Camera-Ready : The Cameraman’s Instinct Is to Watch, to Serve, to Capture, in an Expert Second

SOME YEARS AGO, while shooting a commercial in L.A., I made a pilgrimage to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last apartment, on North Hayworth. The stucco was nostalgically peeling. The current occupant was too busy conducting a lawn sale to show me around, but from what I could see Fitzgerald had a splendid view of the Hollywood Hills.

It was here that he played out his last years, awed and humiliated by the manufacture of American fun. To the end, cranking out unsuccessful screenplays, he cultivated an attitude of great expectations and romantic disgruntlement toward the industry. “It was like visiting a great turbulent family,” he wrote of the film crew that appears briefly in “Tender Is the Night.” “They were a people of bravery and industry; they were risen to a position of prominence in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained.”

It’s still dumbfounding, this triumph of California craft over high seriousness. What movies mainly do is warp the shape and time of things in the world. Since they do this in a way that we regard as realistic--photo-representationally, narratively--we are soothed by the distortion. The movies’ most profound power is their power to make us feel ecstatically smaller than what we see, to share in their bigness so that we feel heroically adjusted to our place in the scale of things. It’s a religious effect--what the good sisters used to call “pagan awe.” Cinematography, the actual making of moving images, is the basic tool of this magic. As with other forms of idolatry, the point most often fudged is mortality.

Gregg Toland, who shot “Citizen Kane,” knew all about the voodoo of his trade. And because he also knew that when you’re talking technique, you’re probably not communicating, he assured Orson Welles that anyone could be taught the mechanics of cinematography in a few hours. This is rhetorically true: You can learn to drive a car by studying a motor-vehicle-bureau manual. The issue, of course, is not how cameras work, but how Gregg Toland works.

‘What movies mainly do is warp the shape and time of things in the world. Since they do this in a way that we regard as realistic--

photo-representationally, narratively--we are soothed by the distortion.’

Happily, movie workers tend to be a garrulous lot, like ballplayers. Between takes, they are the sharpest, most judicious spectators I know--instinctive deconstructionalists. With the help of my friend and fellow cameraman Ted Churchill, I’ve been able to spend time on big-budget film sets without the handicap of being branded a writer. Writers working on celebrity profiles have to negotiate their way past the many monsignori clustered around the Pope. With Teddy, I was just “Duke,” one of the guys hanging around the grip truck. In my old neighborhood, the nickname Duke was used as a tip of the hat, a pat on the back, now and then a sly twist of the arm, as in “How ‘bout taking out the garbage once in a while, Duke?” The cameraman’s instinct is to watch, to serve, to capture, in an expert second. Duke seems an appropriate nom de camera. . . .

FAT CHANCE FILMS Ltd. flew me out to L.A. to shoot a Subaru commercial that demonstrated the advantages of four-wheel drive in Beverly Hills. We spent most of the first day getting measured for custom-embroidered satin jackets, negotiating permits to shoot on a rugged stretch of Rodeo Drive and listening to Legendary Rooney’s ragtime tapes. Rooney’s theory is that music quiets the racket of cross talk and carpentry, helps the crew see better. Legendary Rooney is the soundman who talks to his plants. He shouts at his cactus because it’s deaf. Weekends he works as a bartender; he wears breakaway bow ties so the drunks can’t yank him across the bar. But the significant thing about Legendary Rooney is that he is bald and beardless, an uncommon combination these days. Hair is not important to him. Technology is. He wrote the first telecommunications program for portable computers. Life might take Legendary Rooney’s hair but not his intelligence, nor his ability to install it in a machine.

I drove to the Sunset Marquis, ate room-service fried oysters, and went for a dunk in the pool just as the lifeguard was turning out the purple underwater lights. I went back to my room, bare soles slapping on the chilly tiles, brushed the battery chargers off my bed and tried to sleep in order to revise the day, which had been a damp dream of more things than I could make sense of.

Headlights washed my window and spilled through the Venetian blinds. This is a lighting effect associated with certain B films of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Most cameramen don’t pay much attention to it anymore: Usually they just pan a light from one side of the window to the other, but that wasn’t what really went on. The light source in this case was a traveling pivot, something rather tricky to reproduce on film, but far from impossible and quite telling in the way it expressed the complete experience--something about a motel’s posed emotions, high-strung and commonplace, like a movie.

Some years ago, not far from this very motel, I’d watched Alfred Hitchcock enter a room. The room was in Beverly Hills, and it was full of rich and handsome people. Hitchcock was a short man, 5 foot, 6 inches maybe. He was in his late 60s at the time, very round. He moved slowly and smoothly, propelled by an effortless inner force, a Buddha on casters. His hair and shirt were white, his suit and tie black, his skin pink. He was a high-contrast rainbow, dazzling and mysterious. It was clear that there was no better way for Hitchcock to be than to be pictures of himself. The room beheld him in suitable silence. What more was there to say?

Anyway, when I’m alone at night and headlights pass my motel window, I pay attention, analyze things. In these solitary moments, reflexively scanning the world with the bribed eyes of a cameraman, I say to myself: “Duke, what’s it all about?” It’s the freest of American jobs, this mechanical exercise of fantasy. Maybe we live in our own world, but movies, for those of us who make them, are seldom an escape. The thing about making pictures, as opposed to looking at them, is you have to be there. Movie crews, even more than civilians, get sick of being pestered by what is.

I was standing with my father at a bus stop in Rockaway, N.J., when I found a little turtle with “Duke, New Orleans” painted on its back. That little turtle was infinitely alive and suggestive in a decorative, indifferent way. It was art on the hoof, just like the movies, I imagined. For a while I kept Duke in the bathtub, but one day my mother pitched him out of the window.

My father rented a bungalow upstate, in Monroe, a resort for cops and firemen. We lived near a lake necklaced with bars. My father commuted on weekends. Tuesday nights, five miles down the road, the theater showed double features of Lash LaRue or Cisco Kid Westerns. Ma didn’t drive (despite lessons and epic excuses, she’d failed her test three times), so every Tuesday, after supper, we hitched into town. One time a motorcycle stopped for us. I got on behind the biker and Ma got on behind me. Sandwiched, excited by the roar of the bike and the whoosh of the wind and the deliciousness of our destination, we zipped away to the movies.

I put another quarter in the Magic Fingers and shimmied off to sleep. The next day I created for the director, a young Japanese guy who chewed gum and affected a groovy American manner, the effect of Subaru headlights whooshing authentically past Venetian blinds. He flipped out, called me a genius. A lot of us guys are geniuses in the industry.

From “Light Years: Confessions of a Cinematographer,” by Tom McDonough. Copyright 1987 by Tom McDonough. Reprinted by permission.