Principal Photography

  12

  Allen Daviau

  Allen Daviau, ASC, has been nominated for the best achievement in cinematography Oscar five times, for E. T.-The Extra-Terrestrial, The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Avalon, and Bugs-y. He has worked on many projects with Steven Spielberg, two films with Barry Levinson, and a film each with John Schlesinger, Albert Brooks, Peter Weir, Frank Marshall, and George Miller. Daviau is a prominent member of the Artist's Rights Foundation and has an encyclopedic knowledge of all things historic, technical, and aesthetic as they relate to the cinema. He is smart, funny, a cinematic goodwill ambassador, and an artist with the camera-but he was not an overnight success.

  Daviau's story of becoming a cameraman is harrowing and inspiring. His decade-long struggle to become a working union cinematographer ended in 1978, and international film audiences were in awe at the sight of his work on Spielberg's classic, E.T. Daviau's odyssey is a testament to commitment and a passion for the movies.

  From the epic spectacle of a forever-gone Shanghai in Empire of the Sun, to the magic glow of E.T.'s miraculous finger, through several time-machine journeys during the 1940s to the turbulent hell of airline passengers in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet and the serenity of a plane crash survivor in Fearless, to an American sky filled with fireworks as it welcomes its newest son in Avalon, Allen Daviau is a cinematographer who expands the parameters of his medium each trip out.

  SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

  Harry Tracy, Desperado

  The Color Purple*

  Empire of'the Sun*

  Bugsv*

  Q: How did you become a cinematographer?

  A: In 1967, I was involved in rock 'n' roll promo films, which now we call music videos. Forms of the musical short existed going back to the beginning of sound. Nat King Cole made a musical short in 3D. If anybody gets the credit for creating the modern music video in the rock `n' roll era, it is Richard Lester in A Hard Day's Night-The Monkees TV show was created wholly out of that. I had worked as a freelancer for Don Berrigan at KHJ radio before he became the promotion director for The Monkees. He got me on the show, shooting stills. I went on tour with them. At the time they started doing the television show, I was working in labs and camera stores. I had no family connections in show business at all. I had no way to become a film loader, so I figured the only way I was going to get in was to become a director of photography immediately. It was a good idea, because I probably would have been a lousy film loader. I used the technique of the kid who owns the football and gets to be the quarterback. I started saving money to buy a 16mm camera. I thought I was going to buy a Bolex. I was working in Studio City Camera Exchange in the Valley and a sales rep came through and showed me the Beaulieu G, which was a 16mm wind-up camera like the Bolex, but with an incredibly great viewfinder and all these easily changed speeds. I said, "I want to get one of those," and he said, "No, wait." A few months later, he came back and showed me the prototype of the E, which was the first electric Beaulieu. It ran off a battery. The Beaulieu was a small camera that had many big-time professional features and it sold for the same price as the Bolex. The people who owned the camera store were Swiss and, of course, Bolex loyalists. I said to Milt, the sales rep, "I'll get them to carry the Beaulieu line if you'll sell me one." So I got him to sell me the camera body at half price and I kept my camera in the store. I sold a lot of cameras from that.

  I had a camera and was looking for ways to get started. A guy named Doug Schwartz and a group of young kids were trying to form a teenage film company. I said, "Hey, I've got the camera, I'll shoot the film." There was a lot of discussion, a lot of meetings, then it all fell apart. They didn't get the backing, but there was a guy there named Peter Deyell, who today is an assistant director. Peter was a friend of Ralph Burris, who was Steven Spielberg's producer. Ralph got a small inheritance and was financing this short film Steven wanted to make in 35mm. Steven was Universal's young talent mascot. He would show people 16mm movies he made, and everybody would pat him on the head and say, "Yes, Steven, someday you're going to be a real director," but nobody would give him a job. He realized he was showing this little square 16mm image in the center of the big screen in the Universal screening rooms, and to get taken seriously he had to fill that screen. That's when he knew that he had to work in 35mm. So he came up with a concept for Slipstream, which was a European-style bicycle racing film. Tony Bill and Roger Ernst were cast. He got all of these people in the L.A. area European bicycle racing clubs excited. Steven said, "I have to have a cameraman for this." So Peter Deyell gave him my name, and they came over to our little editing room in the Sherman Grinberg film library and I showed him some of the rock `n' roll promo films we were doing. It was 1967. Steven was 21. We talked a lot, but I said, "I really don't know 35mm equipment, but I know a French cameraman, Serge Haignere, who shot a lot of 35mm" I sold him Serge as a director of photography and me as B camera operator. I found out shooting 35mm is easier than shooting good 16mm because it's a much more forgiving medium. We would go out to these distant locations every weekend in the dark and be there to get the long telephoto shots of them riding over the hill, coming out of the sunrise. We would shoot every available moment of light, from sunrise to sunset. We just kept shooting more and more film. Universal was giving Steven short ends. There really weren't any assistants on the film. I would be on the back of a van, reloading ninety-foot short ends into these two-hundred-foot Arri magazines. Ninety feet is like one minute of film. Then you'd have to run back and reload. Everything was too short in supply. We didn't have money. We didn't have time. We didn't have the equipment, but Steven was shoot ing and getting some remarkable material. If you look at that footage, you can really see him trying to evolve movement and blocking that are recognizably Spielberg.

  We ran out of time on Slipstream. Steven bet everything on one weekend-we would shoot the whole beginning and end of the race in a little town square in Santa Monica. He went for it. We got a Mitchell camera, a Chapman Crane, and it rained liked a monsoon. We're not talking about sprinkling. It started raining Saturday morning at dawn and we had two hours of sun at sunset on Sunday. We didn't get the beginning or the end, and that was it. The money was gone, he lost the bet. Slipstream remains to this day an unfinished Spielberg project.

  So Steven tried to do another short film, but it didn't work out. Then Denis Hoffman, who was only in his mid-thirties and one of the founding fathers of the optical house Cinefx, said, "Do I want to be in special effects or would I like to be a producer?" Cinefx had been bought out by Filmways, so they were all paper millionaires. Denis decided to try and make a short film as a producer. He figured out a way of financing it. They had put in a 16mm to 35mm blow-up printer in the lab. So, he said, "I'll get some young filmmaker to do a short film in 16mm and we'll blow it up to 35mm. I'll be the producer and it will also be a demonstration of our printing facilities." So Denis puts out the word he's looking for young creative filmmakers who want to do a short film. Steven told him an idea for a film called Amblin'. I call it an idyll of the "Summer of Love." Two kids meet hitchhiking in the desert, the girl more experienced, the boy more naive. They're together a few days, they have this little affair, and they part at the seashore. Steven called me up about shooting the picture and it was very, very exciting. We talked Denis Hoffman into letting us shoot in 35mm. We were, of course, to restrict the amount of film we exposed, and on the first day we almost blew the whole project. Poor Ralph Burris was standing there saying, "You guys have got to stop shooting fifteen takes of everything." It calmed down. We started the picture on the Fourth of July in 1968. We did ten straight shooting days. We shot the sunrise every morning and the sunset every night. Then we'd traipse into Technicolor, see our dailies, go back, get up at predawn, go out and shoot a sunrise, and drag everybody through. It was July. It was 105 degrees out there. I was loading my own magazines because I didn't have a real assistant. We had a bunch of volunteers. We were out there shooting this short film and there was no su
rprise to anybody that Steven is who he is today. You just knew it immediately when you met him. He had the vision, the passion, and the ability to be a very practical producer on one hand and a sensitive artist on the other. You just don't get those personalities packed into one person like they are in him. It was just an extraordinary experience. That got him launched at Universal.

  Steven tried to bring me along, and Universal tried to sign me with all good intentions. It was a dead year in production and the union said, "What`? You want him as a director of photography-no way!" Somebody at Universal may have pushed a little too hard and it wound up getting my file red flagged at the union, which basically meant, "Everybody in the world gets in, but he never gets in." That was the start of a long, long battle. So I said to Steven at the time, "Don't worry I've got Amblin'. I've got a 35mm film to show. I'm going to get one of the commercial houses to get me in the union." I did-it just took eleven more years of battling and lawsuits and things that just give you a heartache, because here's Steven rising to the stars and I couldn't get near the entrance to the union. The union was an absolute father/son, uncle/nephew, closed-ham-don't even think about it. I worked in everything you could work in film-educationals, industrials, I did documentaries through David L. Wolper, I got into commercials. I didn't really believe in myself as a cinematographer until I finally got into the IA. It was so discouraging. They want you to get discouraged, the whole business was set up to make you just walk away in despair. You were rewarded for continually trying all the doors and finding the day one of them happens to be open. Between 1965 and 1972, 1 did nine calling-card films, just freebies for people. You will do a lot of work for free to get a chance to shoot a film. I had a nighttime job working in a friend's photo lab that kept me going when I was trying to break through, and times were really tough. It was the way you survived and paid the rent. If I hadn't had a 65-dollar-a-month apartment and some other ways of keeping the overhead low, I would never have made it. It's very much a matter of the spark striking in the right place, and sometimes it takes a long time. People always say, "Gee, your first Hollywood feature was E. T, that was lucky." I say, "Yes, where were you on the Fourth of July 1968, you weren't out chasing after Spielberg." You pay your dues one way or another and then when you get the break, you have to be able to deliver.

  That whole decade, I stayed in touch with Steven. One of the key things you do is form alliances with people who are as obsessed and as passionate as you are about film, then you all go out and try to make your way. Somebody is going to get there first. Somebody is going to make a big leap up. Whatever you do, don't be all over them asking for jobs and favors right away because they won't be able to do anything for you the first time they get a big break to do an important picture. The people who have hired them are going to make sure that person is surrounded by very experienced brand-name people. You're going to have to wait out this person and hope later on down the line they can give you the break. I'd just call Steven up and say, "How's it going, what's happening?" because there really wasn't anything he could do for me until I cracked the union. I called him up every Sunday on Jaws. I stayed in touch. I talked to him about his films as they happened.

  The only time I asked Steven for something was when we filed our class action lawsuit against the union in 1975. 1 asked him to sign our petition on behalf of all of the cinematographers. That was key because different lawsuits had been filed in the past against the union, but they were always on individual merit. Ours was different because Andrew Davis, now known as the director of The Fugitive, was a really fine cinematographer from Chicago who had actually gotten into the union. They gave him a card in San Francisco, which meant he couldn't work in L.A. So he went out and found a labor lawyer who said, "It's totally unconstitutional. What you should do is file class action suit and don't just sue the union, sue the Producers Association and the Industry Experience Roster Contract Services Administration. Name them both as parties to a conspiracy for restraint of trade "" Andy called up a bunch of us who were in the same boat-Caleb Deschanel, Tak Fujimoto (Badlands, Philadelphia), Bob Steadman (Executive Action, Return to the Blue Lagoon), Michael Murphy (Coach, Krull)-and we got some assistants and still photographers in on this. Lo and behold, we couldn't have known how perfect our timing was because the same week we filed our suit, George Dibie, who's now the president of Local 659, filed a suit from inside 659 on behalf of the membership that held E Cards. E Cards were Electronic Cards. This meant you were segregated. You could work on anything with electronic cameras, but you couldn't work on film. Simultaneously, the whole minority program had just gone in and they had to let minorities in on the Group One level. A year later, on around November 11, 1976, they announced open season. People who can prove they worked thirty or more days for one company, ninety or more days for a group of companies, union or signator or non-signator, this time can count. Burden of proof on the applicant. You have to be able to come in with your pay stubs and call sheets. Well, it took me two more years of shuffling paperwork to get it all together. I got accountants from commercial companies driving out to warehouses in Van Nuys to pull out dusty old paycheck stubs. We'd get the paperwork in and they'd reject it or they'd lose it, and then ['d have to get more. I learned all the tricks. Contract services were nasty to the end, but finally in the fall of 1978, 1 got on the roster.

  Q: What is the importance of being in the union today?

  A: On nonunion films, you only use one-third of your energy as director of photography, two-thirds of it you use as labor negotiator and trying to get working conditions for the crew. There's a reason why there are unions. People say, "I work on nonunion productions, it's not bad." Yes, when there is a union, nonunion productions are a totally different matter than when there are nonunion productions and there's no more union, because then you're going to see what nonunion really means. I am on the executive board of the very union that kept me out for all those years, but it's a different place. The whole Catch-22 thing got thrown out many years ago. Now, anybody who works one hundred days-union, nonunion, it doesn't matter-can come join the union. We are going to keep the union going, now that we have all areas of the country working together to organize production everywhere.

  Q: How did you get the assignment to photograph E. T?

  A: In 1979, my friend, Jerry Friedman, gave me my first TV movie, The Boy Who Drank Too Much, because the cameraman he had hired got a feature. I had done some commercials under the IA, but this was my first real union feature film. We had a twenty-day schedule and tried to make it look like a feature because television movies then were like television. I had John Toll (Legends of the Fall, Braveheart) as my camera operator. Abby Singer was in charge of production for MTM Productions. He hired me and made my first deal. I didn't have an agent. The Boy Who Drank Too Much turned out so well they sold it to GE Theater.

  In the spring of 1980, Spielberg, who had run into Jerry Friedman and heard I had done these TV movies, called up and said, "I've got a sequence to do for the new edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind from the original script that I didn't get to do. It's supposed to be the Gobi Desert, and helicopters and dune buggies come out and find an oil tanker ship on its side in the middle of the desert. We're going to do it with a miniature and I promise I can do it in two days." So we did it. It was great just to be by the camera with him again. Then I went off and did Rage, a TV movie directed by Billy Graham for the Chuck Fries Company, which led to a little picture which I dearly love called Harry Tracy that very few people have ever seen. We had the great misfortune to be wrapping production on a Western movie in December of 1980, the day that Heaven's Gate opened in New York.

  So Steven went off to do Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I went to Canada and did Harry Tracy. Eight six-day weeks and we shot all over western Canada. Sometimes cinematographers talk about getting zoned in with weather. The most important rule is never try to out-wait Mother Nature. If you stand there and say, "I will not shoot in this light," you
are going to get had. You've got to go with the flow and find a way to do it, particularly on a shorter schedule, and we really had some marvelous things happen in our favor with the weather. So there's some light and some scenic moments in there I dearly love. The ending of Harry Tracy is still just one of the best things I have ever done on any film. It was a great experience.

  I came back from Harry Tracy in December of 1980. Columbia had passed on E.T. It was then called E.T. and Me. They had research which said nobody over twelve years old will be interested in seeing this movie. So Steven took it over to Universal and they said, "How much is it going to cost?" He said, "$10 million." They went, "Sure, with effects and spaceships. Now tell me, Steven, what's it really going to cost?" He said, "$10 million." Steven immediately contracted Carlo Rambaldi, who had done Puck, the little creature at the end of Close Encounters. By this time, I had a young agent, Randy Herron, over at the Herb Tobias office. This was late in 1979. 1 am still with the same agency to this day. I'm with the Skouras Agency, which came out of the Tobias Agency when Herb's stepson, Spiro Skouras, took over after Herb's death. They've always appreciated the fact I wasn't out to make money fast, I was building my career and making good choices. Kathy Kennedy, the producer, had been Steven's personal assistant. Steven had two films going into production, Poltergeist, directed by Tobe Hooper, and E.T. and Me. Kathy wound up producing E.T. and Frank Marshall got Poltergeist. Steven started thinking about a cinematographer for E.T. and Me, and he wanted to look at the work of a bunch of different people. So Kathy Kennedy calls the Tobias Agency and asks Randy about the work of a cinematographer. He said, "Yes, I'll give you that, but Steven knows Allen Daviau, and he has just been doing some really wonderful television movies. I'm sure you'd love to see what he has been doing." It's the end of January 1981. I'm in Phoenix, Arizona shooting a Lawn Boy commercial. I check my answering machine at lunchtime, and it's Randy, my agent. I call him back and he asks, "If you could show Steven Spielberg any film you've done, what would it be?" I said, "Gee, I'd love to show him Harry Tracy, but it's in postproduction, and I can't just show him dailies. Show him The Boy Who Drank Too Much because it has a whole variety of photographic styles in it and it's about kids, so I know he'll watch it. " So Randy calls up Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises and says, "I'd like to get the 35mm print." "Ah, the 35mm print is in New York," they said. This is on a Thursday. So he's calling and calling, and he couldn't even get the cassette, everything's missing. Randy puts in a call to a gal he knew at CBS who owed him one, who finally calls him back on Friday. In the meantime, I am flying from Phoenix to San Francisco because I'm taking over a United Airline commercial for a cameraman who had to leave because they had gotten weathered-out too much. I'm going down to shoot on a Saturday. I'm completely ignorant of what's going on. Randy is calling this lady at CBS and says, "1 have to have a print of The Boy Who Drank Too Much this weekend" She says, "All we have here is the air print." Randy actually drove over to the parking lot at CBS TV City. She came out the door carrying these boxes and put them in the trunk of his car. He had to go get them mounted on reels. What can I tell you about a great agent? So then he puts in a call to Kathy Kennedy, "When would Steven like to see these films?" She says, "Sunday at his house." The reel from the other cinematographer had already gone over to Steven. So, on Sunday afternoon, Randy drives up to Steven's house and doesn't say anything. He's just playing delivery man. He rings the doorbell and Kathy answers the door, and she says, "Oh yes, this is Allen Daviau's film." Blan2-the door closes, and Randy goes off to a party. I flew back on Sunday. There was a TV movie I'd been up for that I didn't get, called Whale for the Killing, which I was going to see that night on television. So I came back home to Hollywood and I am sitting there, completely not knowing any of this is going on. I'm watching Whale for the Killing and the phone rings, "Hey Allen, it's Steven" I go "Hey Steven, how are you doing?" "Hey, I'm in reel three of The Boy Who Drank Too Much, looks great. How would you like to do my next movie?" Hurray for Hollywood! The next morning, he says, "I'll show you the script. I can't let you take the script home, but we're doing Automatic Dialogue Replacement (ADR) on Raiders over at Warner's Hollywood. Come by, and you can read the script there." I sat on the couch outside ADR 2 at Warner's Hollywood and read the script for E. T. and Me. One, you're the luckiest person in the world because there's so much in this script, it can be extraordinary, and two, totally terrifying-how do we do this-because I hadn't had any of the creature technology explained to me at all.