Stephen Lighthill on Nash Bridges,
Another Cop in Another Town
This article originally appeared in AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER in 1997

By Bob Fisher

Remember when Don Johnson was Sonny Crockett, an ultra-cool cop busting drug lords in a red hot city? In the 1980s, Miami Vice epitomized hip. Fans dressed and spoke like Crockett and emulated his mannerisms, while TV producers copied the look and sound.

Johnson is back, but this time he's Nash Bridges and the city is San Francisco. Nash Bridges is contemporary, right down to being warm and fuzzy. He's a charming, street-wise cop who outwits the bad guys while dealing with two ex-wives, a teenage daughter and caring for a childish father. Even his sidekick, Joe Dominguez, played by Cheech Marin, dresses Salvation Army chic rather than pastel silk and espadrilles. Compared to Miami Vice, this is hard-nosed reality.

The Don Johnson Company and Carlton Cuse Productions (writer/ executive producer) produce the show in association with Rysher Entertainment. It airs on CBS television.

Cinematographer Stephen Lighthill came onto the show after Rodney Charters shot the first 13 episodes. Lighthill talks about his experiences filming the next 18 shows.

"Don (Johnson) is both lead actor and executive producer," says Lighthill. "That isn't easy, but he knows what he's doing. He has good taste and judgment, never forgets a line or misses a mark, and he's involved with everything concerning the show."

It was a homecoming for Lighthill, who launched his career in San Francisco shooting TV news and documentaries. He has worked with Walter Cronkite, filmed stories for 60 Minutes and gone on the road with Charles Kuralt. Two of his long form documentaries earned Oscar nominations: Seeing Red and Berkeley in the '60s. A black and white documentary, Coming Out Under Fire, earned a special jury award at the Sundance Film Festival and top honors at the Berlin Film Festival in 1994.

"I've always had parallel careers in narrative and non-fiction filmmaking," he says. Lighthill was an assistant cameraman on THX 1138, George Lucas' early foray, and he was on the second unit crew when Bill Fraker, ASC, shot Bullit in San Francisco. During the 1990s, Lighthill has shifted his focus mainly to fiction films for the cinema and TV screens. His credits include Open Season, Shimmer and an episodic series, Earth 2.

"Documentaries give you a tremendous foundation," he says. "You learn the craft because you are dealing with everything. You are lighting, putting up reflectors and adjusting lamps. You are watching people's behavior, listening to their stories, and learning about human nature. I learned the difference between wide angle and long lenses while shooting close-ups during interview shots for documentaries. There are a lot of ways you can make a scene work beyond lighting and shooting it."

Lighthill, true to his documentary roots, has a taste for motivated light from a single source. "I'm a minimalist at heart," he says. "I'll use the lamps we need to tell the story, but I believe the light given to us is almost always better than what I create."

He worked one season in San Francisco with Brad Six, ASC as a camera operator on Midnight Caller. "I love working in a place I know so well," he says. "I always thought you could use the environment as a wild, circus-like character. I've put the city on film many times, but never with these resources. We explored the back alleys, the odd angles, the back sides of the hill, the tenements that are hung on incredibly scenic vistas."

Lighthill says, "The reality look we crafted for Nash Bridges is about extremes. There are practical lights on day or night that burn out parts of the frame. We also burn out a lot of backgrounds. It would have been considered bad technique a few years ago."

Technically, the show is supposed to shoot five days on location, and two in the studio, but Lighthill says it is usually at least six on location.

The studio is a converted airplane hangar. The main standing sets are separate apartments for Bridges and one of his ex-wives, Lisa Bridges (Anita O'Toole). His apartment is supposed to be a penthouse overlooking Chinatown. The convincingly scenic exterior is actually a huge translight which covers an almost 180 degree angle. There are separate day and night translights on tracks that roll easily into place.

The set is built on a second story, so the camera can look down. Lighthill did a little fine tuning by putting a scrim between the set and translight to soften the image and create a little atmosphere between the actors and background.

"It's difficult to show the city as a background at real locations," he says. "The exterior background is almost always overexposed in daylight and underexposed at night. I had every light available pounding on the translights, so they would get a little blown out."

Lighthill credits Johnson with the idea of putting the police station on a ferry. The first time Lighthill saw the ferry set, he decided to put sheets of Mylar in frames outside the windows to create a sense of rippling water on the walls.

"I love that set," he says. "It's a room that looks like an office with a tunnel behind it that opens onto a view of Alcatraz. The walls are painted enamel white and are studded with rivets. There are metal surfaces everywhere. I can bounce light off everything."

He lit the interior with a couple of 18Ks shining through the windows. Fill light was limited to practicals and a few small units.

Lighthill uses a Bug light, a very small HMI that's omni-directional, wrapped in a Chimera box, on Steadicam shots. In one episode, there's a moving shot on the ferry that goes from bow to stern, through a brightly lit interior into a tunnel with no windows. There's a 180 degree turn at the back-end which reveals the city in the background. A crew member holding the Bug light is walking backwards in front of the actors. The light puts a glimmer in their eyes, and the fill is sufficient to keep the film properly exposed.

"We went through a six-stop change, from T-2.8 to T-11, on that shot," he says.

"There's an overall architectural theme that is sort of deconstructionist," says Lighthill.

"We shot in earthquake-damaged buildings that have been partially renovated. The exposed beams create a feeling for how everything is held together. Don drives a classy car, and a lot of the bad guys ride around in expensive cars from the 1970s."

Nash Bridges is a bigger-than-life character, and Lighthill treats him accordingly with "good solid portrait light." But, he isn't reluctant to conceal the star in shadows and darkness. One episode ends with a classic shoot-out, in which Johnson is silhouetted until the last moment when the bad guy is shot. Only a brief glimpse of Bridges stepping out of the shadows is visible. "It's edgy and risky," says Lighthill. "Like any actor, Don wants to look good, but he also wants me to take chances with lighting."

As with most episodic TV there's a video tap on the camera. Mainly, it's a director's tool. "We don't record takes on tape," says Lighthill. "Don doesn't come over and look at himself. He rode with the San Francisco police before starting the show and has a strong sense of how he wants to be seen. Don is very faithful to reality. If a director tells him take cover behind something that isn't really cover, he'll intervene."

Lighthill had only two weeks of prep time before he shot the first episode. He reviewed the film from the first 13 shows, visited all locations and shot new film tests.

"The first time I talked to Don, he made a comment about not wanting postcard views of the city," he says. "I tested the camera films that were available at that time, and decided on using the new (Kodak Vision 52)77 for all day exteriors."

Lighthill uses the 320-speed film for all exteriors from just before sunrise until just after sunset. "It's a little finer grain than the (Eastman EXR 52)87 film," he observes. "You can pretty much see with your eyes what the negative will look like. It has 10, maybe 11 stops of latitude. That means if I'm shooting a bright exterior, the film allows me to record a normally exposed person on an overexposed background. The background is kind of bright, but the transition is so gentle you really don't notice. It looks natural."

Lighthill routinely overexposes skylines by four to five stops, and it holds when the film is transferred to tape. "This film doesn't over-saturate colors, and you can over-expose it," he says. "I almost decided to standardize on one stock, but we shoot night interiors and exteriors around a quarter of the time, and I felt we needed the extra two-thirds of a stop you get from the Vision 500T film. I compared it to the 5277 film exposed at an E.I. of 500."

Lighthill notes that some people consider these premium films a bit costly for episodic TV, but he notes that they record the look the producers want on a tight shooting schedule, and are so versatile that he was able to cut a hidden cost by reducing short-ends.

"I use Mitchell diffusion filters on the cameras to help the actors when we are shooting long, hard days, and they're tired," he says. "The filters are from the 1930s, and are very gentle. It is another form of make-up to soften the edges."

There are a few things Lighthill doesn't do, such as using ultra-wide lenses on close-ups of Johnson and heroic low angle shots in the manner of Rocky.

"One thing I learned from documentaries is that sometimes you only get one take," he says. "That helped me cope with what we called 'the Don factor.' When we shot on the street during normal hours, we needed an extra six production assistants to control crowds. If we were doing car shots in traffic, we had to be prepared to lose most of the soundtrack when people yelled, 'Hey Cheech! Hey Don!'"

Almost every scene includes a master Steadicam shot. "Don hates having cameras mounted on the car being towed by the Shotmaker," Lighthill says. "We developed a technique that we call 'free driving.' We mount the Steadicam on the back of the Shotmaker. We can use long lenses, up to 150 mm, with gyros on the bottom of the Steadicam and the Garfield rig on the Shotmaker providing the link. In one episode, there is a Steadicam pan off on the skyline, sweeping over to Don just as his car pulls up next to the Steadicam operator, Julian Chojnacki. Don hit his mark within inches, and Julian automatically corrected just a tiny bit."

Lighthill used big lighting units for almost all day exteriors, "because the show has such a fluid camera," he says. "When Nash arrives at a daytime crime scene, we'll cover the car pulling up to the curb, and follow him into the building with a Steadicam, through the hallways to the scene of the crime. The only way you can really do this is by lighting through the windows. If you lit the location, you'd need a rigging crew putting a grid in the ceiling. All I need is a Condor with an 18K on it to create natural-looking daylight."

Depending on the director, episodes are shot with one or two cameras. The full-time B camera operator, Stewart Barbee, occasionally does second unit establishing shots. More frequently, the B camera is used to extend coverage.

"The most difficult thing you are asked to do is light for two cameras," says Lighthill. "The easy way is to put the cameras side by side and shoot both wide and tight. But we often have the cameras pointing in different directions. We do a Steadicam master with the second camera tight on the subject. Then we do a hand-off to another tight shot followed by a two-shot."

The film is processed at DeLuxe Labs, and telecine work is done by Richard Dalby, a colorist at Modern Film & Video, which provides SP Beta dailies.

"I use the Kodak telecine tool kit," Lighthill says. "It has a gray card with black and white chips. You expose it in neutral light on the first frames at the beginning of each scene." Lighthill uses what he calls a "chart light" that is color corrected for 3200 degrees Kelvin for tungsten film scenes. For daylight exteriors, he uses sunlight.

"It gives the colorist an 18 percent gray reflectance reference," he says. "It isn't an exact science, but it gets them off on the right foot. I also tape-record verbal notes, which tell the colorist, 'This is a day interior, and the background is intentionally a little blue,' or 'It's night, and I want the dark side of the face black and the bright side mid-scale.' Once you are in tune with the colorist, they have an understanding of where you want the film to go."

During the first episodes he shot, Lighthill's camera package included Panaflex prime and Primo zoom lenses ranging from 14 to 600 millimeters. He decided to simplify and standardize on the use of medium focal length lenses in the range of 28 and 35 millimeters, and longer lenses, 80, 100 and 125 millimeters, for close-ups.

"The longer lenses enabled us to back away from the actors, and let the background get slightly out of focus. That draws the eye to the actors." Lighthill typically puts a long lens on one camera and a short one on the other. "If I have a lot of light pounding at the lens during a night exterior, I don't use the zoom lenses," he says.

Lighthill observes that Nash Bridges defies standard characterizations. It's an urban crime drama that doesn't take itself too seriously. Sometimes funny things happen in the middle of the most intense chase scenes.

"Cheech is a master of physical comedy," Lighthill observes. "The humor is in his expression and body language. Don is also very good at comedy. On comedy sequences, we tend to move back a little into more of a proscenium arch."

Lighthill bent another basic rule while shooting Nash Bridges.

"We do a lot of uplighting from ground level," he explains. "That used to be a major no-no, but now we do it all the time. We carry a small grid, but almost never use it. We don't have time to hang lights. My unyielding rule is no ladders on sets."

Lighthill notes that San Francisco is an upscale town. The lieutenant who heads Nash's unit drives a yellow, 30-year-old convertible and dresses in orange jackets. There's a posh aura in the richness in colors, clothing and props, as well as the architecture.

"It's part of the illusion we are creating, about a romantic, interesting world, where Nash Bridges nabs criminals who have nice houses, lots of dough and great cars," he says. "There's plenty of gritty urban crime shows. This one is based in fantasy. The bad guys never win. You can pretty much count on that. Don wants the audience to feel good."

Lighthill says it's important to create a collegial atmosphere where everyone feels like they're a respected part of the team, whether their job is technical or creative. It's more than being a nice guy. There are times when a cinematographer needs his crew to walk through walls for him. Lighthill believes you have to earn that respect.

You also need diplomatic skills. "I'm the keeper of the look on TV, but I'm also the director's helper, and there are times when those missions conflict," he says. "Sometimes a director insists on a shot which conflicts with the look of the show, or it is technically wrong, or it will be too time-consuming. How do you tell them that?"

With all of the emphasis on realistic lighting, there are times when Lighthill pumps a lot of electricity through generators. In one night scene, the crew lit a mile of freeway to film a chase. They used an access road to the Bay Bridge and the rooftops of buildings. Lighthill used five 18Ks and five 20Ks to light a big courthouse scene, both day and night, in another episode. The lighting varied at different times of day. And while the cameras are almost always moving, there are exceptions. Lighthill believes that visually literate audiences know how to read images. If you stop movement, they know the words are meaningful. They listen and watch expressions and body language.

"There is an unwritten rule that the more you move the camera, the less people hear the dialog," he says. "If too much is happening with camera and actor movement on a TV screen, the audience finds it hard to concentrate on the words. We found ways to modulate that effect. If two characters are talking and walking, they might slow down and stop for really important dialogue. We pass off coverage from the Steadicam to two static cameras that draw the audience into the conversation. If we were shooting a night interior at a crime scene, I might isolate key characters in little pools of light surrounded by blackness," he says.

Lighthill has dedicated much of his career to creating films that resonate with important social issues. How about Nash Bridges? Is the subject frivolous?

"Not at all," he answers. "There's usually a violent scene that motivates a chase and the angst that police officers have to resolve, but I don't think the violence is gratuitous. There is also sub-text. I like the way the characters communicate and try to work out their problems. Nash Bridges is honestly trying to resolve problems with his ex-wives, father and daughter. Television can be a positive role model in that way."