American Cinematographer - February 1984 - 38

use of space and color: "When they first started using
CinemaScope, they figured you had to fill the whole
image with picture. Well, Cukor and Gene Allen de¬
cided to leave parts of the screen in darkness or to only
use a section of the screen. The technique of isolating
sections of the screen is used throughout the picture.
"The picture was very carefully de¬
signed over the huge expanse of CinemaScope," Haver
said. "Every single image was carefully worked out and
thought out."
Allen, on the subject of the design
and composition of the movie said, "1 worked with
Leavitt on every single shot. I'd ride the crane and look
through the finder, with him encouraging me, because
it was new to him, too. We found out that by putting
certain verticals in, it would divide the space so that it
didn't seem so long."
"It's a technique," Haver adds, "de¬
rived from various painters. Especially Degas. Cukor
was a great student of art. He got his ideas for com¬
position, especially for lighting, from his study of
paintings. Gene Allen and George Hoyningen-Huene
backed him up on it."
George Hoyningen-Huene, a still
photographer, who became Cukor's "color consul¬
tant" on almost every picture Cukor made after A Star
Is Born, is as integral to the look of the picture as
Leavitt and Allen. Hoyningen-Huene advised Cukor
on how to use color and how to take out color. They
treated space and color "deferentially."

This deferential

treatment

of space

and color is endemic to the Cukor film style. He "de¬
ferred" to the problems of CinemaScope and the inher¬

problems of the Eastman 5248 color stock; and, by
deferring to those problems, made them work for the
style of the picture he wanted to make.
An example is the way Cukor and
Hoyningen-Huene subtracted color. Ron Haver de¬
scribes it as, "Instead of using lots and lots of color,
which was the thing you were supposed to do in those
days, they kept subtracting color. So the primary color
scheme is very natural, subdued pastels, no blatant
reds, no blatant anything. It's all very, very dark, even
the daylight sequences."
ent

Judy Garland

as

in the

original
costuming and
staging of "The Man
That Got Away"
seen

musical sequence
which was

subsequently re¬
designed and re ¬
shot. Footage of the
initial version

was

That dark color scheme, and the ad¬

rediscovered during
the reconstruction of

ditional 30 minutes added to the re-release, 30 minutes
that explore the relationship between James Mason's

the

Norman Maine and

picture.

Judy Garland's Esther Blodgett,

gives the movie a weight and resonance that is very
atypical of movie musicals.
The only movie musical that has du¬
plicated the dark color schemes and undertone of A
Star Is Born is Martin Scorsese's New York, New

York. Laszlo Kovacs, ASC,

shot that picture in much
Sam Leavitt shot A Star Is Born, in a
controlled, darkly picturesque style, "the musical noir"
the

same

way

style.
As critic Pauline Kael notes,

"The
entertaining noir movie usually had some neurotic ten¬
sion." A Star Is Born, in charting the romance of Nor¬
man Maine and Esther Blodgett, contains that neurotic
tension
in Cukor's original version. A large portion
of the tension is played off the backdrop of Cukor's
particular Los Angeles, a Los Angeles that, in a sense, is
used as an unofficial Greek chorus; commenting on
and underscoring the relationships in the movie.
-

"They carefully tailored all the back¬
material to give you a sense of the huge,
majestic sweep of L.A.," Haver said. As an example,
Haver mentions a sequence where Garland, after a
quarrel with Mason's Norman Maine, has run away.
Mason has tracked her to an apartment building,
where she is up on the roof, drying her hair. "The
backdrop is a process plate looking over the entire city,
spread out at night, with all the lights. You couldn't
possibly get that view from the apartment in reality."
Cukor, with a great deal of delibera¬
tion, set up the nature of their romance by giving the
audience what he described as the "spectacular vista of
the whole city from this ugly, dreary roof." Maine
offers the magic of a "Hollywood" Los Angeles as
opposed to the grim Los Angeles she inhabits.
"Cukor was terrific at picking views
that stated what the city looked like, felt like, and how
drop

process

it located

to

itself," Haver said.
And if the city didn't quite conform
the reality he was creating, Cukor altered the city,

through the magic of process photography. Gene Allen
points out one such alteration in the scenes at the
prologue of the movie, which feature a premiere at the
Shrine Auditorium. The sequence, shot with hand held
cameras, involves process photography.
"It's a terribly exciting sequence,"
Allen said, "which was very difficult to do. Part of it
was stolen. We took the cameras and put them on the
roof,

the street from Grauman's Chinese, where
premiering The Robe.
"So, if you watch, you'll see the
Shrine Auditorium, which is in downtown L.A., and
Grauman's Chinese, which is on Hollywood Boule¬

they

across

were

vard, become

one

unit."

Another, subtler
shot

occurs

toward the end of the

use of a process
picture, just before

James Mason walks into the ocean to commit suicide.
He is at his beach house, looking out on the ocean and
surrounded by windows and sliding glass doors. Ma¬
son, reflected in all this glass, is on one side of the
screen; the ocean, reflected in the glass, is on the other
side of the screen. The juxtaposition of the reflected

February 1984
American Cinematographer - February 1984

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