American Cinematographer - March 1988 - 56

GOOD STUFF
BACK
You're

shooting mostly tape
these days. You don't wait for
dailies any more. You don't
worry about negative scratches,
hairs in the gate, or sending col¬
lapsible cores to the lab.
Yet, you miss having tools
that help you create a really
superb image: A top notch
matte box system, for example.
Now you can get

the good

stuff back.

quality of life into the scene to cre¬
ate the impression of movement. It
was Mike Nichols who
suggested
that suspending the camera from a
series of bungee cords would create
the proper sway to convey the mo¬
tion of a train. "This is especially
significant," Butler laughs, "when
you realize that this was not a small
film, this

was a

film where I could

afford to have

anything I wanted. I
had every modern convenience
standing by, including Panaglide
and

a

Louma crane! Here

we are

with all this

high-tech equipment
and the director recalls trying to
recreate an irregular ride using
bungee cords!
"The next morning, we
had the rig built. Our New York
crew
was
very good and they
quickly produced this device that
suspended the camera from bun¬
gee cords and gave us a very realis¬
tic look. We'd give it a little push
and then the bungees would pull it
back, and it's that action and

reac¬

tion that

The Geocam 4*4 Univer¬
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tact

produced the kind of
movement you'd expect to see on a
train that was rocking and rolling. I
couldn't help but laugh that we had
all the equipment you could name
and the thing we liked best was so
simple."
Simplicity remained the
keynote of the production, for the
most part, when things shifted
from New York stages to a real mili¬
tary base near Fort Smith, Arkan¬
sas. For a parade sequence utilizing
dozens of troops and several tanks,
Butler used a symmetrical field to
be able to flop the action in order to
make continuous use of backlight¬
ing throughout the day, no small
feat on such a large scale. "We're
talking about a lot of people out on
that parade ground, so when we
wanted to turn the field around and

reposition everybody, or move a
tank back into position - well, they
don't go quickly, and that's a lot
of work for the production people.
Everything we did was a big num¬
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film this size, and we

could make the

picture

we

wanted

make."

Much of the action of the

Army base takes place in the bar¬

(201) 672-2223
54

a

people to
keep that cooperation going so we
to

GEOCAM CORP.

on

needed lots and lots of

March 1988

racks of Fort

Chaffee, which

were

virtually intact and unchanged
from the day they were built at the
height of World War II - except for
one
slight detail. "I've been in ex¬
actly the same situation we were
filming," Butler recalls, "and my
memories helped me to get it accu¬
rate. For example, when I first went
into the barracks we were going to
shoot in, it had an air conditioner

running down the center, and it just
so
happens that I didn't remember
any
air conditioner running
through any barracks I've ever
seen, so they ripped the whole
thing out. That's the only change
we

made in the barracks, but reach¬

ing for that kind of realism is impor¬
tant. Little things like that can
really bug somebody in the theater
who has similar memories of that

period, so we tried to be accurate.
Fortunately, the barracks we used
were
in very good condition they'd been maintained - so it was
an ideal
place to shoot."
Using a real barracks cre¬
ated its own set of problems as well,
Butler explains: "A barracks is ba¬
sically a long tunnel, so it's excep¬
tionally difficult to handle the
lighting and to make the shots con¬
sistent all the way up and down the
length of it. Naturally, I used'the
windows in the barracks to bring
the light from the HMIs I set up
outside in for my daylight lighting,
while at night the natural lighting
inside the barracks helped make it
look right."
That is, when they shot
the night shots at night. "Because
of the production schedule and be¬
cause it's
cheaper to shoot day for
night, for a great part of the filming
we
found ourselves shooting a
night scene through the barracks
windows," Butler says wrily. "The
strange things you'll do on a film
like this! We went all the way down
to

Arkansas to this natural loca¬

tion,

a

real barracks, and then

had to build
scene

an

artificial

we

night

outside the windows! You

talk about

insanity in this business!
Many's the day we shot night
scenes in the
daytime, and right
outside the window we placed a
photomural night scene of the bar-
American Cinematographer - March 1988

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