Salvato Larry - Masters of light: conversations with contemporary cinematographers

MASTERS OF LIGHT

Master

of

Light

CONVERSATIONS WITH

CONTEMPORARY CINEMATOGRAPHERS

Dennis Schaefer

and

Larry Salvato

With a New Preface by the Authors

New Foreword by John Bailey

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

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University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

1984, 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

ISBN 978-0-520-27466-2

eISBN: 9780520907652

The Library of Congress has catalogued an earlier edition as follows:

Schaefer, Dennis.

Masters of light.

Includes index.

1. CinematographersInterviews. I. Salvato, Larry.

II. Title.

TR849.A1S331985778.53092284-2512

ISBN 978-0-520-05336-6

Manufactured in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

Contents

Foreword

Near the end of his interview in Masters of Light, the Hungarian cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond responds to a question about how difficult it was for him and his friend Laszlo Kovacs to break into the mainstream of Hollywood studio movies in the 1970s. I always tell them [students] that it will take ten years, he begins. Very few people find themselves becoming a cameraman after finishing USC or UCLA. Very seldom will you become a cameraman in less than ten years.

Masters of Light was published in 1984. What Zsigmond affirmed then was accurate. He and Kovacs had come up through low-budget, nonunion filmmaking, shooting action and thriller films for the B and drive-in markets. When the studio system fractured into a kind of chaos with the youth quake of the 1960s, young cinematographers such as John Alonzo and Mario Tosi were well positioned to walk into a moribund structure. They were also influenced by the aesthetic and technical revolution of the European New Wave, whose influence was then breaking on American shores. Several of those young European cinematographers, such as Nestor Almendros and Vittorio Storaro, benefited from this shake-up in the American industry and began parallel careers in the American mainstream: Almendros with the directors Robert Benton, Monte Hellman, and Terence Malick; Storaro with Francis Coppola and Warren Beatty. Two other American-born cinematographers, Conrad Hall and William Fraker, gained prominence by coming up through the union ranks. There is a famous photo of Hall, Fraker, Bobby Byrne, and Jordan Cronenweth as the union camera crew on Richard Brookss western The Professionals. Haskell Wexler, ever the rebel, clawed his way in through low-budget films in the late 1950s, garnering his first Oscar for Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a movie whose documentary style and harsh lighting of the stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton inflamed the conservative old guard. Wexler and Hall closed ranks from their differing origins in forming a successful company for TV commercials. Gordon Willis also began his career shooting commercials and documentaries, but he, too, spent many years as an assistant cameraman. For my own part, I began working on nonunion and NABET (National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians) features as a camera assistant. Even after getting into the union in May 1969, I fell prey to a strict seniority structure in which I was allowed to work on a feature film only after members of greater seniority had been employed. My first studio feature as a camera assistant was Monte Hellmans 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop, now a cult classic of the era but widely reviled at the time of release for its long takes and frequently deadpan acting.

Although the Hollywood studios were in major transition in the late 1960s, the union locals of the IATSE still wielded considerable power. Perhaps the most powerful of them was Local 659, the camera guild for Hollywood and the western region. IATSE Local 644, for New York and much of the East Coast, was only slightly less rigid. It was virtually impossible to build a feature career as a cinematographer outside this structure. One way or another, all American cameramen had to come to terms with the unions. This is part of the unstated subtext that Zsigmond alludes to in his interview.

This apprentice/journeyman/master guild system has held sway in the American studios from the 1930s to today. But an alternative way now existsone that could not have been foreseen by the fifteen cinematographers who were interviewed for Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvatos book. This new approach is what Francis Coppola and others have called the democratization of filmmaking. In certain respects, the breakdown of an entrenched motion picture hierarchy had begun with the post-World War II Italian Neorealist films and their offspring, the French New Wave. A recent exhibition at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) of behind-the-scenes photographs of classic French films of the 1960s such as Jules and Jim and Breathless by the set photographer Raymond Cauchetier shows how the compact crews of the time exploited the new lightweight equipment, fast emulsions, and direct sound technology of cinema verit to create more naturalistic films: a revolution in French cinema, reacting against what Franois Truffaut sarcastically dubbed the Tradition of Quality. One of the most amusing of Cauchetiers photos is of the cinematographer Raoul Coutard handholding an clair CM3 for a dolly shot of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. The director Jean-Luc Godard is pulling the wheelchair dolly.

This democratization of cinema is a product of several factors that were not yet operative when Masters of Light was published; it gives the interviews a kind of historic glaze, not unlike that of an earlier book of interviews by Leonard Maltin. In 1971, the then twenty-year-old critic published Behind the Camera, with an insightful introductory essay, as well as interviews with five established cinematographers. Conrad Hall was one of them, as well as Lucien Ballard, both men having photographed iconic new westerns in the 1960s. The other three were, even then, legendary cameramen: Hal Mohr (who was president of the camera local when I joined in 1969), Hal Rosson (who was noted for his luminous black-and-white imagery and his two-year marriage to Jean Harlow), and Arthur C. Miller (who won the first of his three cinematography Oscars for How Green Was My Valley in 1941, edging out the more flamboyant work of Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane). Like many of his generation, Miller was a workhorse, photographing as many as a half dozen films a year, an IMDb total of 145 titles.

Zsigmond speaks of the role of the film schools at USC and UCLA. Certainly, many of my generation of cinematographers were film-school brats. My friend the cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and I were at USC Cinema at the same time. But nearly twenty years before us, so was Conrad Hall. The difference between our film-school years and today is that USC and UCLA, along with NYU and a few other schools, were then the whole enchilada. Some universities offered a survey of film history, often tied to a novels into film course within the English Department, but few colleges offered cinema as a major. Even fewer had full-fledged film production facilities, such as equipment and stages. Today, there are hundreds of schools with richly endowed film and TV departments. Cinema has also become an academic discipline, fodder for legions of critical studies doctoral theses. Cozy tie-ins between many film schools and the studios have become common-place; USC Cinema is widely regarded as a recruiting arm of Hollywood. When I began searching for an entry-level job straight out of USC, I was advised, above all, not to speak of having attended film school. There was plenty of residual old guard resentment about these upstarts with their fancy foreign-film predilections.