THE CEMETERY CLUB
YOU'LL DIE LAUGHING

Forget your pre-conceptions about The Cemetery Club. You are probably wrong. The title is misleading. This is one of those rare films with a spooky word in the title that isn't based on a Steven King book. In fact, there are no ghosts, vampires or anything supernatural or frightening.

There also are no shootings, stabbings, earthquakes, riots, fires, explosions, hijackings, kidnappings, chase scenes or other gratuitous displays of violence. Okay, there's some dying. But the worst happens right at the beginning of the film and there's no blood.

If you think that's counter-culture for a contemporary Hollywood movie how about a film starring, not one or two, but three women? Thelma and Louise meet the new champ. You better find a friend if there's a sequel on the storyboard.

If you are of the male persuasion, and are old enough to shave, chances are that you had (or have) a crush on at least one of the stars. But don't get your hopes up if you are prone to old-Hollywood stereotypes about sex appeal. All three actresses portray characters in their 60s.

Good luck Steve Poster, ASC. Try shooting a movie with three glamorous women stars, and the director tells you that all of them are SUPPOSED to look older than they are in real life. Don't forget to wear your bullet proof jockey shorts just in case he forgot to tell them. Hollywood is about making actresses look younger. Isn't it?

Apparently not in the case of The Cemetery Club. In fact, that's exactly the point. The women discover there is life after death -- as long as it's a near and dear one who dies, and not you. Olympia Dukakis, Diane Ladd and Ellen Burstyn portray widows who discover life goes on without their departed mates, and it isn't half-bad.

"This is one of the few times I shot a film where there wasn't at least some pressure for the leading lady to look like an ingenue," says Poster. The story is based on a play by Ivan Menchell, who is also one of the screenwriters. There are no men in lead roles, and only Danny Aiello is on screen long enough to qualify for a shot at best supporting actor.

We asked Poster, is this a film designed to appeal to women in their sixties? If so, it seems like a narrow market. "No way," he says. "Danny Aeillo plays a widower. He's in the same situation. I think it will help men understand what their wives will go through when they are gone. It will also prepare younger people for a situation they are going to someday face. Everyone deals with the loss of someone close at sometime or other whether it's a spouse, a sibling, a parent, a friend or someone else. I think this film gives everyone something to think about."

Is it grim? "No way," he says again. "It's a comedy with drama, or maybe a drama with comedy. I think the audience is going to get a lot of laughs out of this film, and they'll get an emotional high from watching how these three women handle their situations." The film is directed by Bill Duke, who Poster points out, is a talented actor himself. It was produced by Down to Earth Productions for distribution by Buena Vista. The story takes place in contemporary times in Pittsburgh, where it was also shot. Three families, who are old friends, meet at a wedding. Soon afterwards, all of the husbands die, and their wives are left to fend for themselves, which they do with varying degrees of success.

The "imaging system" Duke and Poster designed for The Cemetery Club brings the audience in close and intimate contact with the characters. It's almost physical, as if you are there with them. It's very personal like being a close friend rather than a dispassionate observer.

"The alternative would be to lay back in a fixed position with a long lens and watch the story from a voyeuristic point of view," Poster explains. "That wouldn't pack the same emotional wallop."

Poster amplifies, "We had a certain rhythm in mind, which was helped by the movement of the camera. There were times when we stopped that flow and allowed the audience to pause and observe something happening. It had to do with continuity and whether we were entering or leaving a scene."

What is rhythm in the context of filmmaking? "It encompasses a lot of considerations," he explains. "How you enter a scene. Where the camera goes, its movement and the tempo of that flow. It also deals with your use of color, light and shadows, diffusion and filtration and angle of coverage. Of course, you have no control over how the film will be cut. But by establishing a rhythm in collaboration with the director, you create an inherent quality within the pacing of the film which can influence how it will be cut."

The Cemetery Club was photographed in the Academy standard 1.85:1 aspect ratio. "That was a given," Poster says. "You don't need -- in fact, you don't want the wider dimensions of an anamorphic image to tell this story. You want to make the audience feel close to the characters, like they are part of the story, so they can laugh and cry along with them."

This was the first time Duke and Poster have worked together. It was love at first sight, metaphorically speaking. "It was a lot of fun from the beginning," says Poster. "I got as much intellectual input from Bill as any director I've worked." And that comes from someone who has worked with the likes of Ridley Scott (Someone to Watch Over Me) and Mel Brooks (Life Stinks).

"Unless you have a plan, there is no coherent visual design, and you end up making arbitrary decisions," Poster says. "It isn't sufficient to say I think this should be a dark film with sharp angles. There has to be a reason, otherwise you are putting style ahead of substance.

"After you define such things as which characters have strength and which are dominated in a particular scene, for example, you are better equipped to determine what is the most appropriate use of light, shadows, color, camera movement and angles, and focal length in that situation."

An imaging system in the grammar of movie making as it is practiced by Poster begins with an understanding of the characters. One of them had married for duty (Dukakis). It was almost like an arranged marriage. But over the years, the love between spouses had grown. One of the characters married for love (Burstyn), and those feelings never diminished. The third (Ladd), married for adventure, and the emotional ties that bound that couple faded with time.

Duke and Poster defined an imaging system for each of the main characters as they evolved. This provided a visual guideline -- kind of a shorthand that simplified communications between the director and cinematographer. These discussions occurred before Duke and Poster scouted locations, including a cemetery, various homes, restaurants and a delicatessen. "There was a 'power spot' at each location which provided the best point of view to work from," Poster says. "That gave us a basis for storyboarding. But that's just a place to start. Once we began rehearsals, there was input from the cast. You have to see how they (the cast) flow through each scene, and relate with one another. You have to be totally flexible because the location is their space. You have to see how it fits them. At that point, it is the responsibility of the director to guide them accordingly. It is my job to make the appropriate adjustments."

Poster notes that each character had her own personality, but there were also complex inter-relationships, friendships and jealousies that varied when they were together or apart in different combinations.

"The relationship that evolved between the characters portrayed by Diane and Olympia was great fun to watch," Poster says. There was a fair amount of physical ad-libbing by all three actresses in their movements, body language and facial expressions, and a script writer was always on the set refining the dialogue as though it was a work in progress rather than a finished product with words carved in marble.
"I love photographing women," Poster comments, "and it was a special treat working with talent of this caliber. There was a responsibility to the script in being true to the story. There was also a responsibility to put each of the stars in their best light. Every face is different. And there is a difference between shooting a close-up, a two-shot and the trio together in bigger scenes."

What about lighting two-shots and scenes with all three women? "It's less critical than a close-up, since you are not going to see someone's face projected 40 feet high," he says. "The communications between Bill (Duke) and I was very good, and Diane, Ellen and Olympia were very accommodating. Sometimes we moved people around to get the best lighting for the interactions of characters in that situation."

Like everyone, Poster is a product of both his environment as well as his in-born instincts. He grew up in Chicago, where he took his first still pictures at the age of 10. In his early teens, he was greatly influenced by a neighbor, Maury Bleckman, a TV news cameraman who worked with Charles Kuralt.

"I wanted to be a cameraman like him, but he encouraged me to learn still photography first," Poster says. Poster learned how to think about film in terms of exposing one frame at a time. It still puts a gleam in his eyes when he describes how he felt watching a print come up in a darkroom for the first time. It was pure magic.

Poster studied photography at the Art Center in Pasadena, and he earned his degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology. After graduation, he was hired by an industrial film production company in Chicago. He shot training, sales and educational films and TV commercials, but his passion for still images never cooled, and he still works at it diligently.

After doing some second unit work in the Midwest for Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, and other Hollywood cinematographers, Poster moved to Los Angeles during the mid-1970s. He shot his first feature when he was 39. His credits include such TV dramas as Testament and Courage, starring Jane Alexander and Sophia Loren, respectively, an eclectic list of features, ranging from Big Top PeeWee to Next of Kin, The Boy Who Could Fly and Rocky V, and countless commercials.

How did he handle the task of filming Dukakis, Ladd and Burstyn in ways that were true to both them and the story? He started by talking. There was a discussion with each actress which lasted from 60 to 90 minutes. They spoke about lighting, their characters, and about how they like to be seen. He asked if there were any problems they have had being photographed that he could help with.

In addition to developing rapport and providing insights into personalities and the characters the actresses were portraying, these conversations gave Poster an unrestricted opportunity to study their faces, including shapes and skin tones.

Before he started work on The Cemetery Club, Poster shot a series of comprehensive tests for Disney Studios. He exposed every camera film made by all three major manufacturers under controlled conditions. "The idea was to discover exactly how each film performed under a variety of lighting conditions when it was under- and over-exposed and exposure at its normal rating," he says.

Based on that test, Poster decided he would shoot The Cemetery Club entirely on the "improved" 500T Eastman EXR 5296 film, including interiors and exteriors, day and night scenes. In part, the decision to standardize on a single emulsion was a desire to simplify, but more importantly, Poster and Duke envisioned a painterly look, almost suggestive of a period film.

Poster says the 500T film renders slightly less saturated colors, a bit less contrast, and grain or texture that's more suggestive of paint on canvas than reality. Of course, all of this is based on how the cinematographer exposes the film.

"A properly exposed negative should always have consistent blacks," he says. "I expose for the shadows and print for the highlights -- which goes back to my experience with both still photography and black-and-white film. If you are consistently in the low 40s on your printer lights, you are going to have good blacks with details in your highlight and shadow areas."

There were also tests with the main characters on a sound stage in Pittsburgh. The actresses were placed in front of a simple background, in make-up, with their hair dressed, and wearing clothes with colors that were chosen for their characters. Poster tested different angles of keylight, and experimented with fill, side and backlight. He was also looking at different focal lengths and angles of photography. No film was exposed. He was judging by eye.

Do people actually have best sides? "People have two sides," he answers. "They aren't necessarily best or worst. But in a lot of people, a particular side of a face reveals a different aspect of their personality or character. Most people have private and public sides. You can usually see it in the set of their eyes. One is more open. The other is guarded. Sometimes one side makes someone look older. Some actors don't like something they see on one side of their face. You have to respect their feelings so they feel at ease. No one wants to work with a cinematographer who makes them feel inadequate."

Each of the characters was assigned a distinctive color palette that helped define them at different times. It can be seen in the decor of their homes, costumes, hair and make-up. Poster refers to this as a color arc which is part of the imaging system he devised with Duke.

All three women are characterized early in the film by the blackness of their husbands' deaths and funerals. The range of colors varies the least for Olympia's character because she remains consistently dutiful. Her palette consists of a limited range of darker colors. Diane's character is brighter at first, but towards the end of the film everything around her becomes darker as she crashes emotionally.

The palette of colors designed for Ellen's character undergoes the most radical overhaul. It starts with black, or the absence of color and lightens to pastel, i.e., mauve, when her life is more or less controlled by other women. Her colors become more vibrant and stronger at the end as she assumes more control over her own life.

In the same way, Poster used diffusion -- combinations of a Tiffin Promist filter and nets -- to provide the audience with subtle visual clues. There is a certain softness in the beginning when things are going well. The look becomes a bit harsher when the husbands die. As a love interest developed for Ellen's character, the look in her arc becomes softer again.

"This (the use of diffusion) also helps to establish the rhythm of the film," Poster explains. "It is like stage lighting, where you give the audience cues to indicate time has passed, or they are at a different location." It isn't obvious enough to call attention to itself. There are subtle shades of differences in tones and textures underlying the surface of the film. It's just enough to gently nudge the mood of the audience ever so slightly in different directions.

The Cemetery Club was primarily shot with a single Panaflex Platinum camera with Primo lenses. Focal lengths ranged from 21 mm to 100 mm, and those were the extremes. "We were usually working close-in," Poster says. "The camera was active. The lighting was dramatic -- I always had to watch the actresses' eye lines, so we weren't getting dark shadows in their sockets." The sum of those conditions is conducive to the use of a single camera.

Another element of the imaging system designed for The Cemetery Club called for crisp depth of field. "That's one of the advantages of working with a fast film and lenses," he says. "We avoided soft backgrounds which would have distracted the audience."

There were only a few exceptions to those rules. There were a few big crowd scenes, i.e., funerals and weddings, where Poster used a second camera to increase coverage and keep production moving at a brisk pace. In addition, maybe one percent of the film was photographed through a Panavision ultra-speed lens which allowed him to work at T-1.4 when he needed a extra stop to balance the lights of the city with the skin tones of the characters.

Almost all of the camera movement was on dolly tracks. Poster used the new Chapman Lenny crane which sits on top of a regular dolly. It can be used to place the operator and camera up to 13 feet in the air, and there is an additional 27-foot extension for a remote head -- which was used for just a couple of scenes. "It gave us great flexibility, and it was an economical way to have a crane for the whole shoot," he says.

His basic lighting package came from The Lighthouse in Los Angeles, mainly Mole Richardson incandescents and LTM HMIs, up to 18 K, and a bank of PARs, which he used as a single source of sun or moonlight for expansive areas. Poster also carried a dedolight -- "It's an amazing tool for practical locations," he says. "You can stick it on a ceiling, or an extension arm, and use it for backlight, top light or fill. Or, you can use it with a lens and focus a hard streak of light. It's a precision tool."

He also carried a few Chimera soft boxes -- a soft fabric which can be used to diffuse key or fill light right down to Peppers -- "It gives your light a very beautiful soft quality, and makes it easier to control," Poster explains.

The negative was processed by Technicolor Labs in New York City, and Poster has favorable things to say about the consistency of dailies. "I'm very specific about the density I like to work at," he says. Joey Violante (the timer) has a wonderful eye, and he was incredibly consistent."

The weather played havoc with the schedule. It was the wettest July in Pittsburgh since 1871, and the rain persisted through August. There was bright sunshine one day, and dark clouds and heavy rain would come out of nowhere. Sometimes the cast and crew spent a full day, from dawn to dusk, shooting a scene at the cemetery which amounted to minutes of screen time. Some exterior scenes stretched over many days because of interrupts caused by the weather. Poster says the biggest technical challenge was matching the look of exterior scenes with footage exposed at different times of day under a wide range of weather conditions. "That's where a color timer can really help," he says.

In retrospect, his experience as a still photographer also helped. "I'll always thank Maury Bleckman for his advice," he says. "Still photography gave me the freedom to work in a darkroom. That took a lot of the mystery out of the chemical process. It also taught me to think about composition as individual pictures. Film is like poetry that requires an economy of words. I believe good cinematography requires an economy of images. It can be beautiful. It can flow. But it should always be subtle."