This article originally appeared in American Cinematographer
Magazine in October of 1990.

Avalon: Cinematic Time Machine
by George E. Turner

"I grew up during the post World War II years and images from that era are still the most compelling to me. Any film that gives me an opportunity to render the colors and textures of that time is a film that I must pursue," Allen Daviau, ASC said recently.

"I feel an obligation to help filmmakers shape the perceptions of future generations regarding a time that we witnessed and they did not. A Truthful use of the cinematic time machine can recall the pat with clarity not clouded with the mist of nostalgia. A script that discusses the process of remembering as well as fond memories is very rare. When writer-director Barry Levinson and producer Mark Johnson invited me to photograph Avalon I knew I had been given a unique opportunity."

Avalon is a family chronicle made entirely in Baltimore. Levinson, A Baltimore native who won an Oscarâ for his previous film, RainMan, based the screenplay loosely on his personal history. It depicts Polish immigrant family's assimilation into American culture between 1914 and 1970. Appearing as members of the Krichinsky family are Armin Mueller, Aiden Quinn, Elizabeth Perkins, Joan Plowright, Lou Jacobi, Leo Fuchs and Elijah Wood.

Daviau prepped the picture in July and August of 1989 and started principal photographing in September, continuing through October and November.

"We finally finished up with snow falling around our interior set the night before Thanksgiving,' he recalled. "Earlier, we had to make our own snow-this was the second time I've been involved in a picture where we were making snow in the heat of summer. Because we were covering such a wide range of years we had many different seasons. As I had found in North Carolina on The Color Purple, the fact that on the Eastern seaboard there are a lot of weather changes in the course of the day that may prove disruptive, but it also gives a lot of different 'looks' t o help achieve the feeling of the seasons."

Whenever possible Daviau likes to work in the 1:85 ratio with a 1:66 hard matte, as he did on Avalon. Producers will go along with this, he avers. "As long as you can get people to understand that the 1:66 hard matte will make a very fine video transfer, both pan-scan and letterbox. I got no flak from Warner Bros.' Or Tri-Star on the last two, but each time it's a new adventure. Somebody always says 'What? You've got a hard matte in the camera?'

"Barry enjoys using multiple cameras, which I do not," Daviau remarked. "I don't think any cinematographer does. Bit this film really called for it, because we had large scale scenes of family gatherings with children in them, and we knew that if we shot the tight stuff on the children from the start we'd those initial reactions, which otherwise would be lost, In terms of matching, it helped in the coverage, but the lighting certainly wasn't any fun. Barry hates to rehearse-he likes to get out there and shoot the scene right away because he feels he'll get a lot of his best things, particularly with kids, in the very early takes.

"Avalon," according to Daviau, "is one of Barry's Baltimore pictures. Diner, his first feature as a director, was about growing up in Baltimore, then he went out and made some pictures about the rest of the world like, The Natural, Good Morning Vietnam and Young Sherlock. Then there was Tin Men, which again was a Baltimore picture taking place in the early sixties. Avalon is his remembrance of the late forties and fifties. It's an overall portrait of a family and the relationship of a young boy and his grandfather. The grandfather is always telling the children about what it was like coming to America in 1914. When he arrived in Baltimore, it was the Fourth of July, and when he walked down the street he has never seen so many lights. This flashback is used as the basis for the storytelling throughout-we have flashbacks to 1914, 1915, 1917, 1926 and 1939. It also tells the story of brothers whom the grandfather came to join, and we see them again in contemporary times. The 'present time' of the picture is about 1948 to 1951, and most of the film is told from that perspective of looking back in time. At the end there are some scenes of the sixties.

"The story is built around two very American holidays that the immigrants had to become accustomed to: Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. These holidays are a motif of the film and often provide the reasons for the family gatherings. By going back in time and talking about the grandfather's memories we paint a portrait of the family joining the American lifestyle."

Daviau welcomed the opportunity to deal with the forties as a point of reference for looking back farther into the past. He emphasized that every attempt was made to avoid techniques that have become cliches of the genre: One thing Barry and I knew we didn't want was a lot of sepia tone and heavy diffusion. We had to find something new. We wanted to get several photographic styles to help differentiate the periods. So may of the flashbacks take place in the silent film era that we needed some sort of motif to express that.

"I told Barry about something I has done with Panavision while I was doing different kinds of color saturation tests and trying out the new Kodak 5296 stock," Daviau revealed. "I did a test shot at 16 fps and had DuArt, which has its own optical department stretch-print the daily back to 24 fps. One time I had tried to do this on a commercial and the optical house talked their way out of the job by telling the producer, 'What's the point of that? It'll look just like 24.' Which, of course, is not correct. If you shoot something at 16 and stretch-print to 24 and everybody is fairly stationary it does not look quite normal, but if something moves through the background, particularly across the screen, it certainly doesn't look like 24. It doesn't have the hokey effect of speeded up action, yet it brings to you something that is distancing. We wanted something that something that distanced these particular years. Everybody has seen this effect many times looking at documentaries and presentations of silent films, but it makes a difference that we have rarely seen this in color. It's not the same thing that leaps out at you; it's there, very subtly."

Some unusual color techniques were used to add to the "distancing effect" of the flashbacks. Certain scenes in the past are very saturated and rich while others are desturated. "I'd love to say that we planned them carefully for how they'd intercut into the modern footage, but that wasn't always the case," Daviau admitted.

"In some scenes-for instance, when the great grandfather is sent for by the children and he arrives at the docks-we were dealing with in-and-out sun in a sky with a lot of clouds, and in the course of the opticals and subsequently in the lab we wound up going with a less saturated look, taking it more to the pink than what was in the dailies. It intercuts very well with the warm tones of the scenes at the dinner table where this is all being discussed."

Daviau praised the production designer, Norman Reynolds, with whom he had worked on Empire of the Sun. "he had an enormous job when we consider the number of locations in this film," Daviau pointed out. "Baltimore is basically a wonderful city in which to do a period film; it has a certain look because of the widespread use of brick in the row houses. When we meet Sam, the grandfather as a younger man arriving in 1914, the brick helps to establish that period. We had to avoid buildings with phony stone facades that were put over the brick fronts in the fifties to make them look different. Barry and mark had location scouts looking for every brick street and sidewalk left in Baltimore and I think we squeezed them all into this film."

Although most of the picture was photographed in practical locations, Reynolds designed several interior and exterior sets. "He built a stage set of the interior of the first row house. And we built a hospital interior. The house in the suburbs was a real location, and how I wish it could have been a set! It was very difficult. We had a lot of night interiors to shoot in there. Michael Kenner, our key grip, and Tom Bookout, his best boy, came up wit a rig that's the best thing I've ever see for completely blacking out a house on location. Once we walked through the curtains from outside it was night time, and night surrounded the house, including the brushes and the foliage. We could light through the windows-it was really like being onstage. The house also had to evolve-we had to show changes in the place over the years. The art department had to wait for us to finish those scenes, then rip all that black away and come in and redo the house.

"An image from 1914 that recurs is of Sam walking up the a street completely covered with the arches of lightbulbs and strings of lightbulbs-and an American flag composed of red, white and blue lightbulbs in the background," Daviau said. "This image came from photographs taken during an exposition that was held in Baltimore in 1914. It was called Electric Park and Norman reproduced it as exactly as he could do it (According to the production office, more than18,000 lights were strung for the set). It's an extraordinary visual and it become a motif that is repeated several times with his memory of 'I came to America I 1914 and it was the most beautiful place I have ever seen' The line is repeated during the course of the film and again at the end.

"This is the fourth film I've done with Linda DeScenna, the set decorator, and her lead man, Ric McElvin," Daviau noted. "She's always out looking for light fixtures-her joke is that Daviau likes a set to look like a Hali-Specht showroom. The light fixture she got for over the table is one of the things that created a motif-I loved it the minute I walked onto the set. The mood of the first Thanksgiving was inspired-literally-by the light fixture. There were very old, orange toned light bulbs in and it was possible to hide gadget lights behind all the bulbs and use it as the major source for the first Thanksgiving scene. Even before the first rehearsal I like to turn on the practicals and watch the actors move around and then go in and figure out how to amplify that light to make it photographable and still keep the look."

In lighting a film of this cope, Daviau and his gaffer, Larry Wallace, used the entire range of lighting instruments available from the Musco Light down to flashlight powder.

"I don't want to remember how we did day interiors before the HMI light,' Daviau shuddered. "The ability to put even just 200 watts of 5600 K light onto a scene is still a wonder to me. And with the new Lightmaker AC/DC ballasts we can use HMIs on car rigs and draw from the camera car batteries-something the sound department appreciates.

"We were too early to try the new 18k HMI, but Dick Hart let us have his new 7K Xenon for just one day to backlight the wedding dance near the beginning of the film. We had a long throw from the courthouse balcony down to the marble 'dance floor' but the 7K delivered the most crisp, coherent beam I have ever seen. It is truly the only light in the scene and the faces of the bride and groom are lit solely from the bounce off their partner's costume."

A main theme of the film is that after World War II, Aiden Quinn's character, the boy's father, goes into business with his cousin, and as they go from being door-to-door salesman into owning their own discount television store, they leave the row house and the center city and move out to a newer house in the suburbs.

One scene Daviau regards fondly occurs when the family is moving and the father and the grandfather walk around in the empty row house talking about what had happened there.

"This was on stage in one of our row house sets. It's almost totally lit from outside and it plays quite dark, with the sources all coming from the windows. It had to play in one big, wide shot, with no coverage on their faces at all. We see them walking from the living room into the dining area, into the kitchen, and they disappear and we just hear their voices. Then we see them go to the front door and we cut to a shot outside the door and the key line is to the title of the show is given: "All I know is we are getting farther away from Avalon." Avalon is the street where the grandfather and his brothers lived when they first came to Baltimore.

"When they say that line, we're looking through the screen door," Daviau continued. "We do a rack focus to the screen and discover painting on it. There was a style in the forties that Barry feels only existed in Baltimore, To have painting done on the screen doors and window screens. This one depicts a house in the country, and the next cut is to the family in the house in the suburbs.

Because the family gets into the television business, the movie is able to comment subtly on how television quickly began to pervade American life and developed a stronger and stronger influence.

"In those days, the grandparents still lived with the parents and children," Daviau pointed out. "When they move to the suburbs the packing boxes are on the floor of the house and they're having their first meal in the new kitchen. When the sound of Milton Bearle in the TexacoStar Theatre comes from the living room, everybody jumps up from the table, runs in and sits on the packing boxes-the first piece of furniture that was installed was the television set. So we establish the influence of television that plays throughout the film."

One large scale scene is when the father and the uncle have a successful opening of their discount warehouse near the docks. To celebrate, they take the family to a Fourth of July party at the country club. There they receive news that the warehouse is on fire. When they get there, flames are blowing out of all the windows and the fire trucks and fireboats are there.

"It was enormous!" Daviau exulted. "It's a Baltimore tradition that on the Fourth of July they set off huge fireworks displays from the barges in the harbor, so we had the warehouse burning in the foreground and the fireworks going off in the background. We forgot what time it was and we were still shooting off fireworks till the early hours of the morning. It was the one time that the city of Baltimore didn't appreciate our shooting there! The second unit crew got some terrific angles of the fire from a boat in the harbor, which were very advantageous in showing the scope of the fire.

"This was a rather large lighting job," Daviau understated. "I wanted to use the Musco Light to cover the scene from one source, but I couldn't find a place where I really wanted it to be. Larry Wallace and I got involved in a long series of discussion about whether we could put the thing on a barge out in the harbor. Charles Neuwirth, our associate producer, was not as enthusiastic about this plan as we were. It was difficult to get a barge large enough and somebody commented to me 'if this thing tips over you'll be responsible for killing every crab in Chesapeake Bay'

"We did not get to put the Musco on a barge," Daviau admitted. "We found a fixed location for it and it served the purpose of providing some illumination, although not from the angle I would have liked. With all the flames we had coming out of the building we didn't need as much intensity. The Musco did prove itself a very flexible tool. The remote control of each lamp that can be done with that light proved extraordinary in terms of being able to shift emphasis and put some light out to the harbor and light the fire boats and the warehouses all from one location. It's the fat that it has the height and the flexibility to focus 15 different lamps from the remote control setup that is so astounding."

A sequence that Daviau recalled with enthusiasm depicts the youngsters watching a vintage Republic serial during their weekly Saturday pilgrimage to a theater.

"It was a challenge,' he said, "depicting a solid kids audience at a Saturday children's matinee. We shot in the Senator Theater in Baltimore, which is also the theater that Barry remembers going to in his boyhood, and it's one of the most beautifully restored and maintained movie houses in the country. At midnight, as the audience was leaving after the last show on a Sunday night, our rigging crew had to be ready to go in. Bob Meyers and Tom Bookout rigged a pip over the top of the screen and put a teaser in front of that so I could edge-light the audience from the direction of the screen and have the light source coming believably from that. There was very little other light used anywhere in the theater except a bounce light on the close-ups.

"The features episode on the screen is a chapter of King of the Rocketmen, which includes a stream of spilled gunpowder burning toward the explosives. We had Ray Emerits from General Camera in New York, who was the projection technician for Gordon Willis on The Purple Rose of Cairo-which was a really complicated piece of work. I was concerned that we wouldn't have enough brightness on that screen in 35 mm from an old dupe print, although it was a very good dupe. We had the actual movie projecting. One thing that was wonderful is that we shot toward the audience first. Here was a whole new generation of eight to eleven year-old children who'd never seen Rocketmen before, and the reaction we got was really spontaneous. Terrific! It's a tribute to the original filmmakers because the response of the audience in genuine. We had a great audience of kids and they put up with us as we shot all different angles. It was one of the scenes I was not looking forward to because of the many complications but it turned out to be a delight to shoot."

Looking back on the experience of putting Avalon on film, Daviau reflected:

"I think it was John Hora (ASC) who said that 'making a period movie is the closes thing we have to a time machine.' It's true: when you look through that lens it should be looking back in time. It's many fine details that make the difference, and everybody who contributes has to be in tune."