Live Cinema and Its Techniques Read online

  LIVE

  CINEMA

  AND ITS TECHNIQUES

  FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

  Liveright Publishing Corporation

  A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York London

  TO JOHN FRANKENHEIMER

  THE PIONEER

  CONTENTS

  Preface Why This Book

  Personal Introduction

  1Proof-of-Concept Workshops

  2A Short History of Film and Television

  3The Actors, Acting, and Rehearsal

  4Equipment and Technical Specifications

  5Scenery and Location

  6The Shame of Things to Come: Madison, Wisconsin

  7One from the Heart: Its Lessons

  8Rip Van Winkle

  9The Question of Style in the Cinema

  10The Stumble-Throughs, Technical Rehearsals, and Dress Rehearsals

  11Marks and Other Smaller Unresolved Problems

  12Obstacles and Other Thoughts on Live Cinema No Matter What They May Be

  13Equipment—Now and in the Near Future

  Afterword Why Am I Doing This?

  Appendix Journal Notes During OCCC Live Cinema Production: May/June 2015

  Glossary

  Credits of the Live Broadcasts

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PREFACE

  WHY THIS BOOK

  Since the early 1990s, the cinema has transformed itself from a photochemical-mechanical medium to an electronic-digital one. It is a revolutionary process that seems to have just happened, but it actually occurred in small increments, the transition beginning in sound, then in editing, then digital cinematography, and finally, theatrical projection. The cinema is now just about wholly digital. Yet our love and respect for film masterpieces, from the silent era through the era of “talkies” and beyond, including extraordinary cinematic work around the globe, inspires us to make our new electronic cinema do little more than emulate the films of the past.

  Many young filmmakers are loathe to abandon film, not realizing that it has already abandoned them. The Eastman Kodak factory in Rochester, New York, that used to employ over 3500 workers is now down to 350 as the need for Kodak film has shrunk to accommodate those few filmmakers (my own daughter Sofia one of them)who prefer working the old way. This inclination to use film is touching and totally understandable. Film and its traditions remain beloved. There even remain still photographers who make their own glass plates with emulsion of silver halides, as the results are so beautiful. No doubt there will always be a few passionate souls who will try to create photochemical film after none is manufactured. But the unalterable fact confronts us that cinema is now primarily an electronic-digital medium.

  I have to believe that this change will profoundly influence the essence of the cinema, no matter how much we revere those many great works made on photographic film, taking us in new directions. What will these new directions be?

  In the digital world, moviemaking can now be performed by directors collaborating on the internet, using game pads, joysticks, keyboards, and touch screens, all the devices of internet gaming. They can engage in play across geographical boundaries, perhaps even viewed by large audiences in auditoriums. And they can engage in role-playing games, identifying with and controlling individual characters and at the same time helping to create the defined worlds that are the settings. Virtual reality, with its point-of-view perception of the main characters, may create new formats; and movies themselves may be performed live, shown at theaters, in community centers, and in homes around the world. Eventually “cinema auteurs” may emerge who can use this format to create literature at its highest level, in ways I cannot yet imagine.

  Of course, we have lived with live television since television was first invented—in fact, television was dominated by live programming until well into the 1950s and the development of videotape technology. But my own interest, Live Cinema, has only just appeared in this second decade of the twenty-first century. The purpose of this book is not to indulge in nostalgia, whether for live television or for the early days of filmmaking, but to explore this new medium, to discover how it is different from other creative forms, what its virtues and requirements are; and especially, to look at how it can be used and taught.

  In its essence this new medium is cinema, not a television play, but conceived as cinema and yet not losing the thrill of a living performance. Thinking about all of the implications, I wanted to learn more—not just by talking about what Live Cinema might be, but by actually doing it. So I launched two experimental proof-of-concept workshops, one in the facilities of Oklahoma City Community College in 2015, and another a year later at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. I learned a great deal from both workshops—my journal from OCCC is included in the appendix, followed by credits from both workshops—and, brimming over with knowledge and facts that I really hadn’t digested, I decided to write them down in a user-friendly book. This is that book.

  What you are about to read then is a manual, a guide through the many intricate issues one confronts when attempting to do a Live Cinema performance, from the all-important matters of the actors and how to rehearse them to the details of making use of sophisticated technology that was originally invented for television sports. Of course it is my dream to one day do a major Live Cinema production based on my own writing, but should the many reasons I cannot do this prevail, I hope that those who come after me will read this record of what I have learned from my Live Cinema workshops, and use it to work in this new art form.

  PERSONAL INTRODUCTION

  Born in 1939 and being as a child of a scientific leaning, I was drawn to and fascinated by the new wonder of my time, television. My father, who was a classical musician and first-chair flutist in the Toscanini NBC Symphony Orchestra, was also fascinated by innovation. He was the son of a master tool and die maker who had engineered and built the Vitaphone, the machine that made movies talk. In my earliest memories, my father was always bringing home the latest devices from the shops along New York City’s “Radio Row”: the Presto home acetate recorder, the wire and tape recorder, and then the first television set. I was seven, the perfect age to operate these things, so when our small-screen Motorola TV showed up in our Long Island home, I was in heaven.

  True, in 1946 there was hardly any programming, so I spent hours watching the geometric test patterns, waiting for something to begin. I can remember the early shows. Howdy Doody looked nothing like the famous puppet in later years; he was then a lanky hayseed with blond hair whose face became wrapped in bandages because he was running for President, we were told, and had gone through plastic surgery. Of course, we kids knew nothing of the copyright suit going on, when the creator of the puppet refused to cede the rights to his character, and a new puppet design, this one with rights intact, had to be introduced to the audience. There were a few Allied Artists cowboy movies coming over on Channel 13 from New Jersey, and the DuMont Television Network offered shows on Channel 5, including Captain Video and His Video Rangers. When I was nine years old, I was paralyzed from polio. I became a prisoner in my room with the television my focus, along with some puppets, a tape recorder, and a toy 16mm movie projector. For a year I saw no children other than my brother and sister. With pleasure and longing, I watched the Horn and Hardart’s Children’s Hour, where talented children performed, and the most gorgeous little girls in the world sang and danced.

  Later, as I grew and regained the ability to walk, I persisted in watching. By the age of 15, beguiled by the beautiful Golden Age of Television, I began to think I could write plays. Thi
s was a period known for its live, televised dramas: shows like the Philco Television Playhouse and Playhouse 90, featuring original dramas by young writers like Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky, and young directors like Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, and John Frankenheimer. Stunning and ambitious works like Marty, Days of Wine and Roses, and Requiem for a Heavyweight were performed live in those years before video tape recording, with stars like Ernest Borgnine, Jack Palance, Piper Laurie, and Cloris Leachman. (Many of these plays for television would soon be made into films.) Even as a teenager, I could see that some of these impressive productions seemed like movies in their style and their use of strong shots and cinematic expression; and without exception, the best of those were the work of John Frankenheimer, who later became a successful film director with many great films under his belt. I’d say that my notion of Live Cinema was hatched while watching Frankenheimer’s work in live television, and something of that work remains with me to this day.

  What I hope to accomplish in this book is to lay out the idea of Live Cinema and explore its techniques, as well as its possible benefits and apparent limitations. My perspective is that of a director who grew up on live television; who had early training in the theater; and who has spent a lifetime working as a screenwriter, producer, and director of movies. I have long dreamt of working in all these ways at once: in some form of Live Cinema. The technology continues to change, providing new answers to the questions “What for?” and “Why give up control?” How does Live Cinema differ from theater, television, and conventional cinema? Much of what I will discuss here was learned through intense personal reflection, and during two experimental workshops which involved using sections of my work in progress, a long (screen) play entitled Dark Electric Vision.

  1

  PROOF-OF-CONCEPT WORKSHOPS

  After several actor readings of my script I decided to do something more like a staged reading. This process evolved into phases of trying to perform sections of the story that would be performed live, and broadcast to some select theaters for viewing. When I made the decision to do a workshop to explore the possibility of Live Cinema, my original thought was to find a place where repertory actors might be available to “try out” some pages of my script, perhaps with some modest staging. I quickly learned that repertory actors are very busy and over-scheduled. I considered Austin, Texas, a city with some production activity, where I could go and try out ideas in some privacy. But local film production was ongoing, and most resources there were already well booked. Then I thought of Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC), where a long-time associate of mine, Gray Frederickson, was on the faculty. Gray had previously asked me to speak there in order to help raise money for a new facility. The idea eventually emerged to conduct a class during which we’d try out some 50 or so pages of my script, and cast with local Oklahoma City repertory actors in a workshop.

  Plan in hand, I arrived in Oklahoma City on April 10, 2015. I did the preliminary local casting, which included some actors from nearby Dallas. I prepared some 70 OCCC students in the various crew positions, and came back in May and spent six weeks there on the project, rehearsing, experimenting with sets and cameras, and eventually broadcasting a live performance to a number of private screening rooms. I learned so much during this time that about a year later I wanted to do a second workshop, to add new areas of learning. These were some of my new concerns:

  1.Could I integrate large numbers of costumed extras into scenes shot in one day, augmenting them to principal actors and using EVS machines? (I’m going to mention the EVS a lot, otherwise known in slang as the “ELVIS,” which is an amazing machine, technically a replay server.)

  2.Could I create shots in camera by using lightweight scenic panels and props rather than stage on sets and props as is done normally?

  3.Could I play scenes in Italian dialect, with subtitles that are dynamic and expressive on different places in frame and different sizes?

  4.Could I end with a spectacular live stunt?

  5.Could I smoothly switch between live cameras and camera shots previously recorded on EVS?

  I knew that if I could come up with answers to these questions, the second experimental workshop would be a success and worth the money and effort it would take.

  THE BASIC UNIT

  Often, an artistic discipline has a basic unit out of which the whole is built. In prose literature, and really all writing, be it journalism or the novel, the basic unit is the sentence. If you have a great sentence, and it is followed by others that result in a great paragraph, joined by other paragraphs building up to yield a great chapter, you’re on the way to a great book. In my OCCC workshop, I learned that in Live Cinema as in conventional cinema, the basic unit of the cinema is the shot. Shots tell the story. As we have learned from the silent film era, a shot can be a short component within a structure of shots that are then cut together in order to provide a great sequence. Or it can be long and complex, and tell much of the story itself, as in a Yasujiro Ozu film, or its opposite, a Max Ophuls film shot with extensive camera movement.

  “A shot can be a word, but it’s better when it’s a sentence.” For many years, I’ve had notes I’d written pinned up above my work area on a bulletin board marked “FC NOTES ON STORY AND CHARACTER.”

  1.Character is revealed by behavior.

  2.A story can be told through unique moments between its principal characters.

  3.The memorable moment is often unspoken.

  4.Something needs to happen.

  5.Emotion. Passion. Surprise. Awe.

  6.The shot can be a word, but it’s better when it’s a sentence.

  7.Audiences want to become involved with the characters, want that involvement developed.

  8.Beware of the cliché, the predictable.

  9.Audiences want themselves and their lives explained and illuminated.

  In a recent phone call, my daughter Sofia told me she also had my same list pinned up, and she asked, “What does it mean the shot can be a word but it’s better when it’s a sentence?” In trying to remember what I had meant, I had to remind her (and myself) of two extreme poles of the concept of the “shot,” these being films made by Ophuls and Ozu. Ozu (1903–1963) was a film director and screenwriter working throughout his lifetime in the Japanese cinema. In his long career, during which he turned from comedies to serious films, he had a unique style: his camera rarely if ever moved, and he held a beautifully composed shot for the duration of the scene. This lack of camera movement made each entrance and exit of characters very dynamic, as they moved in and out of the frame from left to right, right to left, back to front, front to back. Every shot in an Ozu film is a unit of importance, like a brick in a beautiful masonry wall. Max Ophuls (1902–1957), by contrast, used a style in which the camera almost never stopped moving. A German-born director working in Germany, France, and the United States, he was well known by the short poem written by actor James Mason:

  A shot that does not call for tracks

  Is agony for poor old Max.

  Pure and simple, these two opposing cinematic styles came home to me early in my career, as I was caught between the disparate styles of two of the world’s greatest cinematographers, Gordon Willis (The Godfather) and Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now). I learned well. For the classic style used in The Godfather, each shot was meant as a brick in the structure of the scene, which then became a design of a great wall of bricks. One should never, according to Willis, include everything in the shot, or else there’d be no reason to cut to the next shot. The overall effect was created by the placement of each shot in relation to the next. Storaro, on the other hand, wished the camera to be used as a moving pen, gliding from element to element in Apocalypse Now.

  What I finally explained to Sofia (and myself) was that the shot could be like a word, in that it expresses a simple idea: for example, in a “shot of town hall” the word means “here.” Or it could be like a sentence: a shot of town hall, with the shadow of a lynched man cas
t upon it, could be read as “Here, justice is often abused.”

  THE LANGUAGE OF LIVE CINEMA

  So, in cinema the basic unit is the shot, as in theater the basic unit is the scene. In television the basic unit is the event. Whether for a sporting event or a live television play, one is forced to get what shots one can to cover the event. In cinema, on the other hand, we carefully design not only the shot but the magical effect that comes when one shot is cut to another, known as montage.

  Filmmakers have known from the beginnings of the art that one shot cut to another may yield a meaning contained in neither. The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein astonished the world in the 1920s with the power of such juxtaposition, and even the earliest pioneers of cinema knew that a shot of a heroine tied to the train track when intercut with a shot of a speeding locomotive would produce great emotion felt by the audience.

  In theater, of course, such pictorial collisions were rarely if ever used. The basic unit of that medium is the scene. The scenes play differently each night because the audiences are different, and each night the actors learn to play the scenes according to the response of the audience that is engaging with them.

  Whether the basic unit is the shot as in cinema, the event as in television, or the scene as in theater, one could say that basic unit is the emotional moment; how that moment is achieved differs in each.

  It was clear in my first workshop at OCCC that even in Live Cinema, each shot had to be specific and capable of being cut against other shots; in other words, clear, specific shots were needed in order for the storytelling to go forward with cinematic syntax. Otherwise, the shots would merely be coverage of the components of play-like scenes, such as the close, medium, and long shots of characters used in televising a play. I wanted to achieve a cinema-like expression, which required that the shots not just be coverage, but real building blocks in the cinematic telling of the story.