Picturing New Headquarters

Hollywood cinematographers have launched an $8-million campaign to build an elegant campus on the modest lot the group has occupied since the 1930s, an effort to secure a more conspicuous place in the future of filmmaking while preserving the craft’s history.

If fund-raising proceeds as planned, the American Society of Cinematographers hopes to break ground next spring on a facility that includes a 265-seat screening room, a 200-seat dining hall, offices for American Cinematographer magazine and an underground parking garage.

Annual summer workshops, funded by a new $1-million endowment, will be offered on the campus by mid-2003. ASC members now lecture at colleges at their own expense.

The project marks a transition for the society, founded in 1918 and headquartered for the last 65 years in a bungalow at Franklin Avenue and North Orange Drive.

“It shows the industry that cinematographers are a force to deal with, not only with creating an image on the screen, but in continuing the education, raising public awareness and educating the producers and directors who don’t truly understand what cinematographers do,” said Victor J. Kemper, ASC president.

Kemper says the society isn’t threatened by digital moviemaking, a revolution in the way filmmakers control the on-screen image. There is some concern in Hollywood that a shift toward digital technology could upstage cinematographers, who paint with light and compose images.

“I’m not afraid of technology,” Kemper said. “I don’t believe it will matter whether we shoot on film or some other miracle format. The job still has to be done.”

The ASC headquarters, known as the Clubhouse, is a three-bedroom house circa 1900, when Hollywood was a landscape of citrus groves and open fields.

Today, it is sandwiched between apartment buildings, lacks proper air-conditioning and bears the scars of indelicate renovations over the years.

One bedroom has been converted into a dining room that can’t come close to accommodating the society’s 341 members and associates.

A small library and meeting area occupy the other bedrooms. The basement houses the magazine’s circulation staff.

In contrast, the new campus, as designed by Goldman & Firth Architects of Malibu, features an airy complex of three structures around the Clubhouse, connected by walkways and landscaped with citrus trees, a fountain and several courtyards.

The architecture will “recapture the old studio environment with interior back-street allies and quasi-industrial Craftsman buildings,” architect Ronald Goldman said.

After renovation, the Clubhouse will be converted to a cinematography museum and will display the ASC’s motion-picture camera collection.

Kemper, an award-winning cinematographer and ASC member for 27 years, has pushed for the new campus since the late 1980s.

A legal battle thwarted his efforts in the early 1990s, when the group ousted then-treasurer Jack Cooperman for allegedly fixing an ASC election. Cooperman sued and won reinstatement and a monetary award.

The battle nearly depleted the club’s treasury and dimmed enthusiasm for expansion plans. “From that day on, it was a dream of mine,” he said.

In 1999, Kemper tried again, but the threat of an actors’ strike put the brakes on his efforts. “I had visions of 12 years ago when a little adversity comes along and everybody runs scared,” he said of his earlier attempt to get the project off the ground.

Early this year, Kemper tried a third time. He met with city officials to map out the permit process, hired a fund-raiser, Corbett Barklie, and architects, Bob Firth and Goldman. The ASC board of governors, Eastman Kodak Co. and Panavision pledged more than $3 million for the project.

This time, morale among ASC members survived and Kemper continued the drive.

“If we continually wait for the right time to do something,” he said, “it’s never going to come.”