Optical and Special Effects - Text 7
The personal accounts of some cinematographers, however, reveal that the daring visual feats imagined by directors and made possible by the sophisticated cameras manufactured by Pathé, Bell & Howell, Mitchell and Debrie, were not without causing some anguish in camera crews. For back in the day when optical and special effects were produced with the camera during the principal photography, crews operated with little margin for error: one bad take and the whole trick shot or sequence – often made up of several scenes filmed in multiple locations, or with different backgrounds – had to be started over. The director Allan Dwan explained to Kevin Brownlow what happened when he decided to link no fewer than twenty-seven large spectacular scenes with dissolves in one of his early films, The Restless Spirit (1913):
The cameraman [Walter Pritchard] would start on the first scene, and at a certain point I’d say “Fade,” and he’d start to count, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,” and he’d be out. It was faded. And he’d mark that number down. Now when we’re ready for the second scene, he’d have to black his camera out, wind back eight, and we’d be ready to start. He’d fade in, and the scene would go on until I said “Ready – fade,” and he’d count again and fade out.
He had to do that twenty-five times on one piece of film. Any mistake on any one of them would wreck the whole works. Now the thing was sensational. When it went into the theater, people stood up and cheered. Everyone wondered how we did it. And I got a letter from Griffith about it. But the cameraman was so nervous that by the time he had fifteen of them on there, he’d take that roll of film and sleep with it! And he’d get up with his notes in the middle of the night and work it out to see if his numbers were right. When he put it in the camera his hands would shake so much that his assistant would have to take it away from him to be sure it was reloaded exactly at the same spot. I guess I was showing off a little. Twenty-five dissolves! It was a task to give a cameraman – I thought afterward it was a mean thing to do.[6]
Cinematographer James Wong Howe confided to George C. Pratt that a well-meaning mistake he had committed while employed as assistant to Alvin Wyckoff on the set of Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female (1919) had ruined a complex sequence near completion:
Now when we came back, they had made a dissolve – I didn’t know what dissolves were in those days. Anyway, Mr. Wyckoff bought a new tripod with an aluminum head. So he said: “Be sure to keep this tripod head clean.” I used to polish it, oh, beautifully. Well, we’d gone to lunch, I came back and I happened to look at the tripod and I saw writing all over it – a lot of “fd,” “fi,” “fo,” “fi,” “des,” and then figures like “32,” “46” an “out at 57, in at 58.” And I said: “Who’s been writing all over this tripod?” So I got the rag and I wiped it all off. So, somehow or other, Mr. DeMille stopped work after lunch and we put all the equipment away. Next morning I brought the equipment. I set the camera up and put it on the set, and I heard Mr. DeMille say: “All right, Alvin, we’ll make the rest of that scene now.” And I noticed Mr. Wyckoff looking at the tripod, and he looked very concerned after a moment, and he called me over and he said: “Jimmie, is this my same tripod I’ve been using?” I said: “Absolutely.” He said: “ What happened to the numbers on there?” “Oh,” I said, “I wiped them all off.” He said: “Oh, my God! My God!” […] What happened was that they were making a dissolve of Gloria Swanson and Bebe Daniels arguing and they dissolve to cats fighting. Well, what I had done [was to destroy the record of the dissolve] when it would come in, change to the cats and change back again. We had to do it all over again… I felt very bad about it and I told Mr. Wyckoff… Mr. DeMille was very mad. However, one thing about Mr. Wyckoff, he was very fair to all the boys that worked with him. He said: “Well, Jimmie, I should have told you that. It’s not your fault really. Next time you see any numbers – writing or anything – just don’t wipe it off.”[7]
The introduction of Eastman Duplicating Film in 1926 finally made it possible to take off some of the pressure on cinematographers and their assistants by creating optical and special effects with optical printers in post-production. This, in turn, led camera manufacturers to eliminate many features previously part of units intended for studio work. (It is likely that the industry’s conversion to sound also contributed to this trend, as features and accessories were potential sources of extraneous noises.) Mitchell, for instance, announced in 1931 that it had removed from its new model the mechanism that made it possible to use the variable shutter to produced automated fades. American Cinematographer commented that this feature was “no longer needed in studio practice.”[8]
Over the following decades, studio cameras concentrated on what had always been their primary function: image capture. Most of the new features gradually introduced by manufacturers (video assist, heated eyecups, etc.) aimed to make the work of cinematographers and their assistants easier, and not to create optical and special effects during principal photography.