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Machines
that Made the Movies: Part 2 This article originally appeared in ICG Magazine in Aug. 2000. The end of the “Roaring Twenties” found Hollywood in a state of panic, fear and uncertainty. The stock market crash of 1929 hadn’t turned Tinseltown upside down, but rather the huge success of 1927’s The Jazz Singer. This Warner Brothers Vitaphone production not only revived a slumping box office, it also ushered in a new era of cinema. The novelty of an exciting new entertainment technology called radio had trimmed the profits of MGM, Paramount, Universal and every other studio from Gower Gulch to Burbank. Instead of going out to the Bijou or the Palace, movie fans gathered in living rooms, huddled around RCA consoles. One night in October of 1926, 50 million people tuned in the wireless to hear Gene Tunney defeat Jack Dempsey in the famous “long count battle” for the Heavyweight Boxing Championship. Why go to the movies when you could stay home and be entertained for free? The four Warner brothers were the first studio executives to see that marrying this wildly popular audio technology to the art of the motion picture could assure the future well-being, and even survival, of their business. Cecil B. DeMille predicted that “the movie and the radio will bring people together. They will make for unity and a certain great oneness in the world.” (C.B. certainly foreshadowed the digital age’s current rallying cry — “the Internet will change everything,” including the way movies are produced and exhibited).The success of Warner Brothers’ next “all talking” hit — The Lights of New York — sent every studio rushing to fill its theaters with “talkies.” Down in freshly built soundstages, great silent film cinematographers did battle with the new technology of sound as two divergent mediums tried to co-exist and forge a new artform. Joe Walker, ASC was so frustrated with constraints placed on his photography by sound recording that he seriously considered leaving the film business. Thankfully, he decided to stay, because it’s hard to imagine Frank Capra’s classic films — such as Lost Horizon, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe — without Walker’s perfectly supportive imagery. In his memoirs, Walker noted that the unwieldy techniques of early sound pictures caused photography “to suffer. . .heretofore, I had freedom to create interesting effects with a moving camera. No more! Miserably ensconced in a soundproofed stationary booth, I shot through heavy plate glass at fixed scenes. . .Depression gripped me as I filmed long uninspiring scenes of talking stage actors from my stifling booth.” Such was the plight of every cinematographer on every soundstage from Hollywood to Astoria. Directors and cameramen were “mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore.” While shooting Applause in 1928, director Ruben Mamoulian and cameraman George Folsey, ASC added wheels to the soundproof camera booth and, with the help of six grips, pushed the whole contraption from a wide shot to a close-up in one long “dolly” move. William Wyler directed his first talking picture on location — in the Mojave Desert, no less. Hell’s Heroes was the picture in question and, according to Wyler, a mobile camera was necessary to relate the tale of three desperate cowboys riding roughshod across the desolate landscape. Wyler had his crew rig the camera booth with balloon-tired automobile wheels to follow the action through sand and sagebrush. The desert heat surged to 150 degrees inside the “Icebox.” Short takes became the order of the day, as the camera operator would often faint before Wyler called “cut”! Director “Wild Bill” Wellman was never one to obey the edicts of anyone, let alone a soundman. Stymied when he couldn’t shoot a simple “walk-and-talk” with Wallace Beery for a dialogue scene grafted to the silent Beggars of Life, Wellman grabbed the usually stationary microphone, hung it from a broomstick and walked along with his actor while the camera tracked in hot pursuit. The fish-pole mike boom was born! DeMille demanded that the camera come out of the “Icebox” so he could shoot a stairway scene during the production of his first talkie Dynamite (1929). The soundman declared this impossible because the camera simply made too much noise. Good old C.B. also never took “No” for an answer. He promptly ordered the new camera setup, and had the infernal machine shrouded in piles of horse blankets until the soundman agreed that silence had been attained. Of course, wrapping the camera in horse blankets hardly offered a long-term solution. Striking upon a better idea, Arthur Edeson, ASC rebuilt his own Mitchell camera from the inside out. After the overhaul, the once clattering gears and sprockets ran so smoothly that the camera could be muffled with a single padded blanket. Without this “liberated” Mitchell, Edeson’s could never have achieved such brilliant, fluid location photography in Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Soon, the Mitchell Camera Company would modify most of its existing cameras for quieter operation, and introduce a new model dubbed the “NC” (for “Newsreel Camera.”) Along with many internal modifications, the NC used a compensating link movement employing eccentrics instead of cams, and sleeve bearings replaced ball bearings of the Mitchell Standard. The NC was often referred to as the “Noiseless Camera” but this moniker had a slightly optimistic bent: the camera still required some sort of barney or blimp to keep the sound department at bay, especially in the soundstage’s cathedral-quiet air. “Barneys” tended to be thickly padded covers tailor made for the camera. These form-fitting quilts had their namesake in a sway-backed studio horse that donated his blanket to help a forgotten cameraman hush his grinding Bell & Howell. A blimp was required to completely muffle the whirring camera, and every studio camera department designed and built its own versions of the blimp. This evolutionary process began by shrinking the soundproof booth until just large enough to encase the camera. Some early blimps still hovered around the size of a Frigidaire, weighing 400 pounds. “It’s as big as a blimp,” exclaimed one jocular cameraman — the nickname stuck for 70 years. At least operators and assistants no longer had to endure imprisonment in “the icebox.” MGM devised a compact blimp that set the standard for the early Thirties. All Metro cameramen became “sound-certified” after attending a special class in the new technology. 20th Century Fox designed and constructed its own sound camera from scratch. The Fox self-blimped camera was a true marvel of engineering: an 85-pound compact machine that met acceptable sound levels without any extraneous housing. Being of proprietary design, the Fox camera saw little usage outside it’s own studio. However, George Mitchell’s innovative company finally fashioned a state-of-the-art motion picture camera for the rapidly maturing sound era. A Good Year for Blimps Barely five years after Wall Street’s infamous October meltdown, the Great Depression’s clutches still gripped America. The haunting restrain of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” sung a bleak anthem for the country’s mood. FDR’s New Deal promised prosperity “just around the corner.” In August of 1934, the Mitchell Camera Corporation introduced the “Blimped Newsreel Camera” — the famous and long enduring “BNC.” The camera had its internal mechanism refined for silent running. Composite material replaced metal for certain gears and the camera “floated” on sound dampening pads within the integrated blimp. Hammered lead-foil lined the blimp’s innards for optimum sound insulation. It retained the rackover pre-view system from the original Mitchell “Standard,” and the shooting viewfinder was fully coupled to the lens for accurate, non-parallax framing while the camera rolled. Compared to the many “Rube Goldberg” blimps of the day, the Mitchell BNC was a technological dream — smaller, lighter, (about 75 pounds) and user-friendly for operators and assistants. Alas, many years passed before the “BNC” found its place in the front ranks of movie production: the period between 1934 and 1937, saw manufacture of only three new BNC cameras. Studio coffers contained little extra cash for the purchase of new camera equipment. Thanks to sound production’s added expense, shaky finances of an industry dependent on Wall Street’s house of cards and downturns in production, most cameramen were lucky to be employed, let alone have the latest gear. The movie business was not immune to the effects of the Depression, contrary to a long-standing myth. Production dropped from over 800 movies in 1927 to fewer than 550 in 1934. MGM cut employee salaries in half. Thousands of Hollywood’s finest lost jobs. America’s unemployment rate zoomed to 25 percent. Truth be told, people in breadlines do not go to the movies. Glorious Technicolor Paints the Silver Screen By late 1935, the moribund economy began to show some vital signs. Paramount Studios emerged from bankruptcy. MGM realized a $7 million profit. Every week 80 million people hit local theaters. On the runway of Santa Monica’s Clover Field, the Douglas DC-3 took off on its maiden flight, launching the modern era of airline travel. The sleek, all-metal, twin-engine transport remains an icon of Streamlined Moderne design. A few miles away in Hollywood, Pioneer Pictures utilized an up-to-the-minute, color motion picture camera to film an historic 18th century drama. Directed by Ruben Mamoulian and photographed by Ray Rennahan, ASC, Becky Sharp became the first feature film to use Technicolor’s three-strip process. Enclosed by a blimp of behemoth proportions, the three-strip Technicolor camera was hardly streamlined, but it employed the most modern method for producing “natural” color film. This process had been in development since 1915 when Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Comstock and Burton Wescott formed the Technicolor Corporation — named in honor of their alma mater, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Moviemakers have dabbled in color since the very origins of cinema. Thomas Edison experimented with hand-coloring prints but found it too expensive and tediously time-consuming. The French PathéColor system of the early 1900’s employed 300 women to meticulously produce tiny stencils for each frame of the negative. These stencils — lined up in perfect registration with the original negative — were used during the printing stage to add color dyes to specific areas of each frame. Recalling his photography for Erich Von Stroheim’s magnum opus Greed (1925), William Daniels, ASC noted that many scenes had been hand-painted for the release print. Unfortunately, most of the original eight-hour epic film was destroyed, including a scene in which every flickering candle flame had been painted — frame-by-frame — with a tiny camel hair brush. Film labs added overall tints and tones to individual scenes or entire movies but the quest for a natural color process (which achieved color in the original photography) was long and difficult. Among several dozen color processes that tried to make a mark were Kinemacolor from England, Chronochrome from France and UFAcolor from Germany. In the United States, Prizma, Multicolor, Magnicolor, Cinecolor, and even Sennett Color (from the Mack Sennet Studio) vied for the attention of producers and cinematographers. Like early attempts to add synchronized sound to the movies, experiments in natural color ran the gamut from failed curiosities to the limited success of the two-color additive system used by Technicolor in its own production of The Gulf Between in 1916. Shot in Florida, the movie required that Technicolor build a complete laboratory in a railway car for the on-location processing and printing of celluloid. The men from M.I.T. soon abandoned the problem-plagued additive process and developed the two-color subtractive system with a modified Bell & Howell “2709” camera. Douglas Fairbanks produced the 1926 swashbuckler The Black Pirate with four of these hybrid cameras. The Ten Commandments (1923) and Ben Hur (1926) both exploited Technicolor’s primitive “Process Number Two” for a few scenes. The two-color process had limits in the spectrum it could reproduce. By exposing separate frames of black-and-white film through a red filter and a green filter, one could attain a semblance of natural color; without the blue record, certain key picture elements might not be rendered realistically — a bright blue sky, for instance. Technicolor realized the goal of full spectrum color reproduction in 1932 with the three-strip process. The technique began on-set with a special camera designed by George Mitchell and Technicolor’s Joseph Ball. The three-strip camera looked like a Mitchell NC on steroids. The oversize magazine held three rolls of 35mm stock and the camera body contained a host of prisms, beam-splitters and filters. A specially designed intermittent movement pulled three black-and-white negatives through two separate gates — two negatives traveled in bi-pack, the other remained solo. Much has been written about the extremely slow speed of Technicolor “film”: Becky Sharp was photographed at a five ASA and Technicolor calibrated its light meters in hundreds of foot-candles. But it wasn’t just the specifically prepared black-and-white stock that registered slowly: substantial light loss from the filters and prisms kept the effective ASA down to a single-digit number. Technicolor eventually applied black-and-white negatives pre-treated with an ammonia solution that increased the film’s sensitivity, developed more efficient beam splitters and, consequently, raised its ASA to 50. After traveling through the taking lens, the light was divided by a beam splitter and aimed through a series of in-camera filters to ensure exposure of each negative with only one primary color record of the scene. Three separate negatives rendered three discrete records of Red, Green and Blue — all color combinations were blended from this “RGB menu.” It’s important to remember that actual color was not being recorded: color information was logged on the black-and-white film — a kind of algorithm for the process’s next step. After development, the camera negatives were optically printed onto another set of three, black-and-white films. Silver was washed from these “matrix” films so that only a clear gelatin relief “map” of the original scene remained on the celluloid, depicting the amount of red, green or blue light present. Up to this point, no actual color had been put on the film. The three clear matrix prints were coated with a color dye complimentary to the original negative — cyan for red, magenta for green and yellow for blue. These color-coated strips were then printed onto a blank receiver film — in strict registration, one at a time — until the complete color palette came to life. The Technicolor system combined elements of photochemistry and lithographic printing. The matrix films were like rubber stamps that absorbed or “imbibed” the dye — hence the process being dubbed “Technicolor Imbibition Dye Transfer.” This complex method required incredible accuracy and quality control: the final print demanded a registration tolerance of 8/10,000 of an inch. The procedure was also very expensive — it could increase a movie’s budget by fifty percent. Back on the set, under a blaze of arc lights, the Technicolor camera hummed in its massive blimp. Camera and film had been balanced for daylight. Powerful white flame, carbon arc lamps were needed to saturate the set with Technicolor’s preferred exposure level — 800 foot-candles. The assistant racked focus with a handheld remote unit that controlled a selsyn motor attached to the lens barrel. The lens compliment included focal lengths of 25, 35, 40, 50, 70, 100 and 140mm. High-speed photography was accomplished with a special Technicolor camera designed to run at 96 frames-per-second. When shooting action scenes or dangerous stunts with the giant three-strip camera was unfeasible, a standard Mitchell or Bell & Howell Eyemo would be pressed into service. Loaded with 35mm, color reversal film, these cameras could shoot exciting cutaways that blended quite well with the original Technicolor. By 1940, Technicolor and Eastman Kodak were experimenting with monopack color negative film. Field tested in aerial scenes for 1941’s Dive Bomber (shot by Bert Glennon, ASC and Winton Hoch, ASC) and 1942’s Captains of the Clouds (Sol Polito, ASC), the single-strip color film proved acceptable for action shots. Ten more years would pass before monopack color emulsion would challenge Technicolor’s preeminence on the movie marquee. Hollywood’s Golden Age – The Sequel On Saturday night, December 10, 1938, the flame-ridden sky over Culver City glowed red-hot as Selznick International Studios’ backlot burned to the ground. Seven Technicolor cameras manned by 27 operators and assistants recorded this spectacular display of pyrotechnics. Thus began filming on the monumental Civil War epic Gone with the Wind. Production designer William Cameron Menzies orchestrated and directed the “Burning of Atlanta” while Technicolor cameraman Ray Rennahan, ASC supervised its photography. David O. Selznick brought a wealth of color experience to production of GWTW, having produced The Garden of Allah, A Star is Born, Nothing Sacred and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — all in three-strip Technicolor. Selznick’s primary financial backer, Jock Whitney, was also heavily invested in the Technicolor Corporation, so it’s not surprising that Selznick chose Technicolor for most of his “event” movies. Released in 1939 amid the greatest publicity campaign in movie history, Gone with the Wind attained success beyond every expectation. The picture earned unprecedented box-office receipts while winning almost every category in the Academy Awards. Ernie Haller, ASC and Ray Rennahan, ASC took home golden statuettes for their superb photography. Lee Garmes, ASC shot the first twelve weeks of GWTW, but was uncredited and unsung for his subtle, often moody manipulation of the sometimes garish Technicolor process. Many film buffs consider 1939 to be the greatest single year in the history of Hollywood movies. The turbulent and difficult decade emerged with cinematographers forming a shaky alliance with a new technology that seemed to threaten their artistic freedom on every front. Yet, less than two years after the first “talkies,” sound and camera departments had become comrades in arms, together raising the motion picture art to unparalleled heights. Technical innovation liberated the camera from the soundproof booth. In describing his ideal of the flowing camera, director F.W. Murnau noted that it could once again “whirl and peep and move from place to place as swiftly as thought itself.” Cinematographers concentrated on lighting, mood and story instead of mechanics of multi-camera coverage. The shimmering black-and-white photography of the silent film’s “Golden Age” returned with even greater artistry. Technicolor added the next important dimension to motion pictures. Directors of photography quickly tamed the boisterous hues and harnessed the dreadnought camera to create color motion pictures that still dazzle the eye. Just venture back to 1939 and the astounding slate of movies that remain classics to this day — Dark Victory, Gone with the Wind, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights. That list only comprises the Academy nominees. (Gregg Toland, ASC won an Oscar for the black-and-white photography of Wuthering Heights, the first major feature photographed entirely with the Mitchell BNC. Toland, of course, went on to use BNC serial #2 to shoot Orson Welles’ landmark Citizen Kane.) Continue on with that year’s timeless movies, and one uncovers Beau Geste, Destry Rides Again, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Intermezzo, The Shop Around the Corner, Only Angels Have Wings, The Roaring Twenties, Young Mr. Lincoln as well as two Technicolor films that tested the three-strip cameras with grueling locale shoots — Jesse James and Northwest Passage. The latter film (directed by King Vidor and photographed by Sidney Wagner and William V. Skall, ASC) saw the crew spend 12 weeks roughing it in the mountains, rivers and swamps of Idaho where a fully operational camera crane was built from trees felled on location. Its triumph proved that Technicolor was rugged enough to survive extremely demanding location work, thanks to the efforts of a very tough crew! Cinematographers conquered technical and artistic challenges that sound and color pitched their way. As the halcyon list of 1939 attests, the late Thirties rank as a Renaissance period for motion pictures. Filmmakers approached their craft with a supreme confidence and skill that only comes from decades of experience. Movies’ progression from Porter’s The Great Train Robbery to Selznick’s Gone with the Wind in only 35 years is an astounding accomplishment. The brave new winds of technological change swept through the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Fair-goers could experience the utopian promise that science and technology held for the future of mankind. RCA beamed live television to the 20,000 TV sets that dotted the busy boroughs of New York City. Polaroid projected 3-D movies to an enthralled audience. These two visual novelties would soon offer new hurdles to cinematographers and their colleagues in show business. In Europe, the world was primed to engage in the century’s greatest threat. On September 1st, Adolf Hitler’s’ Blitzkrieg slashed through Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II would question the future of any utopia — technological, or otherwise. In our next chapter, Hollywood enlists with the Allied campaign! • |
