BEHIND
THE SCENES: DONALD M. MORGAN Originally
appeared on cinematographer.com Bill Robinson was the grandson of a slave. He was born in 1878 and began dancing for a living at the age of seven. Robinson performed in vaudeville, in Broadway musicals and on stages around the world. Eventually he was teamed with Shirley Temple when she was just emerging as a child star in films. His early movie credits included such classics as The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Robinson earned millions of dollars during the 1930s depression. He was applauded for his philanthropy for causes ranging from police charities to the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Robinson also had a dark side. He was a compulsive gambler who was known to pull a gun to retrieve his losses and a womanizer who betrayed his friends. But, when Robinson died in 1949, 350,000 people lined the streets
of Harlem, Broadway and Brooklyn to say goodbye to the man they
knew as
Mr. Bojangles. The director was Joe Sargent, who has compiled more than 70 credits at the helm, and Donald M. Morgan, ASC handled cinematography. Morgan recently earned his fifth American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award nomination in the MOW/ miniseries category for For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story. He has earned top honors an unprecedented four times for Ruby Ridge: An American Tragedy (1996), Geronimo (1993), Dillinger (1991) and Murder in Mississippi (1991). Morgan also earned a 1997 Emmy award for Miss Evers’ Boys and a nomination the previous year for Ruby Ridge. Morgan and Sargent have been collaborators since 1980 when he shot Amber Waves for the director. Morgan was born and raised in Los Angeles, where his father started his career at Technicolor Labs. He then became an animation cameraman for Disney and other studios. He followed in his father’s footsteps working at labs and animation studios until he landed a job as an assistant cameraman with Nelson Tyler. Morgan did aerial camerawork until he earned his first narrative credit in 1973. He has subsequently compiled more than 50 credits, mainly on telefilms but also on such notable features as Starman and Christine. During the past several years, Sargent and Morgan have collaborated on Miss Evers’ Boys, A Lesson Before Dying and the telefilm about Arturo Sandoval. Morgan says he knew very little about Bill Robinson other than he was a tap dancer who performed with Shirley Temple in movies. "I kept hearing that we were going to shoot Bojangles but there was no affordable way to light the streets of New York and gather huge crowds during the funeral procession. We had the same problem with other big period scenes. While I was working with Joe on the Arturo Sandoval Story, he came up with the idea of using old newsreels and other historical footage, and having characters in the foreground in front of a green screen talking directly to the camera. "One of the characters would step into the foreground and talk directly to the audience about the scene behind them," Morgan says. "We had this great black and white archival film in the background that you could never recreate." Various characters speak directly to the audience throughout the film, including his wife Fanny, his brother and Robinson himself. Sometimes vintage black and white footage is digitally composited into the background. Other times, a character simply seems to step out of a scene into the foreground. The technique invites the audience into the film and it makes the characters seem like old friends. Bojangles was produced in Toronto, where the earliest scenes showed him dancing on a vaudeville stage in 1916. Early in the story, Robinson sleeps in fleabag hotels and he is forced to enter the backdoors of segregated hotels where he’s performing. Robinson is required to wear black face makeup and white painted lips and they always had to appear in pairs. Fanny taunts him, "You have to wear blackface to pretend that you’re white." When Bojangles gets a chance to work in Canada, he insists on bending and breaking the rules. He becomes the first black entertainer to appear on the stage without blackface makeup, and he finally gets top billing and fairer pay. There was a deep commitment to making the telefilm authentic. There’s a scene later in the story where Bojangles slips during a performance and nearly falls down the steps connecting the stage to the audience. He recovers his balance and dances down and back up the stairs. The stair dance later became his signature and a highlight of his act. Morgan recalls that Hines spent hours watching an old movie of that routine and then he would practice performing it exactly the way Bojangles did, so he could be faithful to his memory. At the end, there’s a split-screen shot of the real Bojangles dancing up and down the steps on one side of the screen and Hines on the other side. "It’s identical," Morgan says. "He became Bojangles." Morgan had only two weeks of prep time before shooting the complex two-hour film in 24 days. His visual references were old photographs and movies. He also read vintage news articles and scouted locations, including a few old theaters and a former speakeasy. "Joe is very brave," says Morgan. "He does things that would make other people nervous. We had a scene that was supposed to be in a moving train. There was a place that worked on old trains and we used one as a set. I used smoke inside the train and backlit it to create ambience. You can see out the windows but not straight out. You can’t see any details. We used light outside the windows and the grips waved flags in front of the light to make it seem like the train was moving. The train was so heavy, we couldn't shake it, so every once in a while we'd shake the heck out of the camera like they hit a rough spot on the tracks." The production company built a set at an old airfield replicating the Fox Studio lot in Hollywood where Bill Robinson met with Darryl Zanuck during the early 1930s. They met in Zanuck’s office and stood by the window looking at activity on the lot. There were extras pulling movies carts and similar activities. They cut away to a scene where Robinson performs with a young actress playing Shirley Temple. It was a warehouse set. Morgan also improvised ways to create the illusion that Bojangles was performing on stages in front of large audiences. They would shoot in old theatres. The camera would show Robinson performing from the perspective of the audience. Then, he would cut to a shot silhouetting Hines in the foreground. Morgan had a wide-angle lens on the camera and there was smoke and simulated footlights at the bottom of the screen obscuring the audience. Then, he would cut-away to close-ups of small groups of extras applauding. "It starts with the director," Morgan says. "He wanted to recreate this world that Bojangles lived in many years ago and he gave us the license to do some magic. We mainly shot with two cameras, a Panaflex Gold GII as the A camera and a Panavision G as the B camera. We used Zeiss prime lenses and the Primo 11:1 and 4:1 zooms. Joe liked using the second camera with a long lens to give him cut-aways. We just never let it interfere with our primary lighting." The film spans some 30 years of Robinson’s life. Costumes and props mainly define the different periods. Morgan suggested keeping the look consistent rather than differentiating the 1920s from the ‘40s. It’s mainly interiors, so he used a combination of smoke and diffusion to craft a warm, "almost sepia" look throughout the story. "I know this is an over-used analogy but I think films define their own personalities when you see the actors on the sets," Morgan says. "I watched the rehearsals, and that sharpened our ideas for lighting. Joe is good that way. He takes a lot of time rehearsing. That’s when we made our lighting and camera placement decisions." Morgan says one way they staged live performances was from the perspective of Robinson’s manager who would be in the wings, sometimes talking to Bojangles’ wife. "You could see the stage lights hitting the lens and they’d be in the foreground or background," he says. "We tried to cover performances from every angle." There were exterior locations in an alley and old streets that could have been from the period. Early in the film, when Robinson first meets and is beginning to court Fanny, he escorts her to a horse-drawn trolley. There are people standing around the street warming themselves by fires in trash barrels. It was one of the few Steadicam shots. "It’s like you are walking with them," Morgan says. "She gets on the trolley, and as it starts to ride away, he asks her to meet him for dinner and she says ‘maybe.’ "I had my doubts about intercutting with old black and white film, at first because I’ve seen it done before," Morgan admits, "but I think it really worked in this movie." Morgan lensed the green screen elements long before the vintage background footage was chosen. The first time he saw the archival film was during timing. Characters were different sizes in the frame depending on the scene. Occasionally they loomed large in the foreground almost filling half of the frame. "When we filmed the wedding scene (with Robinson and Fanny) we had a small, portable green screen," Morgan recalls. "The grips would set it up behind the character, and use a few portable lights. We’d dim the lights on the set and shoot with my regular crew and production camera. We composited those with wedding background plates." There’s a memorable scene staged in a bar with funky neon lights and a moody background where Bojangles engages in a tap dance contest with Savion Glover. "There was a little stage for musicians," Morgan recalls. "I kept it real moody with a lot of practical lights and smoke. We had a lot of neon signs and we put fluorescent tubes with different colored gels to create a lot of warmth. We also used bounce cards with red and amber gels." Morgan recalls that there was a time television drama was much more conservative with darkness a taboo and formula coverage, for example, "a master and a two shot over the shoulder. Joe’s (Sargent) films have a flow. We move the camera but he's always got places where we use a long lens for close-ups." Morgan observes that advances in film technology have given him more creative latitude in dealing with diverse skin tones. "We used to have to
put kickers on the sides of black faces and try to warm them up or
backlight to pull them out from the background but that isn’t as
necessary
with today’s
(Kodak) Vision films," he says. "They have the latitude
to hold those details." "There were a lot of situations where we were both over- and underexposed by several stops in the same shot," he says. "The film really bites into the backgrounds. It is very natural looking—pretty much the way your eye sees it." "We changed the look at every performance and every location to keep a fresh exciting look," Morgan says. "We always used a half-black pearl mist sometimes looking right into the lights making it flare." "Joe’s not afraid to try different things, and if something doesn’t work, he’d use another shot," Morgan says. "It’s fun because you're not confined by rules." The negative was processed by Deluxe Labs in Toronto that occasionally provided Morgan with High 8 dailies when he wanted to see more details. The last scene occurs after Hines is dead. He’s dancing and talking to the audience. The background is a white cyc background, and he is wearing a white tuxedo, top hat and shoes. The suit was a duller white than the background, so it provided a small degree of separation. The idea was to try to make it like a slightly hazy cloud effect, suggesting that Bojangles was speaking to the audience from heaven. Morgan had a number two White ProMist filter on the camera lens for a slightly hazy look. He backlit Hines and lit the cyc separately to create a subtle nuance of separation between the actor and the white background. It verges on being ethereal and leaves the audience with a warm, indelible memory of a character who they have just gotten to know intimately. (Kodak and Vision are trademarks.) |
