Robbie Greenberg, ASC Wins Emmy for
HBO’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridge
by David Heuring and Bob Fisher

This article originally appeared in ICG Magazine in 2000

Robbie Greenberg, ASC earned his second consecutive Emmy award for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, a biopic whose subject is considered to be the first African American movie star. Earlier this year, he won the American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award for the same telefilm.

Dandridge is played by Halle Berry, who also served as executive producer. Greenberg says one of the keys was establishing a trusting relationship with Berry, the actress.

“It’s hard to define,” he admits. “There are a lot of steps to figuring out what you’re going to do on a film. Interdependent things happen on different levels. You develop an instinct with the actors as to where you feel the camera should be — how far to the right or left, above or under the eye, and what the various effects are. I think that happens unconsciously. However, the warmth with which I lit Halle Berry and the other actors was a conscious decision. It fit into the scheme of the film as a whole.”

Dorothy Dandridge came to Hollywood from humble circumstances. Greenberg wanted to portray Hollywood from that perspective, making it the most glamorous and exciting place imaginable. “I felt that Dorothy Dandridge was totally enamored with the Hollywood system. She was in love with Hollywood and the guys who ran it,” says Greenberg. “I wanted to have the audience in love with Hollywood, to feel the same way she felt.”

Some of the most memorable scenes take place on a Hollywood soundstage, where Greenberg and director Martha Coolidge recreated big productions including Carmen and Porgy and Bess. The actors on the sound stage were lit brightly, according to the filmic lighting of the period, while the people portraying crewmembers were barely visible at the darkened edges of the frame. The demarcation was meant to play up the manufactured glamour of Hollywood, but the result is striking photography.

“For me, a lot of those decisions are made purely about the relationship of light and dark,” says Greenberg. “I look at the frame and at the information the director wants to deliver. Then instinct takes over, and you see it as a photograph and try to make it interesting.”

Greenberg says that early in his career he was always true to the source. But today he is more willing to deviate for the sake of the image. “There is always someplace where I believe the light is coming from,” he says, “but sometimes I’ll add a light that deviates from the source because I feel it does something special for the photograph. When I first started, I was completely true to the light source. I don’t feel I need to be any longer.” “

The film traces Dandridge’s ascent through the nightclub circuit, where she sang and danced her way to popularity. The photography in these situations was varied, depending on the location. “There was a conscious effort to make each club look different,” Greenberg says. “We weren’t able to have a pre-rig or hire a lighting designer to help in those situations, as you might in a feature film, so I would come up with an achievable lighting design given the schedule and budget. We had spotlights in different places, or from different directions, or footlights. Those were basically the variables and we mixed and matched and placed lights where they would be appropriate and beneficial both for lighting the subject and for how they would look in the frame.”

In some club situations the Panavision camera was mounted on a Lenny-arm crane or a Matthews remote crane. Camera negatives included Eastman EXR 200T (5293), Kodak Vision 500T (5279), and Eastman EXR 100T (5248) films. “The ‘79 was for all the night exteriors and interiors,” Greenberg says, “including some of the performances. The ‘93 was for day exteriors when I needed the stop, and day interiors. The ‘48 was for day exteriors.”

For one-day exterior scene when Dandridge is asked for a date by her future husband, Greenberg augmented daylight with Dino lights, large rectangular banks of 1000 watt PAR lamps.

“They come in spot, medium and flood,” he says. “They weigh about 400 pounds. They’re great through diffusion, or multiple layers of diffusion, or if you want to use it hard, you can. Sometimes I used 3200K bulbs outside if I wanted to create a sense of warmth. Sometimes I put a quarter blue on a frame to cool them down just a bit. That’s what I did in that scene. It was ambient daylight, and a quarter blue on the 3200 source as the sun, so that it came kind of warm.”

Skin tones are always a consideration, but Greenberg didn’t have any concerns in that regard on this film. “Every woman was beautiful,” he says, “and the skin tones were magnificent whether I kept them neutral or lit them warmly. I did a lot of lighting through muslin, or bouncing off of muslin. I used dimmers but no gels. When you dim a light, it gets warmer. There’s just a quality you get from reducing the color temperature that I like better than using some of the warm gels.”

Greenberg used an eighth ProMist filter on the lens throughout this film, as he did on last year’s Winchell. His explanation is non-technical: “I just like the combination between the Primo lenses and the eighth ProMist. I’ve used a light diffusion in front of the lens for many years—nothing heavy, nothing obvious, and probably not obvious to anybody else’s eyes, even another cinematographer’s. But it just feels right. I just like the way things sort of blend a little bit.”

Robbie Greenberg’s feature film credits include Save the Last Dance, The Milagro Beanfield War, Sweet Dreams, Free Willy, Fools Rush In and Snowy Day. His additional television credits include The Winter of Our Discontent and Second Serve.

When asked about the differences between shooting feature films and shooting for television, he says, “Realistically, as far as what I’m doing, I can’t immediately detect a difference. What is different is that you don’t have six weeks of preproduction. You can’t always shoot a lot of tests of things that you want to try. You can’t shoot the background plates for any kind of green screen that might appear. On this project, we had three weeks of preparation. It was spent figuring out the job and what the approach is going to be. For me, the secret to doing a feature quality project on a 40-day schedule is preparation. Once you have a strong foundation, it’s easier to make changes. And you make changes while staying within the confines of the plan.”“

Greenberg adds, “What’s important is that while there is an intellectual side to defining what you’re going to do on any specific project or situation, there is also a really strong emotional side that takes over. It’s the marrying of the intellect and the soul. Not everything is conscious. Not everything is done to create a certain psychological effect. Some cinematography is just looking at something and feeling that this is the way it should be. It is trained instinct. There is a place where you’re not thinking of what pieces of equipment are on the set, you’re just looking at the subject and thinking of how to make it right.”