American Cinematographer - January 2008 - 83

membership by Charles G. Clarke, ASC (Miracle on 34th Street), one of his mentors at the University of California-Los Angeles. “I really hadn’t done very much up to that point, mostly TV shows, so I felt a little unworthy and intimidated at first,” he recalls. “But I guess they saw some potential in me.” Burum earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UCLA at a unique moment in the school’s history, when the cinema faculty in the fledgling theater-arts department was populated by semi-retired or retired filmmakers who had worked at 20th Century Fox during the classical Hollywood era; many had credits dating to the silent days. “Kenneth Macgowan was instrumental in the formation of the theater-arts program, and he’d been a producer at Fox, so he had a lot of contacts there,” explains Burum. “When someone retired or became too ill to work at the studio, he’d bring them into the classroom, so our stages became like mini Fox stages. He brought in Arthur Ripley, who’d directed and written Chaplin pictures, and Dorothy Arzner, who’d cut all the Valentino pictures before she moved up to directing. “This was the late ’50s/early ’60s, before there were ‘film students,’ and we theater-arts majors were social pariahs,” he continues. “Our film professors actually discouraged us because they thought the industry was going to die off.” Their warnings did not deter him, however. “When you’re young, you always think you’ll get a job somehow.” Burum entered college certain he wanted to be a cinematographer, but he did not focus on that goal until his junior year. “UCLA’s theater-arts curriculum was a great, classical Beaux-Arts education,” he notes. “For the first two years, we took basic theater courses — acting, writing, directing, scenery, sound, costumes, lighting, makeup and so on — and we all had to crew on shows. Everyone had to take a survey course on the history of theater, and we all had to take more literature classes than the world has ever known. In the junior year, you declared a major, and one of those was motion pictures.” As a graduate student, Burum was the permanent cinematographer in Arzner’s intermediate workshop. “She probably taught me more than anybody else,” he says. “I shot more than 70 student films, and she was the faculty adviser on most of them. In those days, when you shot a student project, the adviser was always on set in case you had questions. Miss Arzner was very clever about helping students. If you were in trouble, she’d say, ‘You know, what I’ve always liked about your film is …,” and she’d tell you what your picture was about. Or, if the director was about to make a misstep, she’d say, ‘Steve, you know that’s wrong; don’t let him do that.’ So I’d tell the director what he should do, and she’d come over and say, ‘You can’t say that, he’s the director.’ She taught you from the beginning where your place was and how far you could go. “She was really classy, which was typical of that generation,” he adds. “She always said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen make motion pictures.’ She’d never let anyone swear or be nasty, and she treated students like colleagues.” Another instructor with valuable lessons to offer was director Henry Koster (The Robe). “He taught us there’s more than one way to do a scene, and it’s valid to do it in Photos on pp.82-83 courtesy of Stephen H. Burum. Opposite: On the set of The Escape Artist (1982), director of photography Stephen H. Burum, ASC checks his meter for a shot of Griffin O’Neal as first-time director and future ASC member Caleb Deschanel looks on. This page, above: Burum (standing next to the camera, wearing glasses and plaid shirt) shoots the student film Queen of the 4 Crowds at UCLA in 1961. Below: Burum and director/ choreographer David Winters on location in Mexico for Raquel! (1970). American Cinematographer 83

American Cinematographer - January 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2008