenty years ago, and at a steadily decreasing cost. The NAB show’s tag line is “Where content comes to life.” So be it.
CBS, the company with one of the best technical and research traditions, thanks to the great work of its technical director emeritus Joseph Flaherty, was the first to adopt video cameras to replace 16mm film cameras for news gathering. The company has for decades conducted research and development in collaboration with Sony and a full gamut of other Japanese equipment manufacturers, as well as with NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting company. Barry Zegel, Senior Vice President and General Manager of CBS Television City, told me that they are equipping their massive studio in Los Angeles with new 4K cameras and are currently contemplating the use of several 4K cameras stitched together to be able to cover sporting events with the ability to derive any shot they may require. CBS Television City opened on November 16, 1952, and was where much of our television history was made, including my favorite Playhouse 90 production, The Comedian. Today they are investing time and money in the facility to provide digitally built scenery with motion control capable of being used in live production. There is virtually no area in the production of television today that remains untouched by the kind of engineering that brings with it new possibilities.
Arri, synonymous with nearly a hundred years of movie cameras, now makes thousands of digital cameras per year, although it still makes the necessary parts for its famous Arriflex film camera, which it will assemble only on the basis of an actual order. Arri’s digital cameras have become a mainstay of the film industry (which, ironically, no longer uses very much film). New camera companies such as RED and Blackmagic offer sophisticated digital cameras for both movies and television, while Canon, after discovering that many filmmakers were using its still camera to record movies, now makes an affordable camera for that purpose, and Sony Professional builds some of the highest-quality digital cinema cameras in the world.
Presently, there is a declining number of film directors who have the desire and clout to be able to still shoot film: Steven Spielberg (who edits on film as well), Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and my daughter Sofia are a few. Film is photo-chemical, requiring film, laboratory developing, and printing on film, while digital video records signals sent by an imager, but both use lenses, which is where the real beauty of the recorded image lies.
PHOTOGRAPHY IS AT ITS APOGEE
In 1977, Polaroid founder Dr. Edwin Land (though he never completed his undergraduate degree, he was called “Dr.” by his associates) introduced the Polavision instant movie system. The product was a financial failure, and in 1982 Polaroid accepted Land’s resignation as chairman. Around that time, I decided to try to find a rare copy of Johann von Goethe’s early-nineteenth-century book on color theory with color plates, and contacted Dr. Land’s office to see if I could visit him at his Polaroid headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and present him with a gift. I knew that although the Goethe work on color ultimately was discredited and replaced by Isaac Newton’s (much earlier) work on color, Goethe’s scheme had been helpful to Dr. Land’s early work in two-color photography. The Polavision unit had a small camera that accepted a special cartridge which, when played back on an accompanying viewer, would instantly develop the film and show you color movies. It was similar to an 8mm movie camera roll, producing about two and a half minutes of silent movies which could only be viewed on a special desktop viewer. My son Gio loved the Polavision. He experimented and played with it—it produced a unique type of colored movies instantly. But I had my eye on the new unit Sony was making, their electronic Handycam camera, which connected by cable to a small mobile recorder and produced an hour and a half of video movies with sound. To me, the writing was on the wall: the electronic system would be the death knell of Polavision. And ultimately it was. But I greatly admired Dr. Land and wanted to meet him and express my gratitude for his great work, and to present him with the Goethe volume as a gift on the occasion of his leaving the company he had founded.
I took a flight to Boston especially for this purpose, and was delighted to find that Dr. Land was waiting for me. I ended up spending most of the day with him. He was very kind, and seemed genuinely excited when he unwrapped my gift—and noted that of course he was familiar with Goethe’s work with color, and that it had definitely been useful to him. We spent the day touring his facilities, and his own personal lab. I remember feeling a great respect and sense of history as he took me through the lab where many experiments were still underway. As he showed me around, we discussed the factors that had ultimately led to his decision to resign: primarily, the failure of Polavision to capture the market. Everywhere we went w
ere stacks and stacks of colored Polaroid SK70 photos, all of beautiful Smith College girls posing to test the color balance and flesh tones. I thought if I were he I’d be testing color the same way. It was an extraordinary experience. He’d shoot a laser at some distant target in the dark, and it would respond with a brilliant flash. Or he’d show me the enormous prints his company had made of art masterpieces, reproducing them with uncanny fidelity.
He told me that his company originally thought they’d make their fortune with Polaroid glasses for 3-D movies. But each time a 3-D trend began after a particular movie—Bwana Devil in 1952, House of Wax in 1953—the fad died out, and their bonanza selling the glasses never materialized. He even said he had invented a new 3-D process in which the emulsion on either side of the celluloid base of the film was polarized in different directions: only a single normal 35mm projector was required; the projected film, when viewed with the Polaroid glasses, would appear in three dimensions (previously it required two projectors or alternation of small frames of the two images). He said the Disney company had made a test of a cartoon this way. (I later contacted Disney, but they had no record of it. Nonetheless, I eventually found an independent expert who actually had the sample of the process and loaned it to me. I threaded the single reel of 35mm film on my projector and tried it out. It worked great.)
In the course of this wonderful day with this brilliant and wonderful man, I finally brought up what I figured was a taboo subject: the new video cameras that were appearing on the market, and had no doubt a part in dooming Polavision. He sighed and finally whispered sadly, “Ah, but photography is at the apogee of its development.”
I certainly can understand. Photographic film’s beauty and luster are a great achievement; film is a link to the great cinema of the past, of Kurosawa, Ray, Ozu, Murnau, Fellini, Wyler, and Bergman—and it has a look of its own, imperfect, but an imperfection that is beloved. But there is no doubt in my mind that the digital image now achievable will continue to improve just as film did over the years. At the end of the twentieth century there may have been doubt that cinema would be electronic, edited on computers, shot on digital cameras, and projected by vivid, bright digital projectors. There will always be filmmakers who wish to continue shooting and editing film, but fewer and fewer, until the issue will become, “Where does one buy and develop film?”*
THE STEADICAM AND LIVE TELEVISION
The Steadicam, which was introduced in 1975, is an invention that enables a person carrying a camera to produce smooth, floating, steady shots without a dolly, tracks, or other complications. It is a system of balances which the operator supports by his body, so that the camera floats wherever he walks. When used in a live television production, such as Grease Live! (2016) or Lost in London (2017), it can move through corridors, in and out of rooms, taxis, and cars, and precede dancers and actors as they burst anywhere they wish, even from interior to exterior, because it provides basically one continuous, fluid shot. It can also contribute many views, panning and tilting at the operator’s whim, and producing long dramatic dolly-like moves without a dolly. A camera mounted in this way can make a shot that would otherwise require many cameras and editing. It is an effective tool in a live production, with few of the complications present in multi-camera sequences.
The Steadicam was used magnificently in the Andrea Andermann production of Verdi’s La Traviata, which was staged in 2000 as a live television performance in real locations in Paris, beautifully realized and photographed by Vittorio Storaro. The Steadicam was operated exquisitely by Garrett Brown, who invented it. Garrett also was the principal camera operator on One from the Heart, which used the Steadicam extensively shortly after it was invented. Garrett is a big strong man, and as can be imagined, a fantastic Steadicam operator. What he and Vittorio did in La Traviata is extraordinary, moving in mirror-clad rooms without ever being seen in reflections, while beautifully depicting the characters of the classic Verdi opera.
THEATERS AND HOMES—EXHIBITION
If you’re not familiar with professional movie theater 35mm film projectors, certainly you’ve seen scenes in movies like Cinema Paradiso that show large machines rattling away with big spools of film unwinding by the glare of an arc light. The projector in the local movie theater is no longer a film projector requiring nine or ten reels of film delivered to the theater, loaded up and projected, switching from reel to reel. Film projection is now either fed by a locked hard drive (until a time when the cost of the projectors has been retired), or receives a feed by satellite.† Is the content going to remain as it was when it was alternately projected 20 minutes at a time, because that was the length of the reels? Will theater owners really be able to insist that they have a window of four or six weeks when only they can show the film, with home viewing withheld by edict of the theater owners?
I’ve always been impressed that pretty much whatever the customer wants, the customer gets. I know people love to go to the movies in theaters, as I do; but they also enjoy having the right to view entertainment on a television, computer, tablet, or phone, anywhere they wish. They may see a movie in the theater one evening, and see it again at home with their kids. Who knows? It’s up to them, and so it will continue to be.
Furthermore, it’s very hard for me to accept that after the transition into the digital realm that has happened with all of the tools necessary to make movies—with the lone exception of the lens—that all that can be different and yet the movies tend to remain the same.
THE GREATNESS OF TRADITIONAL CINEMA
The wish for movies to remain the same is understandable. The motion picture is roughly 120 years old. There exists not one greatest film ever made, or ten, as someone or some organization is always trying to list, not fifty, or one hundred. There were already perhaps thirty great masterpieces made in the silent era alone that are still beloved. The sudden appearance of sound stopped short the appearance of masterpieces, and sent cinema back to recording stage plays for a while, but the development soon began once again.
I would guess that there are many hundreds of film masterpieces. Kurosawa alone probably made nine out-and-out masterpieces, Fellini a half dozen, and so on. These were anywhere from ninety minutes to about three hours long, mostly but not entirely shot on black and white film, with a narrative structure constantly being improved upon, and with beautiful performances from the cast. After many years, color film came to replace black and white, although we now still find a place for both, depending on the theme and style. Kurosawa made many masterpieces in black and white, as did Fellini and Bergman. Antonioni made beautiful films in black and white, but then he made Red Desert. Bergman made Fanny and Alexander, and the color was original and superb. Heroic work in saving our film heritage is being done by Martin Scorsese, founder of The Film Foundation, as they endeavor to preserve and restore many classic films.
I’ve often wondered about this burst of creative greatness—why and how it happened. My only conclusion, however romantic, is that during the nineteenth century the unconscious urge to make cinema was present and building—but the technology simply did not yet exist. Goethe, who was born in 1749 and died 1832, was a man of his time—a poet, novelist, scientist, playwright, and theater company manager; but I’m certain he would have jumped at the chance to make movies, as would his colleague, the dramatist Friedrich Schiller. Richard Wagner would have found cinema a natural expression of his music-drama concept. Playwright August Strindberg would have as well. Wagner’s great Italian counterpart Verdi owed much to Schiller, whose plays were the basis of at least four of Verdi’s operas. So by the time that motion picture technology did become available, there was a surge of creativity that gave us wonderful cinema, to be added to the world’s great literature.
Yet this burst of cinematic work presents something of a slight problem. These films are so moving, so wonderful, ingenious, and convincing, that all young filmmakers, including those in my own generation, could set their aspirations on nothing higher tha
n to try to make a film that was in the vicinity of such great examples. One dreamt of making a film “like” 8½ or, in my case, like Blow-Up; of doing something more or less like The Best Years of Our Lives, or A Place in the Sun, or Singin’ in the Rain—and so on.
So does the fact that we love these old films to the extent we do act as a barrier? That sometimes we don’t even try to think beyond them, even when the means to manufacture them has entirely changed? It’s as if having the technology, we build an airplane, but insist on driving it around on the highway because the cars of our time are so wonderful and beloved.
A NEW INSTRUMENT
Sometimes I wonder, what would happen if there came into existence a totally new musical instrument, one that didn’t depend on human breath or reeds or brass, stroking or plucking strings, or banging on hides? Something totally new, with sounds that only recently had arrived from heaven, with neither keys nor theremin antennae, an instrument absolutely new that no one knew yet how to operate? How long would it be before some damn fool came along and tried to play it? And if that happened, would the intrepid instrumentalist insist that the resulting music need sound like music that came from the traditional orchestra? Or does a new instrument imply new music? And how do you get to new music when the old music is such a treasure, and all anyone wants to create is something like it?
*Film will, however, continue to be made for archival and other purposes.
†Neither the exhibitors nor the film studios want to pay for the installation of new digital projectors in theaters, so a third-party investment entity gets a percentage of the tickets until the cost is retired.
AFTERWORD
WHY AM I DOING THIS?
In Live Cinema and Its Techniques I’ve explained how I conducted two experimental proof-of-concept workshops, one at Oklahoma City Community College and one at UCLA. I based them on different excerpts of my script-in-progress, and had different objectives in terms of specifics I wanted to understand. But I haven’t yet discussed much about my script and why understanding Live Cinema is truly so important to me personally.
Live Cinema and Its Techniques Page 9