MASTERS OF LIGHT
Master
of
Light
CONVERSATIONS WITH
CONTEMPORARY CINEMATOGRAPHERS
Dennis Schaefer
and
Larry Salvato
With a New Preface by the Authors
New Foreword by John Bailey
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1984, 2013 by The Regents of the University of California
ISBN 978-0-520-27466-2
eISBN: 9780520907652
The Library of Congress has catalogued an earlier edition as follows:
Schaefer, Dennis.
Masters of light.
Includes index.
1. Cinematographers—Interviews. I. Salvato, Larry.
II. Title.
TR849.A1S331985778.5’3’092284-2512
ISBN 978-0-520-05336-6
Manufactured in the United States of America
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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
1.Nestor Almendros
2.John Alonzo
3.John Bailey
4.Bill Butler
5.Michael Chapman
6.Bill Fraker
7.Conrad Hall
8.Laszlo Kovacs
9.Owen Roizman
10.Vittorio Storaro
11.Mario Tosi
12.Haskell Wexler
13.Billy Williams
14.Gordon Willis
15.Vilmos Zsigmond
Glossary
Index
Foreword
Near the end of his interview in Masters of Light, the Hungarian cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond responds to a question about how difficult it was for him and his friend Laszlo Kovacs to break into the mainstream of Hollywood studio movies in the 1970s. “I always tell them [students] that it will take ten years,” he begins. “Very few people find themselves becoming a cameraman after finishing USC or UCLA. Very seldom will you become a cameraman in less than ten years.”1
Masters of Light was published in 1984. What Zsigmond affirmed then was accurate. He and Kovacs had come up through low-budget, nonunion filmmaking, shooting action and thriller films for the B and drive-in markets. When the studio system fractured into a kind of chaos with the “youth quake” of the 1960s, young cinematographers such as John Alonzo and Mario Tosi were well positioned to walk into a moribund structure. They were also influenced by the aesthetic and technical revolution of the European New Wave, whose influence was then breaking on American shores. Several of those young European cinematographers, such as Nestor Almendros and Vittorio Storaro, benefited from this shake-up in the American industry and began parallel careers in the American mainstream: Almendros with the directors Robert Benton, Monte Hellman, and Terence Malick; Storaro with Francis Coppola and Warren Beatty. Two other American-born cinematographers, Conrad Hall and William Fraker, gained prominence by coming up through the union ranks. There is a famous photo of Hall, Fraker, Bobby Byrne, and Jordan Cronenweth as the union camera crew on Richard Brooks’s western The Professionals. Haskell Wexler, ever the rebel, clawed his way in through low-budget films in the late 1950s, garnering his first Oscar for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a movie whose documentary style and harsh lighting of the stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton inflamed the conservative old guard. Wexler and Hall closed ranks from their differing origins in forming a successful company for TV commercials. Gordon Willis also began his career shooting commercials and documentaries, but he, too, spent many years as an assistant cameraman. For my own part, I began working on nonunion and NABET (National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians) features as a camera assistant. Even after getting into the union in May 1969, I fell prey to a strict seniority structure in which I was allowed to work on a feature film only after members of greater seniority had been employed. My first studio feature as a camera assistant was Monte Hellman’s 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop, now a cult classic of the era but widely reviled at the time of release for its long takes and frequently deadpan acting.
Although the Hollywood studios were in major transition in the late 1960s, the union locals of the IATSE still wielded considerable power. Perhaps the most powerful of them was Local 659, the camera guild for Hollywood and the western region. IATSE Local 644, for New York and much of the East Coast, was only slightly less rigid. It was virtually impossible to build a feature career as a cinematographer outside this structure. One way or another, all American cameramen had to come to terms with the unions. This is part of the unstated subtext that Zsigmond alludes to in his interview.
This apprentice/journeyman/master guild system has held sway in the American studios from the 1930s to today. But an alternative way now exists—one that could not have been foreseen by the fifteen cinematographers who were interviewed for Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato’s book. This new approach is what Francis Coppola and others have called the “democratization” of filmmaking. In certain respects, the breakdown of an entrenched motion picture hierarchy had begun with the post-World War II Italian Neorealist films and their offspring, the French New Wave. A recent exhibition at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) of behind-the-scenes photographs of classic French films of the 1960s such as Jules and Jim and Breathless by the set photographer Raymond Cauchetier shows how the compact crews of the time exploited the new lightweight equipment, fast emulsions, and direct sound technology of cinema verité to create more naturalistic films: a revolution in French cinema, reacting against what François Truffaut sarcastically dubbed the “Tradition of Quality.” One of the most amusing of Cauchetier’s photos is of the cinematographer Raoul Coutard handholding an Éclair CM3 for a dolly shot of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. The director Jean-Luc Godard is pulling the wheelchair dolly.
This “democratization” of cinema is a product of several factors that were not yet operative when Masters of Light was published; it gives the interviews a kind of historic glaze, not unlike that of an earlier book of interviews by Leonard Maltin. In 1971, the then twenty-year-old critic published Behind the Camera, with an insightful introductory essay,