Q: Do you feel the technology and technique on a period film has to complement the time period? On Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick and his cinematographer, John Alcott, used the zoom lens extensively. How do you feel about using the Steadicam and other technology on a period film?
A: Cinema didn't exist when Barry Lyndon took place, so that gives you license to do anything. I looked at the use of zooms in Barry Lyndon with Gregory Nava when we did My Family/Mi Familia, which takes place in three different periods-the twenties, fifties, and the seventies. Most cinematographers don't like zooms because it's a mechanical way of bringing the audience into something. The zoom in Barry Lyndon has a whole other visual context, it was used as more of a literary device. It was like the page turning or the chapter changing. I saw it more indicative of an eighteenthcentury novel, where the landscape comes upon you. You can use any tool you want-there's no rules. The application of techniques take your story further. Look at the way a great stylist like Nick Roeg uses a zoom. I worked on Insignificance, and he'd use three cameras always shooting in different angles. He uses it in a very evocative way. He's always looking for a point of view that gives some kind of an emotional context to the character. Roeg uses a zoom in a different way than Luchino Visconti would, as in Death in Venice which he did in a baroque, sweeping aesthetic, or the way that Peckinpah used the zoom which had a visceral violence to it. In all honesty, I try not to use zooms because it draws too much attention, except in documentaries where I have to respond to the image very spontaneously.
Q: How did you achieve the sense of period on My Family/Mi Familia?
A: There were three different periods-the twenties, fifties, and the seventies. For the twenties, we looked at silent films of that period and old photographs of family albums. For the fifties, we looked at periodicals like Life magazines and fifties album covers. Then, for the seventies, we worked with a Chicana artist that lives in the community where we shot, and interpreted our story through renderings of her paintings. Gabriel Figueroa, the renowned Mexican cinematographer, and Jose Clemente Orozco, the great Mexican artist and muralist, served as an overall inspiration for all the different styles of our periods.
Q: What films do you consider to be landmarks in cinematography?
A: It always changes. Gabriel Figueroa's films The Pearl, and Los 01- vidados-he is somebody whose work I've always respected and greatly admired. Of course, Orson Welles and his cinematographer, Gregg Toland and Russell Metty. Toland's work on Citizen Kane is certainly a landmark film, and Metty's black-and-white photography on The Magnificent Am- bersons (Metty worked uncredited on the film, as did Harry J. Wild. Stanley Cortez is the credited cinematographer) and Touch of Evil. I Am Cuba, by Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov, is a brilliantly conceived and photographed black-and-white film created with long, extended, innovative handheld camerawork. The Hungarian film Time Stands Still, photographed by Lajos Koltai, created an expressionistic, political world of the fifties in Hungary through the eyes of teenagers coming of age. Other landmarks are the intricate visual poetry of Russian director Tarkovsky. The approach of each film by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski had a totally different visceral style. The young Czech director Ivan Fila made a remarkable first feature film, Lea. It is a beautifully ethereal film that is an unconventional love story. The Hong Kong director Wong Kar War and Cinematographer Chris Doyle are creating the most contemporary and provocative imagery today with Chungking Express, Days of Being Wild, and Fallen Angels. Images in film are always evolving and reinventing themselves, which in turn will inspire new film language.
Q: You've done so much in your career, working in so many different forms-features, documentaries, commercials, and music videos. What haven't you've done that you would like to do?
A: Just to work with inspired people. I was very lucky from an early age to work with the people I most admired. I was on a set with Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro as second unit director of photography on La Luna. I worked with Jean-Luc Godard, with Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Rainer Fassbinder, and Volker Schlondorff. I would like to continue working with inspired and passionate artists, young and old.
Q: What advice do you give to students who ask how to become a cinematographer?
A: Just pick up a camera and start telling stories with images. If you want to be a cinematographer, learn about editing. It's not enough just to take pretty pictures, it's important to understand how these images are constructed to tell a story. Editing is as important as shooting. Cinematography might be an additive process and editing is a subtractive process, not necessarily in a pejorative way; it will help you become a better cameraman. Seek out the artist whose work you most admire, and they'll know and respect you if you understand their work in the context of what is important to them. If you are true to them, those are the people who will help you because they'll find a familiarity with you. I was fortunate enough to work with the people I most admired. You have to make whatever sacrifices it takes to afford you the possibilities to succeed.
9
Garrett Brown
Since the invention of motion pictures, filmmakers have longed to free the camera from its shackles. Every imaginable technique and method of suspending, carrying, floating, throwing, and pushing the motion picture camera was attempted, but not until the 1970s did anyone really develop a viable way of stabilizing the camera itself to give complete, maneuverable control to the operator. Cinematographer and inventor Garrett Brown shared the dream of Abel Gance, Jean Rouch, D. A. Pennebaker. Max Ophuls, Stanley Kubrick, Stan Brakhage, and John Cassavettes to empower the camera to see with the responsiveness of the human eye, and with his creation of the Steadicam he freed the motion picture camera.
The story of how Garrett Brown, ASC, came to invent the Steadicam, a camera stabilizing device, is captivating, hilarious, deeply serious, and a bit miraculous.
Brown has navigated his Steadicam on over two hundred films and has captured many magical moments-the triumphant Rocky Balboa soaring up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Rocky, Woody Guthrie wandering through a grim migrant farm camp during the Great Depression in Bound for Glory, and Danny Torrance whizzing around the haunted Overlook Hotel on his Big Wheel in The Shining.
Garrett Brown currently holds over forty patents worldwide for camera devices, including the Steadicam JR, a miniature version of the Steadicam for camcorders; the Skycam, which flies on wires over sporting events; and the Mobycams, Gocams, and Divecams that pursued Olympic swimmers, runners, and divers from Barcelona to Atlanta.
Garrett Brown is a cinematic Thomas Edison, an autodidact, and an American original-a man who has changed the moving image forever.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
Rocky
Marathon Man
The Formula
Altered States
Willie and Phil
Can't Stop the Music
Xanadu
Fame
No Nukes
Blow Out
Fort Apache, the Bronx
Wolf err
Deathtrap
Reds
Sharkev's Machine
Prince of the City
Taps
Stripes
Four Friends
Let's Spend the Night Together
Annie
A Little Sex
Tootsie
Lookin ' to Get Out
The Toy
Return of the Jedi
A Night in Heaven
The Man Who Loved Women
The King of Comedy
Baby, It's You
Yentl
The Hunger
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Falling in Love Hard to Hold
Give My Regards to Broad Street
The Muppets Take Manhattan
Hannah and Her Sisters
Sweet Liberty
Love Affair
Q: How did you first become interested in filmmaking?
A: When I was a kid
, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. My father was an inventor, a chemist for Dupont, and he invented the material that binds paperback books together. I was sick in bed with nephritis for six months when I was in the fourth grade, and I read through the World Book and filled notebooks with drawings of inventions-including some gadgets that would still be quite revolutionary, like a matter transporter. Regrettably, I neglected to include enough detail to allow my adult self to cash in. I was a ham operator and an extremely fast Morse code sender; as an eleven-year-old, I could send forty or forty-five words a minute and used to love editing audiotape to humorously alter conversations. I was enthralled when a neighbor wrote a book on trick photography, but I never specifically thought about the movie business.
When it came time for college, I had a full navy scholarship to Tufts; I was bright enough, but very lazy when it came right down to it. I was also an extremely fast banjo player, always a good organizer, and I had energy-enough to round up five adolescent buffalo, turn them into a folk group, and get everybody all enthused. In the early sixties, a folk act was just an entertainment, all polish. We wore blazers, sang laundered pop folk songs, and told jokes. I wanted to be an entertainer, and I quit my navy scholarship in order to sing full time. "Brown & Dana" recorded for MGM and sang at colleges and folk clubs for the next three years. But we didn't write any of our own songs, so when blazer-wearing buffalos fell out of fashion, we were in trouble and Brown & Dana split up. I was just married and I had to earn a living, so I hung on as a solo act for about five months, but that didn't bring in enough money to live on. Finally, I had to take a job-selling Volkswagens-and I began to cast about for my next career.
I was a real movie buff, and the thought of a job in the film business had great appeal. To prepare myself, given my ignorance about the practical aspects, I read the entire section on film at the Philadelphia Public Library, literally thirty linear feet of books, while my wife worked at the phone company. She paid the bills while I read. It took four months, after which I headed off very confidently to get a job.
Q: How did you become a cinematographer?
A: It took me much longer than I expected. No film company would hire me. When they asked if I had ever A and B rolled, I would tell them no, but I was sure I could (Hey, I was a fast banjo player!). The Philadelphia Yellow Pages listed thirty local motion picture production companies, but I couldn't even get a job sweeping floors.
Finally, an adventuresome ad agency hired me as a writer on the basis of a brochure I had made for myself, along with some dummy ads. When the agency's producer quit, I got the job by default. We actually won a lot of awards, but just when I was becoming valuable to the agency, I realized where I really wanted to be was on the other side, in production. So, I left to start my own production company and promptly starved. I eventually took a job as director with one of my former suppliers, and after eight months of recovery I restarted my own company. Now I was both director and cameraman, making commercials and beginning to win awards for novel special effects.
Q: What led you to invent the Steadicam?
A: I started contriving gadgets to help me do impossible shots, like shooting people moving backwards, but speaking forwards. For instance, I made a rig that held a camera with a primitive video assist in a ball suspended thirty feet below a helicopter. With this, we could move the camera alongside automobiles at ground level, fly up over the hood to look in the windows and then fly away into a wide shot.
Generally, I loved moving the camera, and I liked the resulting threedimensionality of the film medium. To me, the moving camera lets you break into the medium itself-the screen stops being a wall and becomes a space you can play in. At that point, I shot a lot with my Bolex, which weighed all of eight pounds, but in order to move with that eight-pound camera, I had to lug around an eight hundred-pound Fearless-Panaram dolly, the old one with the crank and the jib-arm. I broke my heart lifting that thing in and out of pick-up trucks.
I would stare at that pin-headed dolly with my tiny little camera perched on it and my rusty rails laid down, all for a crummy ten-foot move-it just seemed ridiculous. It seemed to me there had to be some way to isolate a human being from a camera without all the rest of the paraphernalia. I needed something I could use to shoot with every day. I didn't think of the Steadicam as an invention as much as a gadget or a rig. An invention is more of an intellectual property, a rig is a contraption you figure out to make something specific possible. But the rigs I devised got more and more expensive and more and more different from anything that had been done before.
I took one early variation as far as I could. Eventually, I had so much money in it that I realized it couldn't be just a rig-I had to make it into a product. Then, of course, patenting became an issue, so I acquired patent attorneys. We actually wrote up one of these early concepts, but it proved to be a dead end-it was too heavy, it required too much skill, and it wasn't very flexible. So I had to start all over again.
In those days, I would go into a motel room for a week at a time, primarily to get away from the phone and to give myself the chance to think about nothing else from morning until night. I wouldn't leave my room; my only contact would be with room service, there was no stimulation of any kind except the project itself. That first time, I emerged with only a few minor improvements. Then I went through this isolation process a second time, and realized I could get further if I relaxed my requirements. All right, maybe the thing doesn't have to be able to take the lens from the floor to over one's head. I finally realized it didn't necessarily have to do everything, that there was no possible rig a human could lug around with cameras worth using that would provide that much vertical range. There would have to be some compromises.
I sketched variations of the current design, pages full of them, so I could flip through them to see what caught my eye, what insights emerged. In the end, I went back through it all, and there it was, sitting there in a drawing that already existed. This time, the compression process had worked-I came out with a drawing of the Steadicam as we now know it.
As it happened, I had a friend, an old fellow named Jack Hauser, a former navy machinist. He was so good, he could think with a milling machine! He built my prototype and it worked immediately, just as I had imagined.
Q: How did you sell the idea of the Steadicam to the film industry?
A: I made a 35mm demo in the suburbs of Philadelphia with about twenty-four shots that had never been seen or done before. By then, I was under pressure. I hadn't paid my lab bill and things felt a little desperate, but I knew this demo was good. The shots were all impossible, with no clue onscreen as to how they had been done. One of them happened to be a sequence I shot while running down and then back up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art chasing my wife, Ellen; others were filmed leaping off ledges or rushing straight ahead through narrow openings. We basically winged twenty-four amazing shots in a single day.
Once we were done, I took the unprocessed negative off to Los Angeles. My lab account was closed, and I knew I had to score fast. I had already shown a similar 16mm demo made with an earlier version of the Steadicam to Panavision and they had given me the proverbial, "We'll get back to you." They never did. Instead, as I learned, Panavision started a program aimed at knocking this "Brown Stabilizer" thing off, doing it in-house instead of buying it from me. I didn't know this at the time, but as luck would have it, when I couldn't get to them the second time around, I went to Cinema Products. I had an appointment for the next day with Ed Di Giulio.
Quickly, I went to Deluxe General, who hadn't yet gotten word that I was a deadbeat, and they processed the film. When I showed up for it the next morning, they wouldn't give it to me-they had gotten word that I owed the East Coast lab money, and they weren't going to turn the print over to me until I paid it. I pleaded with them, "Guys, you've got to help me just take a look at this film. If you don't think it's worth a million bucks then keep it, but if you do, let me show it so I can
get the money to pay the bill." They were skeptical to say the least, but they took the film into the screening room and ran it at high speed-and then they ran it again for the executives in the big screening room. When it was over, they just handed over the can with a breezy, "No problem!" So Di Giulio saw the demo, and I came home knowing I had a deal for what was at that time a fantastic amount of money-I could pay my bills and buy the little sailboat that I had coveted for years.
Things moved very quickly once that demo got around because that same day Di Giulio took it over to Universal and showed it to a producer who immediately tried to buy it out from under him. That in itself was a pretty clear indication to Ed that this was a good thing. He, incidentally, came up with the name "Steadicam" which, at the time, was a disappointment (I wanted it to be called the "Brown Stabilizer"), but now Steadicam seems like a perfectly proper noun.
Q: What were some of the early approaches to viewing what the Steadicam saw as it was moving?
A: Initially, I had approached American Optical and persuaded them to give me a coherent fiber optic bundle, six feet long, through which I could see what I was shooting. The bundle, in effect, produced a flexible remote reflex viewfinder that extended out of the camera and up over my head. All of a sudden, I could walk around and see with one eye directly through the lens three hundred thousand pixels of perfect color at f 1, which is optically "faster" than any normal viewfinder. I had a brighter image from six feet away than I would have had with my eye right on the eyepiece of the Arriflex. The optic bundle was worth $10,000-American Optical gave me one in hopes that this idea would take off and they would sell a bundle of bundles. It would not really have been commercially practical to have such an expensive component ($20,000 today) in the rig, but it was incredibly exciting to be the first cameraman ever to be able to look through a Steadicam with this magic eye. I did nothing but wander around with this combination for days. I didn't roll film, I just walked for hours in and around my house with the then lightweight prototype. On top of the rig sat my old World War 11 Rommel-era Arri, with the optic bundle poking out of its side and up over my shoulder. I just walked or ran wherever I wanted, looking and watching what happened, experimenting-doing things that couldn't be done any other way. It really was like moving into another dimension.
Principal Photography Page 18