American Cinematographer - December 1988 - 97

Charlex created
Love

a

hand-colored tribute to /

Top: Agnes Moore¬
head swings her

Lucy featuring great moments from

that show. The characters were colored on
the Paintbox frame by frame, but the black &

axe

in "The In¬

vaders." Blurred

white

figure

was cut and
video-matted over

surroundings were preserved for a
magical, nostalgic effect. A computeranimated title sequence for a batch of Star
Trek episodes followed, which was quite
successful for CBS. The Twilight Zone mon¬
tage was a natural follow-up.
The team for this project con¬
sisted mainly of four people: Charlex cre¬
ative director Alex Weil, co-designer and co¬
director Chris Harvey, Paintbox artist John

new

landscape.

Semerad, and senior editor Bill Weber.
"For The Twilight Zone montage,
CBS

much

specific about what
they wanted," Harvey notes. "Part of that
was based on the ideas of Carol Serling. She
was very involved in the definition of what
needed to be. Harry Elias of CBS was the
liaison. He spearheaded the job from the
executive point of view. A group decision
was

more

dictated that all the elements to be used
would come directly from the show - that
the look and feel of the artwork and the edit
should be true to the show. Naturally this
would be done in black & white. All of this
was

geared to making our piece something
TwilightZone fans would love

that hard-core
to see.

"We weren't going to do some¬
thing that was too whacked-out. It could not
overpower the show; it couldn't look so
technically and conceptually modern, or
advanced than the show.
"After many meetings, it was
Alex's idea to use great moments from great
more

episodes, and to use 'film cutouts' Beyond
that, he left it up to me, working closely with
him, to make all the audio and visual selects
and

pair them together.
"Alex and I

are

Twilight Zone

fans," he points out, "so we started working
from what we remembered as great mo¬

Everybody remembers Burgess Mer¬
feeling around for his glasses in Time
Enough at Last'. Everybody remembers
Agnes Moorehead swinging her hatchet in
ments.

edith

The Invaders'. So it became

a

'name that

episode' montage. We found that many of
our colleagues shared the same memories."
The style of the montage went
through several stages. Initially, Weil and
Harvey considered a more disparate
approach - the audio from one episode and
the picture from another. Or, with a little
closer sync, there would be corresponding
audio and video, but from different mo¬
ments. Some of that came through in the
final edit - the cut-out image of Nehemiah

Persoff from the episode "Judgment Night",
for example, showed the actor reeling back
in teror. The moment was taken as he was

being torpedoed by
Tracked

over

a German U-boat.
this was his line "I know we're

being stalked!" from an earlier moment of
deja vu.
Chris Harvey had all the epi¬
sodes

on

one-inch masters. "I made many

rough cuts of various audio and video mon¬
tages. Alex and I discussed what worked
and what didn't, and drove toward a more

hard-hitting edit. We wanted surrealism but
didn't want to enter the obscurities of
Salvador Dali.

December 1988

"Actually,

earlier ideas were
going to cut out
phone dangling in
'Night Call', the sign post from The Mon¬
sters are Due on Maple Street', and from
them make as a background this endless,
Daliesque landscape. But it seemed too
esoteric. I also had a piece of glass in Jack
Klugman's hand from the episode 'In Praise
of Pip', after he careens into the Hall of
Mirrors. We ended up using a shot of Jack
embracing his son, which was much warm¬
our

very surreal. We were
abstract pieces, like the

er

and less abstract.
"Another idea

classic episode

American

came

from the

'Walking Distance'. I used

Cinematographer

a

95
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