American Cinematographer - February 1985 - 52

Reginald Morris, BSC and

Turk 182
Donald Chase

generally
the easiest

the Queensboro Bridge were used
to tell the story of a graffiti writer

closer
see."

of director of photography
Reginald H. Morris' work on
Turk 182. Getting it on film for
director Bob Clark's large-scale,
New York City-set action drama
was quite another thing.

(Timothy Hutton) and his fight
against bureaucratic injustice.

are

Deciding

to go

for

cold, natural look

a

was

part

Overall, there

was

the

problem of striking

a

balance be¬

the desire for

a

strong sense

tween

of

background with the use of the
1:2.35 anamorphic format, long
lenses and, in night work es¬
pecially, low light levels and wide
apertures. Then there were the
specific problems arising from dif¬
ficult locations. A subway station
and tunnel, a burning building in
Brooklyn, a jail in Newark, New
Jersey, and, most difficult of all,

As for shooting
morphic, Morris says, "1

ana¬
was

elated when Bob Clark told me he
wanted to shoot Turk in the

format. I had tried to con¬
to go anamorphic on a
picture we did together in England
several years back-Murder by
Decree. Someone rather foolishly
1:2.35

vince him

told him that he shouldn't, be¬
cause he'd lose the tops of the sets.
That isn't the way to look at it-

you're not losing the tops of the
sets, you're adding to the sides,
giving yourself a whole new range
of possibilities in terms of com¬
position, and, in fact, coming

to

what the eyes

actually

But all these

advantages
counterweighted by distor¬
tion-prone wide-angle anamorphic
lenses
the very lenses most
suited to the sharp backgrounds
Morris wanted to get. "After a
struggle and much testing," he re¬
lates, "we finished up shooting the
bulk of the picture on three Panavision Superspeed lenses, the
50mm, the 75mm, and the
100mm.
But we tried to keep
them as sharp as possible by doing
-

without diffusion whenever we
could."
Also detrimental to the

depth of focus

were

the light lev¬

els
often 6 to 8 footcandles
and the apertures - commonly T2
and occasionally 1.8 and
-

-

1.4-Morris worked

at

while

shooting Turk's night exteriors.
(Outdoor night work accounted
for seven weeks of the $14 million
film's 14-week schedule.) Kodak's
5294 stock, rated at 400 ASA,
was a help here, but still, on closeups the backgrounds tended to be
of focus. Morris admits that,
rather than fight a futile battle, he
sometimes took advantage of the
out

weirdly beautiful patterns of light
he got when street lamps went out
of focus.
As for Turk 182's diffi¬

cult

locations, Morris spent two
nights on a subway-station plat¬
form and three nights in a proxi¬

mate

tunnel

sequence.

New York
party

for

a

shooting a key
Mayor of
(Robert Culp) and a

The

corrupt

of 100 wait on the platform
special train, only to discover

that "Turk

18 2"

-

as

Hutton's

graffiti writer signs himself - has
managed to stop it in the tunnel
and cover it with embarrassing sloAmerican

Cinematographer

March 1985
American Cinematographer - February 1985

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 1985
