HOWARD ANDERSON - IT'S ALL IN THE FAMILY FOR 75 YEARS

By Bob Fisher

Howard Anderson, Jr. has pretty much seen it all, and his father has told him the rest. His father founded the Howard Anderson Company in 1927. It has remained a family-owned business for a remarkable 75 years, spanning much of the history of the motion picture industry, including the transitions from silent movies to sound, from black and white to color, the evolution of television, and now the convergence of film and digital technologies. The company is headquartered in North Hollywood, California, where it provides a full range of postproduction services necessary for finishing trailers, motion picture titles, 2-D visual effects, in addition to operating an insert stage.

It all began with Howard Anderson, Sr., who was a successful portrait photographer in Chicago. His career was interrupted by the onset of World War I.

“My father served in the army until he was mustered out of the service in San Diego in 1918,” says Howard Anderson, Jr., ASC. “That’s where he met my mother. He told me they moved to Los Angeles because it was a boomtown and he wanted to get into the movie industry. I don’t remember asking him why.”

In 1918, the motion picture industry was already in the advanced stages of migrating from the East Coast to Hollywood. Anderson, Sr. worked for a while as an insurance salesman until he connected with Thomas Ince, an industry pioneer who moved from New York to California, where he established an independent studio in Culver City. Anderson, Sr., worked as both a still photographer and second camera operator on Ince’s productions. There was no duplicate negative stock in those days. Everything was printed off the original negative. The second camera operator set up next to the main camera. The negative was edited and shipped to Europe as a master for release printing.

After Ince died in 1924, the legendary Cecil B. DeMille took over the Culver City studio. By then, Anderson, Sr., was playing a new role. He had perfected a talent for handpainting mattes on glass plates, which were used for special effects shots.

“He learned how to paint by retouching still photos,” says Anderson, Jr. “I still remember seeing a plate of a chandelier he painted that was inserted into a scene filmed on a set. If you think about it, the concept was the same as what we do with computers and inserting CG images into shots today. That was just one of his talents. My father created lightning, storms and floods for DeMille on one of the last, big silent movies, The King of Kings. Those effects still seem realistic today.”

In 1927, he founded Howard Anderson Special Photographic Effects Company, where he pioneered the use of optical effects by compositing A, B and C rolls. His camera operator, Dwight Warren, was also a machinist. He designed and built a matte box and a motor for mechanizing the movement of film through cameras. It was a revolutionary concept, since most motion picture cameras were still hand cranked.

Anderson, Jr. recalls that he and his brother Darrell did chores for their father during the early 1930s, including assembling and splicing film. He was still a pre-teenager and didn’t give a lot of thought to a long-term career in the film industry. Anderson, Jr. joined a navy cadet program in high school, and later enrolled in a U.S. Navy ROTC program while majoring in math at UCLA.

He served in the reserves and then in the Navy during World War II. After completing his military obligation, Anderson. Jr. got a job photographing industrial films for Douglas Aircraft. One of his films documented the construction of the first B-19 airplane. He also filmed Wings, which was used by the Navy to recruit pilots.

By the late 1940s, Anderson, Jr. was drawn into the family business as an optical camera operator. He subsequently earned credits for effects work, titles and trailers on more than 50 feature films, including such classics as Heaven Can Wait, Blazing Saddles, The Body Snatchers, Some Like it Hot, the 1960 version of Godzilla, Annie, Superman and Gray Lady Down.

“I was blessed to have an opportunity to work with a lot of creative people on many great movies,” he says. “We generally worked with editors on titles, and usually they were an integral part of setting the mood.”

Anderson, Jr. also worked on many episodic TV programs that are now considered classics, including such series as I Love Lucy, My Favorite Martian, The Untouchables, The Invaders, Dragnet and the original Star Trek series.

“We did all of the opticals for the Lucy show,” he says, “including titles, mattes and also all the second unit work. We had very close ties with Desilu Productions, the company founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez. We were located on their lot.”

Star Trek was one of the first TV series to make regular use of movie-style visual effects. Darrell and Howard Anderson began working on that project about a year before the pilot was produced. There were no rules, because no one had done a TV show like this one before. They were writing the rulebook. They made models of the Enterprise in sizes ranging for four to fourteen inches, created star fields, and invented a photographic technique that visually augmented the signature phrase, “Beam me up, Scotty.”

“We optically superimposed film of glittering aluminum shavings over footage of actors who were being beamed up or down,” Anderson, Jr. recalls. “Gene Roddenberry was a huge, bright, dominating figure of a man. He was good to work with and a nice guy, but he was very precise and would second guess us all the time.

“For footage of the Enterprise in flight, after testing, we decided to fly the camera by the spaceship models instead of moving them, because it looked more convincing. We must have shot the miniature of the spaceship for the main title more than 100 times with different little moves, turns and speeds. We would look at dailies, and Gene who say he wanted it faster or slower or something different, so we’d reshoot it again that night.”

Howard Anderson III, ASC has memories of flipping light switches on and off for the running lights on the model of the Enterprise while his father was filming the spaceship from different angles and tracks for the purpose of building a library of inserts. There was no motion control in those days. They shot one frame at a time and moved the camera to pre-determined marks after exposing each image. He recalls that they manually adjusted focus and lighting ratios for continuity.

Anderson III was an avid photo hobbyist during his early teens. His favorite subject was surfers. He took pictures, processed and printed the film in a home darkroom, and sold them to the surfers. By the time he was in high school, he was working in the family business. He started by shooting titles in the art department.

In those days, the company was located on the Paramount lot, which the studio had purchased from Desilu. By the mid-1960s, the Howard Anderson Company was producing titles and visual effects for some twenty TV series. It was part art and part science.

“I remember when my dad brought an astronomer in to design a realistic star field for Star Trek,” Anderson, III says. “He put pinholes in a huge piece of black paper and we back-lit it. It was authentic, but no one liked it. They wanted it to be more dramatic, so we did it again with a richer cluster with more stars.”

Anderson III earned an undergraduate degree from the cinema school at UCLA in 1969. By then, he was fascinated by opportunities to shoot inserts. Usually, these were unscripted shots for editors who needed close-ups or other shots to accentuate or clarify story points, and also to put movement into static shots, as well as to establish locations and to provide backgrounds for optical composites.

The company moved onto the Universal Studios lot during the late 1980s, where it operated a telecine facility until the mid-1990s. During that period, Anderson III calculates that the company compiled credits on more than 1,000 hours of episodic TV programs, ranging from The Waltons to Mannix, The Fugitive, Barnaby Jones, Remington Steele, Hart to Hart, The A-Team and Hardcastle and McCormick. Anderson III has also compiled an eclectic list of credits, ranging from inserts for the Cheers TV series, to trailers, inserts for other projects and titles.

In recent years, the company has developed cutting-edge capabilities for providing 2-D digital effects services, including rig removal, image processing and manipulation, and blue and greenscreen compositing. It has also shifted its focus almost entirely to feature films. A short list of its credits on contemporary films includes Con Air, Kiss the Girls, Dante's Peak, L.A. Confidential, The X-Files, Domestic Disturbance, Hart’s War, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Life As a House, Orange County, Red Dragon, The Sum of All Fears, Unfaithful, Spiderman and Windtalkers.

At its North Hollywood facility, the company operates up to a half a dozen optical printers with state of the art lenses, an Imagica XE scanner and an ARRI Lux recorder, which serve as gateways between the film and digital worlds, and several digital bays. Anderson notes that the optical printers range from 40 to 50 years old and they are as good as new. He says the good and bad news about digital technology is that rapid progress is being made, and as a result, the company has gone through several generations of computer hardware and software during the past several years.

“Somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of our title and trailer work today involves at least some use of our computer technology,” says Anderson, III. “We can scan and record at true 2K or 4K resolution, depending on what's needed. It depends on the projects and the people. We are working with many more directors today than we were ten or twenty years ago, or even five years ago. Some of them prefer titling and compositing in digital format, so they can see what we are doing on a monitor before we record out to film.”

Asked the difference between working with editors and directors, Anderson replies with a mischievous smile, “We serve directors latte on silver trays instead of coffee in paper cups. The truth is that everyone has different experience and tastes. Some people prefer a digital look for a fade. Others like film. They are different looks. You don’t get the same rich black tones with digital, and opticals tend to blend a little smoother with film. It’s something you feel more than you see.

“We are having the same discussions about digital technology as everyone in the postproduction side of the industry about how much resolution is sufficient,” he continues. “At lower resolutions, you lose color depth, but it takes less time and money. At higher resolutions, you have more control over chroma, contrast, color saturation and balance. My opinion is that you should work at the highest resolution you can afford for archival as well as creative reasons. I also believe that film still provides aesthetic advantages for titling, especially when we are dealing with serif or similar type faces with subtle curves.”

However, Anderson III adds that circumstances often dictate the choice of media. He notes that more trailers are being finished digitally today, because of their longer lengths, typically two to three minutes, and tighter deadlines. For trailers, they generally provide eight to ten copies of the finished product, usually on rugged Estar base color intermediate film. Sometimes trailers are finished in both 1.85:1 and wide screen (2.4:1) formats, depending on how they will be projected on different screens.

What about the future? Anderson, Jr. says, “I remember my father telling me that he thought he had the world’s best life. He saw the advent of the electric light, the airplane, the locomotive, the cinema, radio and television. He thought there was no way it could get better. He had seen everything and was happy about that. I believe that the future will provide challenges and opportunities beyond the scope of our imagination. That’s the way it has always been. No one predicted that in 2002 the industry would be remastering 40- and 50-year-old films for DVD release. I think the secret is that you've got to love what you do, and you've got to strive to do it the best that it can possibly be done. I’ve always loved what we do, and I am proud of how we do it. I believe that there will be future generations who will feel the same way tomorrow.”