POSTER AND KAGAN DEFINE
COLOR OF JUSTICE

Color of Justice is an original script by writer-producer Lionel Chetwynd, who has also compiled interesting credits as a director, including Hanoi Hilton. The project reunites director Jeremy Kagan with cinematographer Steven Poster, ASC in their third collaboration. The first two resulted in award winning telefilms, Courage (1986) and Roswell (1994).

The TV movie features Judd Hirsch, Gregory Hines, F. Murray Abraham and an ensemble cast in what Showtime Entertainment bills as "an urban drama." Four black youths from the Bronx kill a white woman because they want her car. They aren't going for a joy ride. Their motivation is transportation. They need a ride home. The four are arrested and go to trial. The story revolves around that hub.

Kagan points out it's not a who-done-it film.

"We know who committed the crime," he says. "The question is who is responsible?" That becomes the issue after an activist turns the trial into a divisive debate about racial justice. Chetwynd scripted the original story more than two years before the O.J. Simpson trial created the same conflicts in the real world, as opposed to the celluloid world.

Why do stories like this generally end up on the TV screen? "It's about casting," Chetwynd answers. "I wrote it as an ensemble piece, because life is largely an ensemble event. That makes it very hard to cast stars who would make it possible to sell a movie. If you don't have a big star, you aren't going to make it as a feature."

Was there an alternative? "We talked about doing it as a feature," he confesses, "but I would have had to do a substantial rewrite, and that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted it to be a film noir, dark film. God bless cable movies; otherwise I don't know what I'd be doing, but it wouldn't be these kinds of films."

Chetwynd offers one other observation. "You are allowed to take more risks and experiment more in terms of what you want it to look like. You can be more daring. Steven (Poster) did some really imaginative, quite remarkable things. I don't think he could have accomplished that in another context. That's another advantage of doing cable movies."

Kagan says he and Poster share a drive to push the form in new directions. "It's been different each time we (he and Poster) have worked together," he says. "It's nice to have a language, a familiarity and creative understanding already in place."

Kagan continues, "We begin each project by asking if there is a way to tell this story that will be more arresting, and a better experience for the audience? In Courage, Sophia Loren's character gets in deeper trouble than anticipated. I asked Steve to make that statement visually. He suggested Dutch angles to express her disorientation."

Dutch angles are a common visual metaphor today, but on television in 1984, they bordered on heresy. Kagan says that he and Poster have learned how to take the time to ask each other what the story is about. What is the emotional and psychological effect we're after? How can we achieve it? That is what keeps the stories from repeating themselves.

He adds, "Steve is fascinated with applying new technology to the aesthetics of filmmaking. On Roswell, he used a bungee camera."

Color of Justice takes a close look at how the crime affects two families. One family is a father and a son. The father expected his son, who is one of the murderers, to be a different type of person. The son feels awful about disappointing his father. How do you show that to an audience? The other family is the husband of the murdered woman who wants justice.

"I told Steve, 'I want to get these faces on top of each other, almost like superimpositions," Kagan says. "He spoke to the production designer (Jeff Ginn) about the set and the kind of lighting he wanted to do. One result is a sequence of shots where the faces of the characters are almost directly superimposed instead of cutting back and forth."

Kagan characterizes Color of Justice as a classic narrative drama. He didn't want to distance the audience by presenting it as "only a movie." He wanted them to feel like participants affected by the outcome.

"We had a discussion about finding an image form that expresses the angst and anxiety this story is about," he says. "You can't just isolate it as urban violence without addressing racial bigotry, legal corruption and journalistic hypocrisy. There are two families trapped in the midst of a horrific situation. I told Steve, 'I want our black faces to turn white and our white faces to turn black.'"

Kagan's point was that the characters' colors were purely arbitrary distinctions. Poster worked with Ginn to design the courtroom set in a way that enabled him to light through the windows with hard half-light on everyone.

"The judge was black, but half of her face looks white," Kagan says. "We shot around half of the picture handheld with the camera moving," he continues. "I staged scenes, and Steve lit them. Sometimes we didn't let the operator know what was going to happen, and I became his guide. I'd whisper in his ear, 'Pan left, no, move, take it up.' I'd be talking to the actors at the same time Steve watched the video monitor and gave me suggestions. He understood the energy I wanted."

Both Kagan and Poster express themselves in anecdotes. "We were working like crazy to get a night shot," Kagan says. "A car was following another car. We needed an environment with a single lane. But everywhere we were allowed to shoot had two lanes. I was thinking, how are we going to rewrite this sequence, when Steve put up a series of blinking yellow lights as if the other lane was in construction. It solved my problem and the pulsing lights contributed to the drama."

Poster tells how each scene had a signature color chosen from one of three palettes. Red for danger, yellow for caution and green for envy, avarice and sometimes for action. Before each scene, he'd ask Kagan, "What color is this shot?"

"It forced me to think about the nature of each scene," Kagan says. "Was the mood of a scene heat and passion, great danger, or maybe just a warning or anticipation of danger? Every film evolves from your initial intentions through your understanding of the process, and the realities that limit what you can do. That's why sometimes you get a better movie on film than it was in the script. All of us should be contributing to making that thing that started on paper better on film. Otherwise, you should just mail the audience the script and ask them to read it."

Color of Justice was filmed in Toronto and set in New York. The movie isn't just about the randomness of the murder, the lives of the murderers, or the horror of a husband losing his wife. It's also about the agendas of the prosecutors and defense attorneys, and the organizations and individuals that insert themselves into the process. The families of the murdered woman and the perpetrators become pawns in the hands of people and organizations with agendas.

"The only way this movie works is if the audience identifies or empathizes with people in the cast," Kagan says. "But it's not just one character, and that makes it unique. You say to yourself, 'I understand where this guy is coming from and I agree with him, but I also understand where that one is coming from and agree with him, too.' I think that kind of challenge is rare. I credit Lionel for giving us this rich material that allows for that depth."

A number of sets, including the courtroom, were reconstructed from other films. None were built from scratch. Kagan notes that there were three standing courtroom sets in Toronto. One wasn't available, a second was too expensive, and the third was simply wrong. He wanted the courtroom to be small, and kind of falling apart.

Kagan explains, "Lionel used to be a lawyer, so he envisioned a traditional courtroom. We didn't have the money to build that kind of set, and also it didn't feel right. Steve suggested that we make it look like they've divided a large courtroom into three smaller ones with half finished walls and exposed wiring. The back of the courtroom is used as a storage area. It's covered with boxes and piles of files."

Kagan used the courtroom set to put a face on the pressure and decay that mars the legal system. "Lionel wrote a wonderful opening line," he says. "'Welcome to my still unfinished courtroom. They tell me it'll be finished one day.' We designed a shot that went almost 360 degrees around the courtroom. As the judge was making her opening comment, we went around the courtroom with the camera and introduced the characters who were coming in and sitting down. It was done in one shot. It was an evolutionary moment, motivated by a concept that the legal system is overburdened and falling apart."

Poster says that lighting scenes like this are always a challenge with Kagan, because his sense of staging creates dynamic shots.

"Shooting so much of this show handheld allowed us to move in different ways than you normally would on a dolly," he comments. "There is a fluidity that comes from shooting handheld. It was an accommodation to reality that created visual tension."

Poster describes a scene filmed in the judge's chambers, an office in a big warehouse with a couple of windows. He had done an earlier scene on that set, and it gave him a chance to watch the light. Kagan's first idea was that the operator would stand in the middle of the room and pan in a circle. Poster improvised an instant dolly. Working with his grips, he took an office chair, built it up a little higher, created a place for the operator's feet and a way that he could shoot handheld by just rotating him in a circle.

"When we got to the staging, we realized the concept was wrong," Poster says. "Instead, Jeremy had us walk the camera around the perimeter of the room and look in at the participants. Once we made a 360-degree move, we panned again in toward the center of the room, and then back to the doors. There was a tremendous amount of movement.

"We had two windows with venetian blinds," he continues. "I didn't have that much control over the exterior light, because the sun was in and out of the clouds all day. I got a little fill by bouncing light from an HMI lamp off the ceiling and adjusted the blinds as the exterior light changed between takes."

Poster shot the whole movie with Kodak Vision 500T film. In this scene, he rated it for an exposure index of 800. "It was a tremendous advantage for a couple of reasons," he says. "I wanted to build up contrast and grain, so the scene had a grittier feeling. When I first tested this idea, I took the camera outside at night, opened the lens and started shooting. It hardly showed a difference with a one-stop push. At two stops, you still didn't see much grain, but there was some increase in contrast. It (the film) has a lovely personality. It makes you want to walk the edge a little farther. From that point on, I decided we could make much more use of ambient light by pushing one or two stops."

In the judge's quarters, Poster decided to push the film a stop for more depth of field. It allowed him to minimize lighting the interior. "It turned out to be a very organic look," he says. "Of course, I died every time we passed the window and the light had changed, but the reality was that the film held the highlights and shadows. It's really an amazing emulsion that way. It gives you the freedom to do things you didn't do in the past when you had to light everything properly."

The negative was processed at Film House in Toronto. Occasionally, Poster requested film prints if he wanted a closer look, but generally, he saw video dailies.

"The colorist was Chris Dover," he says. "I gave him a script, because it was important for him to know the story." After shooting a test, Poster visited the telecine suite, and he also asked Dover to sit with him in the screening room to look at prints. "That gave him a feeling for what we were doing. We had daily communications."

There was a South Bronx night exterior filmed on a street corner near a viaduct, where the youths are chased by police. Poster pushed the film two stops, using ambient light which he shaped with a few small lamps. "It has a wonderful look," he says.

But don't forget to bring garbage. Poster explains that shooting South Bronx street scenes in Toronto requires bringing garbage to litter the streets and a need to create your own graffiti. "We put graffiti on the viaduct walls," he says. "They had to put some type of coating on first, so the graffiti came off easily."

His camera operator was Kevin Jewison, who had worked with Kagan and Poster on Courage. Poster was able to bring his regular camera assistant, Norman Parker, who has worked with him for some 20 years. The grip and electrical crews were local.

"Jeremy had given me a mandate that he wanted every frame to carry tension," Poster says. "He wanted to force the audience into an uncomfortable position. Composition was very important. I watched the composition on the monitor and Jeremy concentrated on the actors. It takes teamwork and trust. We never played the tape from the video tap."

Poster was shooting with a Panaflex camera, most frequently with a lightweight 27 to 68mm zoom lens. "It's a very short T-2.8 zoom lens," he explains. "It's not Panavision's best optics, but it's a very flexible tool for this kind of handheld shooting. You can change the frame size in the middle of a moving shot, and we had a Ftzsac remote control device for focus."

Poster continues, "I had a lot of electronics hanging off the camera, a zoom motor, a transmitter for the remote focus system, and a wireless transmitter for the video tap."

Poster lauds his gaffer, Ian Bibby. "He made my life a lot easier," Poster says. "He was always offering suggestions. I like that in my crew. I could set him on a course, and tell him the direction, angle and quality of light and left the rest up to him."

Poster experimented with bending the rules of traditional composition. For example, when the camera is looking over a character's shoulder, he used that character's body to create negative space. That forced the other character to the edge of the frame.

"Showtime wants you to compose for a 1.85:1 aspect ratio," he says, "because they might do an overseas theatrical release, or at least private screenings. However, the vast majority of people will see this film on television. It's physically, emotionally and mentally impossible to compose for different formats at the same time I composed for 1.85:1, and when we went to telecine, I recomposed for the TV screen because the headroom and side room are different. As far as I'm concerned, the cinematographer has to be there for telecine, because that is the resolution of everything we do."
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