Principal Photography

  Q: What are the basic components of the Steadicam?

  A: If you combine the following four things, you have a Steadicam. Number one, the camera has to be expanded and made more inert, otherwise it is too compact and you have no access to its center of gravity. Second, the camera has to be supported without affecting its angle. The handheld camera requires too much contact with the ever-moving cameraman. A gimbal, which consists of a series of attached concentric rings, each mounted on bearings, can keep the camera isolated while you shoot. Third, there has to be an exoskeletal arm that will take the weight of the camera and reach as far as the operator's arm-the whole rig is too heavy for a human arm to hold up for long unaided. That exoskeletal arm is more or less analogous to the human arm, complete with shoulder joint, but it is tireless because its titanium springs neutralize the camera's weight, so the camera basically just floats. That arm, of course, has to be attached to a harness you wear on your body. Finally, the operator has to be able to see through the camera to make it do what he wants. The original patent cites either the fiber optic viewfinder or the video assist, which was very new at the time the Steadicam came into being. Fortunately, I threw the bit about the video assist into the patent-at that time you couldn't find one, but that's what we depend on now. So if you combine all four of these things correctly, you have a Steadicam-and it works.

  Q: After you built the prototype, how did you proceed to work with the Steadicam?

  A: The first people I showed it to said I should just continue to do what I had been doing-using the prototypes on jobs. I did go shoot commercials with them, but I realized I would have to get everybody to sign an agreement of secrecy if I wanted to protect my invention. So there was a spectacle-agencies full of people, clients, actors, extras, and anybody who would be attending any of the shots, all signing disclosure agreements. I had to have a sheaf of them to do every single job. Then, with black cloth draped over the various parts and pieces, very ineffectively, too, I can assure you, we would shoot and there (in some otherwise routine commercial from the early seventies) would be a shot that was theoretically impossible. I loved having those rigs because they let me get the shots I wanted without having to lug the goddamn dolly around.

  We finally hit a wall regarding disclosure agreements while shooting an Arnold Palmer spot in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Palmer's manager, Jules Rosenthal, was sharp, but he ultimately outsharped himself. He took a look at our very harmless agreement and said, "We ain't signing this. What's in it for Arnie? What would you do, sue him in a couple of years from now if you think he talked about your gizmo?" I told him the only thing in it for Arnie was a better commercial, that I didn't care whether he signed it or not. I would use the gizmo if he was willing to keep it secret, but otherwise I would shoot it the way anyone else would. So, on Arnold's own gold course in Latrobe we shot a very routine, static commercial using a tripod. Then at twilight, as soon as Arnie went home, out came the prototype which had been lurking in my motor home. We zipped it out and I made some shots while running around on the golf course, while my assistant used the second camera to film me in action. I was always careful to document whatever we did, and we added that shot to the demo along with other shots taken while galloping on the greens and running between pine trees.

  People who had only seen the prototype draped in black and had no idea how it worked advised me to keep this unique rig for myself, charge $20,000 a week, and do high-end jobs only. I thought it over, but I guess that if the stakes were that high, someone would peek under the curtain before long, like the great Oz. I couldn't sleep with it, after all. Somebody would eventually bust it if I made it too precious, if I didn't patent it, and disseminate it, and make it available.

  Q: What led you to realize you had to train more people to use this new technology?

  A: Even when I had the only one in the world, before we began to sell it and I had done Bound for Glory, Rocky, and Marathon Man, people still weren't beating a path to my door. As it turns out, only the boldest cameramen and directors-hotshots like Connie Hall, Haskell Wexler, John Avildsen, and a few other early starters-would dare to try anything this radical. The rest tended to play it safe. I was amazed. I had the only item in the world that could do these things, and yet there were many days when I didn't have a job and waited for the phone to ring. This changed once the Steadicam was featured in American Cinematographer. Everyone knew about it, but to my astonishment, I still was not cal led for every movie being made. Moviemaking is a very traditional business.

  Finally, I decided the only way to get rolling was to teach other operators. This was just before 1980. I had come back from The Shining and realized there weren't enough people out there using it. In the States, I had taught Kyle Rudolf, Dan Lerner, Larry McConkey, and a few others. The nicks in the door frames of my townhouse, formerly initialed by the initiates, are still visible. These early starters were worried about losing business if we let anyone else in. I argued that if you're among the best at what you do and a lot of other people also do it, you'll remain at the top of a very much higher, more important pyramid. So I called up David Lyman of the Maine workshops and told him I had something he ought to have in his catalogue. The late Ted Churchill and his brother, Jack, took the first workshop in 1980. We concluded that the way to make the Steadicam a success was to have a big constituency, and we never looked back. I must have conducted a hundred workshops since then, in a dozen countries. Jerry Hallway is running his ninth workshop in Scandinavia as we speak. The knowledge and the skill have spread, and the ever-increasing client base now includes most features and a vast number of film and video projects throughout the world. The expanding ranks of operators has its own proportion of hotshots and stars.

  Q: What personality traits are important for a good Steadicam operator?

  A: There are probably three hundred ace Steadicam operators in the world, and of that group, probably a hundred are the godlike beings we jokingly call "Living Masters." These are people you could drop in by parachute anywhere on earth and know they would bring back amazing shots. They are an amazing, close-knit group, entrepreneurs and artists willing to put everything on the line for the sake of a great shot. The people who have gravitated to the Steadicam are people with nerve who trust themselves, physically and artistically. This Steadicam culture has permeated the planet and it's still spreading, as those who know teach the skill to others.

  Q: Do dancers and people involved in the martial arts make good Steadicam operators?

  A: They certainly have a head start-as well as people who are good at wind surfing, fencing, etc. However, I think specific skills are less important than personality. Operating a camera is as political a job as there could possibly be. A good operator has to have a filmmaker's sensibilities-able to collaborate, able to organize a shot, and make it happen. The Steadicam operator needs the innate ability to communicate effectively and is frequently encumbered with longer sequences which require real feats of memory and concentration. The Steadicam operator is something of an auteur and has a lot more pieces to put together. To deliver a world-class, spectacular, fourminute uncut extravaganza of the sort increasingly seen at the movies, one needs the whole kit of camera operator's skills relating to the politics, art, and science of filmmaking and to everything that has to do with the script, the style, and the editing of the specific picture, not to mention a solid feel for the history and potential of film, a healthy regard for flares, uneven steps, erratic extras, and the etiquette of the catering line.

  When you start tallying what this job requires-it's big! It takes everything you've got and then some. Ted Churchill referred to himself as an "arty pack mule," which is somewhat less grand. Certainly after you sort out all the things that will make a shot work, you have to have the physical wherewithal to get through the required number of takes. That's where you share the skill of dancers and martial artists.

  On the other hand, you can take somebody who had tremendous heart, drive, and determinatio
n, but who is the most uncoordinated, weakest, flabbiest klutz in history, and they can still become good at the Steadicam. They may not be able to operate with the same degree of endurance, but if all the other qualities are there, they can be successful.

  Q: How is a shot communicated to you? Through storyboards? Video? Are models of a set ever presented to you?

  A: Yes, all of the above. Francis Coppola, on One from the Heart, is the only person who ever used video to show me a proposed shot. Storyboards are common, but it usually boils down to somebody saying, "This is what we want to do...." We talk it through and walk it through, and all the while the brain is going a hundred miles an hour, "Can I do it? Can I get through here? How do I get over to there?" Of course, directorial styles vary widely. Some just describe the action and tell me to make it work and they're off to their trailer. Frequently, I just work for the director of photography in the American system, or on a British film they may hand me the responsibility for the design aspects. In that case, I work it out with the crew and the stand-ins and whistle when we're ready. From a Steadicam operator's point of view, it's much more fun to work in the British system as far as the mechanics of a shot are concerned. In the American style, I've been given either a little detail or a lot, as in, "All right, it's a to-mode shot and you go here" A knowledgeable and experienced director may already have in mind exactly how he wants a Steadicam shot to work. He's the same guy who might draw a line for the dolly, call for a specific lens, and tell the grip when to boom up or down. That's a particular breed of filmmaker that I also enjoy working for.

  Q: Bound for Glory was the first feature film to utilize the Steadicam. The film contains an extraordinary shot that follows David Carradine, playing Woody Guthrie, as he walks through a crowded migrant farm camp. How did you and the Steadicam become involved in this film?

  A: It was due entirely to Haskell Wexler (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Matewan). Haskell had used me with the prototype for a Keds commercial. He was a friend of Ed Di Giulio's, became a friend of mine, and he loved the idea of the Steadicam. So he was on the lookout for a big way to use the Steadicam. His innovation was the combination shot: ride down onto the crane, step off and walk, shooting all the time. As it turned out, I arrived with only one film magazine. Between takes, I had to get off and reload our solitary mag. They all went mad, but in fact I'd be back by the time everything was reset, replaced, and dusted down. They brought the camera truck up as close to the set as they could, so we didn't have far to walk. A loader was standing by and it was-zip!-into the darkroom and right back up onto the crane. Don Thorin was the regular camera operator and he was very helpful to me, especially since I had never been up on a Titan crane before.

  The shot was very well rehearsed. There were nine hundred extras picked up in Stockton, California, and not a single one looked at the camera-except for one poor guy, a professional extra who had been knocking around for years. He thought he knew what a camera was, all right. However, I appeared to be somebody strolling along with a sewing machine, so he had no clue that we were rolling film. At one point, as I was following David Car- radine, he walked right up to him and asked when they were going to break for lunch. Everyone was horrified-he just talked on, and everybody jumped on him. He felt bad, needless to say, and he apologized, but how was he to know? No one had ever seen anything like this gadget before. It was very funny.

  Q: How many takes were done of that scene?

  A: Three. The next night was the first time I had ever gone to dailies on a feature. I couldn't wait for news of the shot, so I asked a guy standing there if he was the projectionist, thinking I could find out in advance how it looked. The guy turned, looked at me coldly and said, "I'm the producer." I felt completely humiliated and just sat there quietly and watched Haskell's amazing footage. It was all great stuff. He was shooting at three and four footcandles, using fire in barrels for the !ight source. Then came my shot. They only printed one take-the one used in the film. It was bloody good-I was very excited. There was a standing ovation right there in the screening room-everybody literally stood up, turned around, and clapped. Life can hardly offer a better moment-what a thrill! They were hugging Haskell, they were hugging me. It was absolutely amazing, because we all felt this was historic.

  Q: How did you shoot the sequence in Rocky where the Steadicam follows Sylvester Stallone up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum?

  A: That shot is in the film because on our initial demo I had chased my wife Ellen down the stairs and back up. The director, John Avildsen, saw our demo and recognized my assistant, Ralph Hotchiss, in the background. He called Ralph, asked for details, and got my name and phone number in Philly. He reached Ellen, who said, "Hold on, I can call Garrett" At that very moment, I was on stage 15 at Burbank, showing John Boorman the Steadicam because he was prepping Exorcist II: The Heretic. Ellen asked Avildsen where he was so I could call him back, and it turned out he was on stage 16, also in Burbank. Ellen didn't let on, but called me on the other line, "Avildsen's on the next stage and he wants to get together with you." I told her to have him step outside the entrance and just stand there, but not to tell him anything else. He stepped out of stage 16 and stood there, looking around. I came out of studio 15 with the rig on and walked right up behind him.

  After being revived, he wanted to know where the place with the steps was, and that's how it got into the movie.

  Q: How was that shot executed?

  A: Rocky actually started as a little, nonunion B-picture in Philly. John Avildsen was basically operating, and Ralf Bode was director of photography. All of us fit into one motor home-this was a tiny little crew. My wife, Ellen, did wardrobe and script. The weather was amazingly cold. It was barely dawn and the camera wouldn't run because we had dropped it the day before. The motor shaft ran right up the center post. In those days, the motor was down below the camera so once the shaft got bent, it rubbed and the motor wouldn't run. In order to make the camera go, we had to hook it to two car batteries. So poor Ralf ran next to me, carrying both a twelve-volt and a six-volt car battery, wired in series. My running speed was restricted by Ralf's, as he chugged along with those batteries.

  Q: What was it like to shoot scenes of Rocky running through the streets of Philadelphia?

  A: During the film, I made the first vehicle shots with the Steadicam. We pioneered shooting out of the back of a van in the Italian market, so nobody would know what we were up to. We shot on some very bumpy roads, but the Steadicam smoothed them all out. Stallone was charging up the middle of the street, wearing that gray sweatshirt, yelling at everybody, "Yo, how ya doin'?" People started yelling back, "Yo, how ya doin'?" There was a strange and wonderful emotional quality to the stillness of those frame edges, as if you were flying through the market in a dirigible. What appeals to me is the way the perspective lines flow away-you're perpetually leaving everything except Stallone, who is the only consistent moving element in the frame.

  Q: As Stallone is running, sometimes you move with him in dead sync, sometimes you move faster or slower.

  A: I learned quickly that the Steadicam is facile enough to become boring if you don't vary the distances. A bust shot can be so stable that it looks like rear projection-you have to force yourself to let the frame have some life.

  Q: How did you execute the shots where you were running behind Stallone with the Steadicam?

  A: I had the first Akai one quarter-inch reel-to-reel video recorder, and I had a little video viewfinder on the Steadicam. So I ran a coaxial cable from myself to John Avildsen, who held the recorder and was running after me. Stallone is fast, and I was also very fast in those days-I had the legs for it. The Steadicam didn't weigh much, so I could keep up with Sly at his absolute top speed, but of course, Avildsen has shorter legs. At one point, he was behind me holding the recorder and we took off across a junkyard in south Philly. I got involved in not falling down in all the junk-the speed was phenomenal-and I forgot about Avildsen. Poor John was yelling at u
s and we couldn't even hear him. He had run out of cord and was stretching his arms out as far as he could. Finally, the coax broke right out of the back of the recorder, and John went down. A little yelp and a crash finally stopped us-poor John had fallen down in the junk trying to save nay recorder.

  Q: You spent a year with Stanley Kubrick on The Shining, which proved to be a landmark film for the Steadicam. How did you come to work on this film?

  A: It certainly was a watershed event. I was in London with Ed Di Giulio for Film '77. While we were there, we arranged to go out and show Stanley the prototype of the Steadicam-he had seen the demo, and now he wanted to see the real thing. By this time, it was on the market for sale commercially. We went out to Elstree Studios at Boreham Wood, where set construction had just begun in late winter of 1977. The big question was whether or not we could do shots at knee height, and we immediately devised the gear for to-mode shooting with the camera hung on the bottom of the Steadicam. Production finally commenced in late 1978, and Stanley had built all the sets so they were interconnected-the entire hotel was laid out between a number of stages. Up the stairs from the lounge were all the second-floor corridors with hotel-room doors, and the individual rooms that he needed were actually there behind the doors, propped and dressed. If you went laterally from the lounge, there were the kitchen corridors, some of which went right on through the stage doors to the adjacent soundstage-itself dressed as a kitchen. There were two huge lobbies, next to which were respectively, seven hundred thousand and one million watts of Par lights, giving him that wonderful effect of daylight all flooding in from one side. Off in other directions were corridors that looped around and made all those continuous-action scenes possible.