American Cinematographer - May 2002 - 54

Caught in a Quagmire
Shooting in the
grand ballroom
of the Biltmore
Hotel in
downtown Los

Angeles,
director of

photography
Stephen
Goldblatt, ASC,
BSC used a
combination of
crane

and

Steadicam work
to

capture

couples swirling
around the
dance floor at
the

Inaugural
Ball.

second

film

The

term.

was

Frankenheimer's first collaboration
with Goldblatt, whose credits

include

the recent

Emmy-nominated HBO
Conspiracy and the features
Deep End ofthe Ocean (see AC March
'99), Batman Forever (AC July '95),
The Prince of Tides, Lethal Weapon
telefilm

and The Cotton Club.
On Path to War,

Goldblatt

initially considered making the film's
colors highly saturated at the begin¬
ning of the story and then, as the
mood evolves from exhilaration to

Super 16mm, however, Path to War
shot on 35mm.) "The range in a

scenes are

almost monochromatic. He ulti¬

mately rejected that approach, feel¬
ing it was too obvious. Instead, he
decided

to

make Path

to War

look

as

In

tion television masters for
as

well

as

broadcast,

VHS and DVD masters.

Cinesite

color-timer

Mike

Bellamy, who had worked with
Goldblatt on Conspiracy, teamed
with him again for Path to War. "We
talked to Kodak and watched

archival

footage to

see

the

some

way

the

constructed back in the

an

look

effort to achieve

as

realis¬

possible, Goldblatt and
Frankenheimer spent many hours
studying a book of black-and-white
photographs taken by Johnson's
White House photographer. The
tic

a

book

was

as

within Goldblatt's reach

throughout production, and he
acknowledges that many of his initial
setups were actually taken from the
book. Likewise, newsreels and other

archival

footage had

effect

the film's visual

tremendous
style.
As an example, Goldblatt
points to the film's opening scene,
which depicts Johnson's inaugural
ball. Reflecting what he had seen in
documentary footage of the event,
on

a

Goldblatt started the sequence in
slow motion - the only time that

though it had been shot

Sixties," Bellamy recalls. "We paid
close attention to what the reds and

device is used in the film. The shot,

have been used in the mid-1960s.

yellows looked like and to the satura¬
tion, so that we might replicate [the
look]. We didn't get into grain struc¬

the Biltmore Hotel in Los

Goldblatt

knew

that

this

approach would require a digital film
intermediate,

a

method he had used

for the first time

Conspiracy.
(Whereas Conspiracy was shot on

May 2002

so

stocks

on period
film stock - that is, stock that would

48

limited

compared to a
telecine suite," he notes. "By
[making] a digital intermediate you
can adjust color, contrast, density,
hue and midrange. When finished,
you output the data back onto a
negative, which can then be printed
traditionally and released on film." A
digital intermediate is also used to
generate high- and standard-defini¬
lab is

dejection, progressively desaturating
the colors until the final

actually disrupting the image."

was

on

ture,

were

because what

more

about

we were

evoking

a

after

was

feeling than

filmed in the

lOO'-long ballroom at
Angeles,
begins inside a large chandelier
hanging in the center of the room.
The

camera

is 25'-30' in the air

on a

Chapman Lenny Arm, peering
American Cinematographer - May 2002

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