Richard Crudo Tackles Two Kinds of Comedy
By Pauline Rogers

"I don't believe in doing comedy in the old 'bright and tight' manner," says cinematographer Richard Crudo (Federal Hill, The Lowlife, American Buffalo, Music From another Room, Bongwater).

But, he admits, although Paul Weitz's American Pie - about four teenage guys who make a pact to lose their virginity before graduation - is the usual teen silliness, it has a strong story line.

"And, Michael Corrente's Outside Providence, co-written by Peter Farrelly (Dumb & Dumber, Kingpin, There's Something About Mary) is much more of a bittersweet comedy/drama coming-of-age, about a 17-year-old boy from the wrong side of the tracks, who ends up finishing his education at a posh boarding school."

Lighting styles were very important to Crudo for both pictures.

"American Pie is very straightforward," he says. "We wanted to keep the lights (and camera work) tasteful and appropriate to the given mood. The real job was not getting in the way of telling the story."

That didn't mean all high key comedy lighting. "Paul Weitz wanted a feeling of being rooted in reality, so there are parts of the movie that are considerably more edgy than you might find in your average run-of-the-mill film of this type," Crudo explains. "Fortunately, we had good-looking kids, so it was pretty easy to photograph them."

Shot in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Long Beach, a great deal of the picture's action takes place in a high school. "We tried to keep a nice sheen on the place," he explains.

"The hallways were of special concern. Here, we used lots of kicks off the glossy lockers. This created a sense of sunlight, as if there were windows somewhere just off-camera in what was really a very confined space."

The young men are walking three abreast in one of the opening shots of the movie. It begins on the second floor balcony that overlooks the big, open lobby where the school's main entrance is located. "We tilt up from the front doors to reveal a beautiful 1930s vintage WPA-style mural on the wall above and then pan to pick up our three main guys on the stairwell," Crudo explains.

They turn off the stairs toward the camera and the camera dollies back with them as they advance, holding them in a medium three-shot. "Though this shot as it appears in the finished film is considerably truncated, we staged and lit it as a 150-foot unbroken move. Since we traveled so far on the dolly, we obviously couldn't have any dolly track laid out because we'd see it in the background."

Crudo thought about Steadicam. "This was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment decision on the part of Paul and Chris Weitz," he comments. " I had to hit the curve (as is so often the case in what we cinematographers do). So I mounted our Super Pee Wee dolly on our large-sized Western dolly. Though the surface of floor we needed to travel over was fairly level and without any pits, the big, soft pneumatic wheels of the Western dolly helped soften the ride and let us do a long tracking shot with a great deal of freedom and consistency.

Crudo's concern, lighting wise, " was not to create a feeling of overhead fluorescence, but rather a more naturalistic one, as if there was no real source of the light; as if it were just there. This was achieved by rigging a 5K fresnel with a large Chimera attached to it on the Western dolly itself, right over camera. This gave a nice, soft, untraceable light on our three heroes as we dollied them back through the hall."

For the sake of variety and contrast, Crudo left the classroom doors open all through the hall (which was filled with 200 kids running for class), and placed 2K Baby Juniors inside which focused into the hall. "As the guys passed the opened doors, they'd get nice hits that felt like normal daylight streaming through the windows inside the classrooms," he explains.

There were also a series of skylights built into the hallway ceiling. "Here, I had a two-pronged approach. First, I covered the skylight with duvetyne so I could control the light there without worrying about it changing over the course of the day.

"Next, I rigged a number of 2K Baby Juniors in the recesses of the skylight, bouncing some of them into beadboard while pointing others straight down to simulate hard sunlight kicks. The effect is very believable, since this skylight effect was measured at about one stop over key. They gave a nice variation from the consistency of the 5K lashed to the dolly, as we traveled the length of the hall. As I said, this shot and others like it were ultimately cut into much smaller pieces in the final film, but in dailies we saw that we all did our job very well.

"My hat is off to my dolly grip, Mike Listorti, who had to push our heavily-outfitted Western dolly a long, long way over many, many takes..." adds Crudo.

The dark, shiny nature of most of the student lockers located in the hallway led to some interesting challenges for Crudo, because of reflections. "Since we moved around these hallways so freely so much of the time, very often I had a problem hiding my lights," he says. "Imagine this - a corridor eight feet wide with shiny walls on two sides and a seven foot ceiling! It was amazing how clearly you could read the shape of our lighting units in the reflections sometimes."

If Crudo was unsure about how to proceed with lighting a scene, his usual backup plan would work. "When I really got into trouble, I would bounce my light (usually a big unit like a 10K or 20K located far down the hall) into a four-foot by eight-foot piece of beadboard. Next, we would flag off the lighting unit itself, so the reflection in the lockers would be hidden in the black of the flag."

But this still left a reflection of what was now essentially playing as the light - the white bead board -very clearly in frame. "This was easy to cure, though; I merely took some two-inch black tape and made a windowpane pattern on the bead board so that when you see the reflection, it looked like a really bright window that was located somewhere out of frame. Fast, cheap, ridiculously simple and very effective," he comments. "It can be seen in many shots and moves in the hallways throughout the movie if you know where to look, but I won't tell. Besides, the movie is too funny to pay any attention to my little tricks," Crudo adds.

Crudo and Weitz were constantly moving the camera to keep up with these kids who were alive, vital and full of energy. "That meant a lot of Steadicam," he explains. "One of the shots that really shows the ability of the Steadicam and our desire to keep moving with the characters takes place in the gym. This is prom night. We started on one kid and followed him for a bit through the huge crowd. We then switched off to all the other characters to show what they are doing at various points. This was all in one continuous move."

To light this, Crudo placed 20 space lights about 30 feet above the gym floor. This created a low level (about two stops under key), for ambience. He then accented the set with 1K PAR cans that were programmed from the dimmer board. "This allowed us to intermittently flash the lights on and off," he explains. "The 1K PAR cans carried party colors - deeply saturated red, blue, orange, purple, and yellow. A festive mood."

There is a night interior in a very nice upper middle-class home that Crudo enjoyed. The house was large, well appointed, and had lots of kids as the guests. "We wanted a very low-key feel, since Paul, Chris Weitz and myself all remembered our own parties from those days as being invariably dark with almost all the lights in the house turned out.

Crudo and his crew used the Steadicam to follow the main character, Stifler, as he downs some shots with friends in the kitchen and then leads the audience through the entire place before the scene switches to some other kids and a separate little vignette in the living room.

"Hiding lights was a big challenge," says Crudo, "since this was a practical house, not a set. No matter how large and comfortable the house may seem to live in, when you start to shoot a movie in exactly the same space, it's amazing how quickly the place becomes small. Ceilings were low and walls were close. I ended up hiding what few lights we used, mostly 650W Mole Tweenies and Midgets or 250W Inkies among the many guests moving about the place. Sometimes lights had to be placed on dimmers to avoid photographing a shadow of the Steadicam as it passes through the lighted areas."

In these cases, an electrician (located out of frame) would use the dimmers to fade the offending light out to dark on cue as the Steadicam passed through the danger zone.

"Under-exposure was the order of the day here, with most of the ambience at least two stops under key, while key lighting on any of the people varied from one to one and a half stops under key. It's an intricate camera move that looks much simpler than it appears on screen because it involved a lot of very precise choreography between the lead actor, the extras and Steadicam operator Gerry O'Malley, who did a great job!" enthuses Crudo.

Crudo also enjoyed shooting the love scenes at the end of the film. The whole movie leads up to these sequences where each of the main male characters finally gets his shot at fulfilling the bet they all made together at the beginning - to lose their virginity by graduation.

"So as the 'climax' of everything, these scenes had to be treated carefully, lighting-wise. In terms of action, they are rather tame and modest, which is totally in keeping with the overall tone of the film. I must emphasize that there is nothing racy or raunchy about the love scenes; on the contrary, they're very soft and sweet and indicate a higher level of true affection and consideration among the characters than we are used to seeing in the teen genre.

Crudo admits that he tried to stay true to this in his lighting approach, "especially since I wanted to make sure the actors were as at home and as comfortable as possible on the set."

Crudo's general rule was low-key, soft, romantic, inviting. "For the scene in the lakeside gazebo between Mena Suvari and Chris Klein, I wanted to keep the water in frame because of its long-held association with sensuousness. It serves here as the introduction to the scene. We begin on the background (the lake itself) and in an unbroken move pull back to reveal the young lovers in the foreground as they start to get seriously acquainted."

Crudo found that lighting the water was a problem. "It was nighttime, and in order to light water so it'll read on film, you have to get a unit way up high at a 180-degree angle to the lens. The geography fought me on this one," Crudo admits. "We shot out at Lake Sherwood in the West Valley and for a variety of community relations reasons it was out of the question for us to consider using a Musco unit or amything like it from the far bank back toward the side of the lake we occupied. The solution came during the prep period. I suggested to our production designer Paul Peters that he build the gazebo in which the love scene take place on the shore rather than over the water. This way, I could angle it so that I would definitely see the water, while also taking advantage of a large light source that could now be placed on a more film-friendly part of the shore."

This solution proved to be Crudo's salvation. "I then used a 100-foot Condor crane with an articulated arm to support two 20K Tungsten lamps. One of them was used for the back light on the water (180 degrees to the lens) while the other was used to light some of the shore that is visible in the background. In the gazebo foreground where the actors work, I used some soft rim light to separate them from the dark background and then filled it with very soft light, some three stops under key."

Crudo explains that there was a warm tone at work that is very romantic and complimentary to both the actors themselves and the context of the scene. "What I, at first, anticipated as a troublesome bit of logistics actually turned out to be a very simple and satisfying part of our shoot."

When Crudo and team did move outside, the sequences were often large and fast moving. One of the most extensive was a Lacrosse sequence shot at Long Beach State University. This involved fast action with young men on the run, waving sticks and firing a very hard ball at the goal.

"We used the Steadicam rigged to a speed rail frame attached to a four-wheel drive all-terrain vehicle," he explains. "It was really the only way to keep up with the action, while on the move. This allowed us dynamic and dramatic footage of the players from right up close in the middle of the action. We also used several different cameras with long lenses, set at strategic points such as sidelines at mid-field, behind each goal, and up high in the stands for overview. This gave us random bits of action."

Because they shot this sequence over the course of two days, there were some discrepancies between sunny and cloudy sky conditions, Crudo notes. "But, since nearly all the action was on the move, there was no way to augment any of this with lighting. So, I was forced to balance everything in timing. With the action and cutting so fast, everything looked consistent."

For American Pie, Crudo chose to shoot Kodak's 5293 (rated at 160 ASA) for day and night interiors and night exteriors. He also used Kodak's 5245 (rated at 50 ASA) for day exteriors. Cameras were Panavision with Primo prime lenses. "I didn't use filtration, except a little of 85 daylight correction," he adds. He kept the interiors at T2.8 and exteriors at T4. His printer lights were 32-34-36 for Tungsten and 21-29-29 for daylight.

DeLuxe Labs of Hollywood did the work with Ron Koch as dailies manager and Ron Graham as timer. Phil Hetos did the release print timing. "An interesting side note," says Crudo, "was that we printed the dailies on Kodak's 5386 positive stock during principal photography. 1999 saw the discontinuation of 5386 and switched completely over to the new Vision 2383 positive," he explains. "The look is somewhat different now that I'm doing the release printing on Vision 2383, and I'm still not sure how I like it. The stock is harder and has more contrast than I generally care for. Had I known this ahead of time, I would have shot the movie a little differently. I might have used a lower contrast negative stock or maybe lit things a little bit more softly and at closer ratios."

In contrast, Outside Providence (set in the year 1977) featured two very distinctive lighting approaches. The idea was to contrast the "wrong side of the tracks" background of hero Dunphy (Sean Hatosy) to the school he attends. Shot in Providence, Pawtucket, and Kingston, Rhode Island, as well as Hollywood, Florida, the locations themselves gave Crudo an even better edge.

"For Pawtucket (where Dunphy lives), we used a cool/bluish tone, making it very contrasty and shadowy," says Crudo. "For the Connecticut boarding school environment (where Dunphy goes to school) we used a warm and yellowish look that was softer and less dense. These choices were made not just to differentiate between the two worlds, but to indicate a texture not common to what we often see today," Crudo adds. "I think it is important, with period pieces, to have some sort of distancing device built into the visual structure, no matter how subtle it may be."

Again, this youthful story contains several sport and movement sequences. "One of the most interesting takes place in a hockey rink," he says. "The location was huge and very, very old. It had mercury metal halide lighting fixtures, rigged in these rafters that looked like they had been there since the year of the flood! To the naked eye, this house lighting made skin tones appear greenish-blue. It was obviously beyond our means to gel correct or replace each lamp individually," he says, "so I shot a test."

Because this was part of the boarding school segments, "I used the 5293 equation - pulling all the filters except for the diffusion. By doing several passes in timing correction, I found the right printer lights to make the house lighting look normal. A second test then determined the proper gel to use on my Tungsten lamps. This would illuminate the actors in the foreground (in other words, I gelled my foreground lights to match the color temperature of the mercury metal halide house lighting that lit the rest of the arena). On the screen, it was a perfect match."

Crudo found another "oddball" sequence - a wake held at Dunphy's house after one of his friends has died. "Since we were back in Pawtucket, I used Kodak's 5298 stock," he says. "Director Michael Corrente wanted a really messy, rough, documentary look. So, we did the entire sequence hand-held."

For lighting this sequence, Crudo stayed simple. "We went with overhead baylight-type arrangements. The baylights, or 'coops', are units of reasonable size (four by eight feet in this case). Inside, 1K broads are bounced straight up into a white headboard, which in turn reflects the light down through a sheet of diffusion that acts as the floor of the unit. When these were suspended overhead, they gave a wide, even soft look - and a very 'toppy' feeling of illumination. We then added black duvatyne skirts, attached to the perimeter of the baylights, to keep the light from spilling on the walls of the set.

Crudo used very little fill light from eye level. "The result of lighting in this fashion was exactly what the director wanted emotionally - sad, uncomplimentary, frenetic, and very, very ugly. No one looks good in this sequence, but I think it still manages to serve the story, especially since we cut from here directly to the more soothing, bucolic and pretty life at the Connecticut boarding school."

The main interior location that doubled for the Connecticut boarding school was the Cranston Street Armory in Providence, Rhode Island. "Built in 1905, it is a truly incredible piece of architecture. First of all, it's gigantic," says Crudo. "It is a fortress in the truest sense of the term."

In the story, it is Thanksgiving weekend and all the students, except Dunphy, are going home. "We wanted to do a shot that would show all the madness and excitement of the students as they head for the doors after their last class. We also wanted to use some of this fabulous architecture that we had at our disposal here at the armory. So we staged 150 student extras to come pouring down the stairs all at once into the main lobby where they are met by waiting parents. To capture this with some imagination, I had a Chapman Lenny arm brought up to the third floor landing. We mounted our Panavision camera on a Cam-Remote unit. The Lenny arm allowed me to start the shot with the camera way up high - between the concentric stairwell rings of the 4th and 5th floors. As the kids start pouring out of the rooms above and head for the stairs, the Lenny arm-mounted camera then booms and tilts down through the concentric stairwell rings with them. They descend to the next floor below, ending close to the ground floor where everyone congeals in a swarming mass of humanity."

As the students clear out for the exits, Dunphy is left by himself. Crudo went for simple lighting. The hard part was just keeping the units out of sight, "because we see so much of the place during this vast and sweeping move," he explains. "Mostly, we used three or four 20Ks (nothing smaller than a 10K), usually bounced into beadboard to create a usable level overall-from as far back and out of the shot as was possible and appropriate. The darkness of the wood that we see here in much of the armory's design sucked up a lot of this light and helped give a naturalistic feel to the practical sources that were in the shot."

Crudo also enjoyed another exterior shot, this time with Dunphy and his father in their car. Dunphy has been arrested by the police for a teenage prank that got out of hand. His father (Alec Baldwin) has come to the precinct to pick up his son.

"It is a rainy night exterior for us and we have a fairly involved shot planned out that would bring Dunphy and his Dad from the precinct door up the block, across the parking lot and to their car," says Crudo.

"After much planning and rigging in anticipation of this big set-up, it was all thrown out the window for the sake of a better idea. Since it was actually raining the night we showed up for this bit, the actors began rehearsing their lines in the car. As the director sat in with them and really listened to what they were saying, the scene was changed to just having Dunphy (in the passenger seat) and his Dad (in the driver's seat). They were already in the car - no walk and talk, no great Steadicam, no big camera choreography - just two guys sitting there talking while we photograph them from the front end of their car through the rain-flecked windshield."

Crudo used minimal lighting. He rigged a 5K Tungsten unit through 216 diffusion some distance behind and up high over camera. "Which, as I said, was placed right at the front end of the car by its bumper," he adds. "This gave a very low level (two stops under key) base illumination. I then used some back-cross lighting on each of the actors (2K Baby Juniors placed at 45 degree angles to the lens off camera left and camera right) to give a bit of a highlight on the insides of their faces (one stop under key).

"The effect is simple, elegant and effective," he says. It was also quick, which was a concern here once the decision was made to go this way, because the actors had to be soaking wet from the rain, and who wants to sit around damp and miserable for very long on a cold and windy night?

"Ironically, as much as I looked forward to the big set-piece originally planned, I think this was a truer choice for the story, much more intimate," he admits. "You really pay attention to the actors and to the text here, not to any camera heroics. And, that's really the crux of what we do as cinematographers."

Again, Crudo used Panavision/Primo lenses for this shoot. He printed dailies as he did before, using DuArt Labs in New York, Steve Blakeley (dailies manager) and John Franick (dailies timer) with Dave Pultz (release print timer).

His Pawtucket segments were shot on Kodak's 5298 rated at 320 ASA (Tungsten and Daylight). His stop was a T4 for interiors and T5.6 for exteriors. Printer lights were 33-47-26 on Tungsten and 27-50-42 on daylight. He used Kodak's Wratten +10 Blue gel behind the lens. For these sequences, there were no diffusion filters. Nor did he use an 85 filter for daylight correction. For the boarding school sequences, Crudo used Kodak's 5293 rated at 160 ASA (tungsten), 125 ASA (daylight/with 85 filter). His stop was T2.8 for interiors and a T4 for exteriors. The printer lights were set at 31-45-29 for Tungsten and 28-47-45 for daylight. He used Kodak's Wratten +20 Yellow gel behind the lens, Tiffen- Black ProMist diffusion filter, and an 85 filter for daylight correction.