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January 1999 Cover Story
Making
the Grade
“I started my shooting career as a freelance sports cameraman, filming
16mm game action and player profiles for NFL Films and other sports production
companies around the world,” says Cohen. “Operating on Little Giants,
Everybody’s All- American, The Last Boyscout and then shooting second
unit for Jerry Maguire, The Program, and The Waterboy was
the perfect extension for me. It gave me a great opportunity to further
my understanding of the strategy of shooting multi- camera sports action
for the movies. It also enabled me to incorporate many visual ideas I
had, but couldn’t utilize filming real sports-action events.
“For example, in one scene of The Waterboy, there is a dramatic
moment where the hero runs and then drop-kicks a player into the end zone,”
Cohen continues. “It was here that I tried a shot that has never been
used in filming football before. I brought in the Century Precision periscope,
put on a 17.5mm lens, and attached it to a Hi-hat on a skateboard dolly.
This allowed the lens to skim the grass.
It was this kind of suggestion that drew director Brian Robbins to bring
Cohen in to shoot the high school sports drama. That, plus the fact that
Cohen had lensed a Tollin- Robbins/TBS co-production called Chasing
The Dream: The Hank Aaron Story, which was nominated for an Academy
Award as well as an Emmy. He also shot an hour- long dramatic special
for Nickelodeon, directed by Brian Robbins, which won the Cable- Ace Award.
When Cohen first read the script for Varsity Blues, he was struck
by the balance between the football story and the coming-of-age hijinx
and honesty. “Although the film is 30 percent football, there is a darker
and more serious side to the picture which drew my attention,” he explains.
“Writers John Gatins and W. Peter Iliff really delve into the dichotomy
of winning versus just enjoying the experience. They also explore the
question of authority that a win-at-all-costs coach has over his students.
“These interesting themes enabled me to design various dramatic lighting
schemes to depict the characters and locations of this small Texas town,
to support the drama of the story,” he adds.
Shot at three locations on the outskirts of Austin, Texas (Georgetown,
Elgin, and Copeland), the picture features wonderful small town architecture
as well as big expanses of Texas landscape. “Elgin is an old-time Texas
town,” he says. “The main street is, maybe, three blocks long with incredibly
interesting store fronts. The town opens up to big expansive flatlands
with these wonderful Texas cloud formations. We had the warm Texas sun
and the mystery of the Texas night.”
When they were shooting many of the exteriors, they were also getting
the smoky air from the massive wildfires burning daily in Mexico, explains
Cohen. “This smoke actually was our ally, adding a haze to some of our
daytime exteriors. It looked like a cool fall day, not the 100 degree
heat it actually was! At night, the smoke added ‘atmosphere’ to some of
our football stadium scenes. This created an element that set some of
our sequences apart even more.
“Because there are a lot of movies about teenagers coming of age in
the market now, Brian and I felt it would be the football-action sequences
that would separate this film from the others,” he continues.
Director Brian Robbins and cinematographer Chuck Cohen wanted to get
inside the film’s action. They wanted to make the audience feel what the
violence, pain, pressure and mayhem is like. They wanted to depict how
a coach can stir a young mind to exert his will over his opponents, and
win, no matter what the physical or emotional cost. “We wanted them to
feel the hits, the pain, the blood and sweat—the exhilaration of winning
and devastation of losing,” says Cohen.
“We did several tests, keeping in mind that I wanted dramatic lighting,
even in the football shots. It would be a play of light and shadow: moody
high key and low-to-no- fill.”
Cohen’s first tests were film stock and filters. To get the warmth and
dusty feeling of the small Texas town, he tried various filters like corals,
antiques, tobaccos, etc. He and the director decided they preferred a
series of sepia filters for the front of the lens. As the daylight changed,
he would manipulate the filters.
For daytime interior shots, Cohen wanted to bring the light through
windows and let the rays play within the room. This provided various degrees
of fill, naturally. It also gave the actors freedom of movement within
the room, as well as the camera freedom to roam and not be hindered by
C-stands, flags, and other lighting units. This was accomplished with
an 18K and various densities of CTO, depending on the time of day.
“We also had small Tungsten units with Chimeras as well as KinoFlo units
available, should we need to bring the exposure up in a certain area of
a room,” he explains.
“There was a scene where Johnny Moxon’s (van der Beek) father is on
the porch, which is attached to the dining room, having a conversation
with some men. Kyle, the younger brother, and his ‘cult’ come walking
in through the group. This escalates into a confrontation between the
father, Kyle, and ultimately Mox,” Cohen recalls. “We used an 18K outside
the dining room window of the house with 1/2 CTO, added a 2K back light
on the men, and an additional 4-foot two-bank Kino for some soft fill
inside the dining room.”
Cohen’s desire was to get in enough light for the shots, without overdoing
the process. He used Kodak film (5248 for day exteriors, 5293 for day
interiors, and 5279 for nighttime interiors and exteriors) and Panavision’s
Primo lenses. “I love the under- exposure qualities of the 93 and 79 film
stocks,” he says.
“Often, on night interiors, my fill would be well under the 1.9 minimum
stop of the Primo Primes, and my key would be anywhere between a 2.5 and
an 5.6-stop depending on where the actors might walk within a room.
“I have a tremendous first assistant, Ronnie Vargas,” he says emphatically.
“Often he would be following actors on a moving camera and tight lens,
like a 50mm or 100mm at a 1.9 or 2.3 stop! He had to be on the mark every
time, and he was. Then, while on the football field, his job involved
following a passed football 50 yards in the air at night, coming straight
at the camera, wide open on the Primo 3 to 1 zoom lens at 420mm, while
booming from the up to down position on a crane, keeping it in perfect
focus the whole way as the receiver makes the catch and runs ten more
yards towards you—with no cuts! And, of course, never hitting exact marks.
There is only a very small group of elite first ACs who can do that every
take and Ronnie is as good as they get.”
One of Cohen’s challenges on this picture was making not only the outside
shots look different from other sports pictures, but the inside shots
as well. “The locker room was one of the challenges of this picture,”
he says. “You see so many of them on TV and in sports films. I’ve been
in a lot of the real ones. They all look the same.
“Basically, they are lit with fluorescent lighting from the ceiling,
flat as ever, as the practical one was in the high school we contracted
out for our hero locker room in Varsity Blues. Of course, I changed the
lighting for the film,” he adds.
“If the locker room we used had windows, I might have gone with what
Caleb Deshanel did in The Natural—warm lighting through the windows
with some smoke producing those beautiful light shafts. However, there
were no windows in this practical locker room in Texas and the scenes
we shot took place at night, anyway.” Cohen and production designer Jay
Hinkel (who also played high school football in Texas and was aware of
the locker room mode) worked together to create a look.
“Jay did a terrific job of keeping the walls painted dark in all our
interior sets,” says Cohen. “One of my pet peeves is about actors shadows
on walls. I wanted to keep as many of the shadows off the walls as I could,
unless it was for a particularly dramatic effect. We hid the actual ceiling
fluorescent lights with blue Championship banners hung from the ceiling
at staggered intervals.”
Hinkel’s darker blue walls allowed Cohen to light actors faces in different
areas in this Georgetown High School locker room. To do this, he had a
series of twelve cage lights hung from the ceiling with practical PH 212s
(150watt) attached to dimmers. “On three walls of the locker room (the
fourth wall was the trainer’s room Jay built) there were about 35 to 40
lockers,” he adds. “In front of and over every third locker, we hung a
200 watt Pepper. This gave us a hot top/side light for some of the players
faces. Some of the actors would lean through or walk in and out of this
hot light to create contrast and a moody feel.”
Cohen shot everything in the locker room again between a 1.9 and a 2.3,
with the hot spots between a 4 and 5.6. “The shadows fell somewhere between
a 1.4 to a 2.3, depending on the angle,” he adds.
The practical locker room in this top-of-the-line high school was so
large that production was able to build the trainer’s room inside it.
“There is an important scene in this room, where Mox (James van der Beek)
sees and confronts Coach Kilmer (Voight) and the trainer who are about
to inject the star running back’s knee with a pain killer; which is illegal,
especially in high school sports.”
To shoot this sequence, Robbins and Cohen decided to approach the story
in a different way. “We set up the dolly outside the window of the trainer’s
room, looking in from the locker room’s perspective,” he says. “With blinds
on the windows, we had an interesting separation. “We put a free-standing
practical light near the trainer’s table, coach and player, with a PH
212 (150 watt) globe which gave off a hot white light on the actors’ faces.
I added a four-foot two-bank KinoFlo unit in the opposite corner of the
room, for some soft fill light.
“We also had two 1200 PAR HMI lights coming through some tracing paper
on the windows above the trainer’s table, as though it was the stadium
lights from outside. We dollied outside the windows towards the door as
though it was Mox’s POV (though the audience doesn’t know this at the
time). We are seeing something with a needle going on when suddenly Mox’s
hand enters the left of frame and slams open the door. A big confrontation
ensues between Mox and Kilmer. This spills out into the locker room and,
eventually, the adjacent hallway outside.”
Whether it is in the training room, the locker rooms, in the houses
of the players, or on the field, Chuck Cohen went for a different look
on this sports picture. “We even tried something a little different to
support the story, in the opening,” he says. “We wanted to introduce the
audience to small-town football, when it is still fun, then see the change.
“We began with a pee-wee football game—shot on Super 8mm. We used 5248
film stock, stripped down. Using two cameras, at various speeds, we got
great shots of the kids having fun at this playing level. It’s cute. They
are enjoying themselves. Everyone appears happy.
“Then we cut to a shot of a father grabbing one of the kids’ face masks,
and screaming at him that he isn’t doing something right. It sets up the
intensity and pressures of the sport even at this level, and plants the
seed that perhaps what we are seeing isn’t as much fun as it seems, and
might get worse.”
The Super 8 was transferred to D2 digital tape. Using an electronic
beam system (EBR) to record the material, it was then transferred back
to 35mm. “It’s called an etching process,” Cohen explains. “When the beam
touches the film it shoots the image onto the film. It is a technique
Oliver Stone used on both JFK and Natural Born Killers.
“When we got to dailies, the quality looked great. We had the pastel
colors of the uniforms and a lot of grain. Just like old home movies.”
In the final cut, this sequence ends with four kids walking side by
side away from the camera. It then dissolves to a photograph of the same
image, which is a bookmark Mox (van der Beek) is using as he reads in
his room and remembers the good old days. “It’s supposed to be early morning,
and a practical location,” Cohen explains. “But we shot the scene at dusk,
when there was no light outside.
“We dollied around Mox from over the shoulder to reveal his younger
brother standing in front of a window in semi-silhouette. He is attached
to a cross. We bring the sun’s rays in with an 18K and 1/2 CTO and a little
smoke. The room is also lit with a 2K bounce off an adjacent wall.
“The scene is really funny,” he continues. “The younger boy will do
anything he can not to play sports—the pressure to perform is too much
for him to handle. He tries acting crazy, so his father will ignore him
and not force him to go out for the football team. In this shot, he has
tied himself to a cross. As the scene continues in the dining room he
attempts to eat breakfast still tied to the cross, knocking over dishes
and banging his dad in the head. At other times, he wears white sheets
and has a cult following.”
In the story, after the quarterback is sidelined by a knee injury, Mox
becomes first-string on the team. Although he is more into academics and
has mocked football and everything it stands for, as he becomes successful
he starts to let the attention go to his head. His girlfriend tries to
keep him straight, but she ends up leaving him.
“This production was like shooting two different movies. The first five
weeks of principal photography was all the non-football action/stadium
scenes of the film and the last three and a half weeks were nothing but
night football action and accompanying scenes. Thank God for this, because
it was literally 112 degrees during the day in Texas and only 75-80 degrees
at night! People would have been dropping like flies.
The football games show how Mox changes, as well as how the other players
are pushed. Explains Cohen, “The games are key to the story, and a great
pallet for a cinematographer. The high school football games in Texas
are played at night. That gave me the opportunity to light the games in
a very dramatic and gritty way, and very different from a bright, NFL-like
stadium like we used in Jerry MaGuire.”
Cohen shot the home football sequences at a stadium in Georgetown, Texas.
“This is the best high school football stadium in Texas,” he says. “The
field is like a golf course. There were two light stations on each side
of the field, each holding twelve non- phased HMI lights, and no light
coming from both end zones. The ambient light read a 2.5 stop at ASA 800
(pushing the 79 stock 1 stop).
“We did color temperature tests of the available lights and flicker
tests on the field’s HMI lights,” he explains. “It was obvious we needed
to enhance the available light with our own lighting units. But to make
it easier to film the three and a half weeks of plays and the sideline
people, as well as the fans in the stands, and because of the film’s budget,
I didn’t have the luxury of bringing in two NiteSuns (which don’t look
like stadium lights anyway) and extra manpower. So, instead, I campaigned
for the large Musco light which would be perfect for our needs.”
Cohen convinced Paramount Pictures of the value of bringing in a Musco
light. “This allowed us to over-power the stadium lights from the hero’s
side of the field behind the home bench,” he explains. “It took care of
the flicker problem and now we had this terrific hot backlight for all
our scenes in the stands and on the bench, as well as a great key light
from one side while filming the football action on the field.”
This allowed Cohen to attain a lighting dimension for the football action,
since the field wasn’t uniformly lit on all sides like an NFL game or
college stadium. “The key was reading around an 8 stop, and the ambient
was a 2.8 stop from the fill side. This extra light power also enabled
us to use the long lenses necessary for filming football action as well
as the ability to film some slow-motion sequences.
“Since the Musco could cover about 50 yards of the field, as the plays
moved down the field, I’d have my gaffer, Mark Lindsay, refocus the individual
Musco lighting units to where we needed the light. The Musco itself never
had to move. This saved us an amazing amount of time.”
By adding half plus-green to balance the Musco with the existing stadium
lights, and shooting the 79 stock without any color correction, Cohen
was able to achieve a very rich electric-blue color for the uniforms of
the West Canan Coyotes team and for the red, green, and purple of the
opposing teams. “Plus, since this is not a college or professional stadium,
the players were filmed against a very intense black night sky many times.
This made them pop out on the screen even more,” adds Cohen. “It’s a whole
different feel from Jerry Maguire, The Waterboy or any other football
movies I’ve shot. It’s very different in a fresh and dramatic way.”
Since all the football action was shot with three-cameras on each setup,
Cohen would plot out the various positions along with Robbins and Mark
Ellis, the football coordinator. “This is the big challenge of any football
action film—coordinating the camera positions and camera moves with the
camera and grip crews and with the movement of the players, many of whom
have never been in a movie or commercial before. It’s so easy for someone
to get run over, or a camera to get run into, if you’ve never done this
before.
“Coordinating all this takes experience, great care, preparation and
communication. And a great crew. My key grip, Ralph Scherer, is a master
at moving the dolly and working the crane within the flow of each setup.
Though it is a film about high school players, the actual players used
were former college players from all over Texas. They were big, quick,
extremely fast and physical. They took a lot of the ‘hits,’ which were
as nasty and punishing as one sees watching any NFL game on Sunday. I’m
happy to say that there wasn’t a crew injury or piece of equipment run
into during the entire film. Though a couple players did get banged up
on some brutal tackles.”
While Robbins and Cohen shot various frame rates, they didn’t go overboard
with slow motion. They used it to punctuate specific story points, thus
giving the games a different edge. “We’d shoot anywhere between 24 and
90fps,” he explained.
When he was shooting the football footage, Cohen used as much as seven
different camera bodies. “We had the Panaflex Platinum as the A-camera
and the G2 as the B-camera for the sync scenes, the Panastar for high
speed, the Panaflex lightweight for my operator Joe Chess when he was
doing Steadicam, the Pan Arri 3 for the C- camera operated by Sonny Stires,
as well as the PogoCam, an Eyemo, and the Panavised Arri 435 for special
shots because it can ramp to slo-mo and is light enough to be used as
a Steadicam.”
Another sequence that Chuck Cohen approached with a more dramatic and
unusual style was a large post-game party. This night sequence involved
four different conversations in the main room of a house. It ends with
a fifth conversation outside on the front porch. “Instead of moving from
conversation to conversation and shooting coverage of each one, Brian
and I devised a long Steadicam move and shot it all in one continuous
take,” he explains.
“We started this sequence following a young woman down a flight of stairs
to reveal the party,” he continues. “We then moved through the crowd of
extras, from conversation to conversation, as the actors walk from one
area to another within the room. Finally, Scott Caan (James Caan’s son)
crosses in front of the camera and pulls the action to the front door
and onto the outside porch.”
Cohen lit the interior of the house with various practicals enhanced
with strategically placed KinoFlos here and there. The exterior porch
was lit with a couple of four-foot two-bank KinoFlos and China balls,
which lit the front lawn as well. Off the lawn area, Cohen used an 18K
with 1/4 CTO for moonlight and for fill, and a 4K HMI into a muslin bounce.
“We used the 27mm Primo Prime on the Steadicam for this shot which lasted
about 1 minute, 45 seconds,” he says. “It took a lot to coordinate Joe’s
movements with the extras and main actors’ movements, and it was many
takes before we got everything right. But it was worth it. There is an
energy and flow of conversation and activity that really furthers the
story in an interestingly visual and quick way.”
For Cohen, the effort to do something unusual is worth it. At times,
it took talking director Brian Robbins into splitting some sequences over
a couple days and even different times of the day to get the sunlight
in the right place. “There was a picnic scene where Mox is coerced into
a confrontation with his father and the father of the first string quarterback,”
says Cohen.
“It was a huge scene, with a lot of speaking parts—again. Brian was
worried about how to cover this picnic with a consistent time of day and
under the limited amount of time we had scheduled for this scene. My idea
was to split the day. We began some of the shots at sunrise through mid-morning,
getting the light into the flat Texas landscape and using it as backlight.
“We moved to interiors in the middle of the day, and then picked up
other parts of the exteriors later in the afternoon from the opposite
angle; again using the sun for backlight and thereby controlling the light
on the actors’ faces with other lighting units and grippage. So the actors
were always either backlit or sidelit—never frontlit—the whole scene.
“It worked great,” he adds. “Over the two days we shot this sequence,
we did something like 73 setups with two cameras! There was a lot of dolly
work and long lens shots, and we pulled the scene together quite nicely.”
One of the scenes Cohen and crew had fun with was a “gun fight at the
OK Corral” sequence between Mox and his father. “The father is inebriated
and a football fanatic, to say the least,” Cohen explains. He’s taunted
by the first string quarterback’s dad who is very obnoxious, and drunk
also, with ‘my son can throw a football and knock this beer can off my
head.’ Both kids do it once and then Mox gets so angry, he ends up hitting
his father in the face with a football throw, breaking his nose.
“Our challenge was to find a way to follow the ball in a tracking shot
from Mox’s hand to hitting his dad’s nose,” Cohen explains. “I worked
closely with our propman, Curtis Akin, and key grip Ralph Scherer. We
put a rod through a very soft football, attached it to an electric screw
gun and attached the gun to the dolly so the ball was positioned just
under the camera’s matte-box, so two-thirds of the ball filled up the
bottom of our 27mm frame.
“We under-cranked the shot at various frame rates and dollied into the
father’s head. The ball’s position in the frame hid the dolly track.”
It was a simple approach to use, to get an interesting angle and make
an unusual shot more effective, without spending a lot of money or time
on equipment or green screen techniques, says Cohen.
Shooting Varsity Blues was a high point for Cohen. Not only did he really
like the way the story exposes the problems behind ‘win at all costs’
coaches and fathers who have tunnel vision when it comes to sports, he
was also able to use things he has learned over the years. “Who knew,
when I was director of photography on the movie about the 1984 Los Angeles
Olympics, or shooting pro or college sports, I would learn things that
I could bring to major motion pictures?
Perhaps because of his sports cinematography background, “I was able
to get my foot in the door of movie productions,” says Cohen. “My knowledge
of the games and the intricacies of the players/coaches techniques and
lives both on and off the field has, funny enough, somehow helped further
my career as a director of photography.
“Perhaps because of my background I can sometimes visualize shots other
cameramen might not think of. I also believe that years of documentary
work have helped me in being very decisive and quick with my setups, as
we averaged 33 setups a day on the non-football action scenes, and that’s
moving!
Cohen loves moving the camera within the action and bringing audience
“new perspectives that can’t be accomplished during real televised sports
events. Obviously, I feel the football action in Varsity Blues is the
best I’ve seen in a movie, especially in terms of getting inside the action
on the field.
“I’ll be interested in seeing if the audience likes and understands
this different way of viewing sports when the movie opens. The film has
tested well; I have a feeling that energy will carry over to the opening
and beyond.”
Next up for Chuck Cohen: lensing the second unit of Oliver Stone’s next
film Any Given Sunday. “It’s about the NFL and the second unit
is about 45% of the film. It will be a good challenge to help give his
movie a different look,” concludes Cohen.
E-mail the author
with questions or comments.
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Cinematographer
Chuck Cohen was well-versed in the intricacies of shooting sports when
he signed on for the latest Jon Voight feature, Varsity Blues.
For this story of a “win at all costs” Texas high school football coach
(Voight) who tries to mold a young high school second string quarterback
(James van der Beek of Dawson’s Creek) and as a result is challenged by
him, Cohen needed to really get into the action on the field.
“We
dollied down the field, following Sandler’s stunt double, so we could
see the grass whipping by as well as the players—all at a low and wide
angle. The result was a highly energetic and exciting shot. It made the
players bigger than life and gave the audience a perspective on a moving
football shot that they have never seen before.”