9
Technological Innovation and Aesthetic Response

I like to compare this revolution [in cinematography] of fast lenses plus pushed development to painting…. Impressionism also came out of a technological discovery, which was the tube of oil paint, as opposed to being limited to paint you had to prepare and mix yourself. The tubes were now ready-made, so you just took them in a box, went any place. You could paint Notre Dame at different hours of the day as Monet did…. So, in the case of cinematography as well: if we are doing things now that have not been done before, it is not only because of a revolution out of our genius, but also because nowadays you can do things you could not do before.

Nestor Almendros, ASC, c. 1980

While the 1970s didn't experience a technological-economic revolution on the order of the conversion to sound in the late 1920s, or to widescreen in the early 1950s, the decade witnessed a series of innovations and refinements that changed the way films were made for the rest of the century. These innovations came in three main areas: cinematography (lens and camera technology, stabilization systems and camera mounts); special effects (traveling matte photography, video and motion-control systems); and sound recording and playback (Dolby stereo optical sound, Dolby surround). Many were based on computers' increasing capacity to precisely regulate certain mechanical operations essential to production and on video's developing capability to monitor those operations and facilitate their remote control. These circumstances worked together to make the technology of filmmaking lighter, more flexible, and therefore more responsive to the wide variety of location contexts in which production now took place. Concurrent innovations in projection technology made exhibition more cost-effective and contributed to the spread of multiplex theaters.

Cinematography

Cinematography in the 1970s acquired a distinctive look that was characterized by the use of heavy lens diffusion, the introduction of fast lenses that could register images at very low levels of light, and the practice of "pushing" the film in the lab—overdeveloping it to increase its speed, thus accommodating enhanced lighting effects. The increased use of diffusion was an aesthetic phenomenon, seemingly a reaction to the high image definition made possible by recent refinements in film stock. Glass diffusion filters, or "fog filters," were long used to simulate fog or soften images in close-up, but cinematographers in the 1970s employed them for the first time throughout entire films to reduce image sharpness and stylize their work.¹ The introduction of fast lenses and overdevelopment, on the other hand, produced a technological revolution in cinematography that Nestor Almendros—one of the great cinematographers of the 1970s—compared to the revolution that occurred in painting in the late nineteenth century when premixed tubes of oil paint became widely available.²

The invocation of painting is instructive because a new aesthetic consciousness entered American cinematography during the 1970s, and the cameraman became an auteurist cult figure second only to the director. (As for direction, with The Director's Event [1969] and The Film Director as Superstar [1970], the titles of two popular books published early in the decade—Hollywood Cameramen: Sources of Light [1970] and Behind the Camera: The Cinematographer's Art [1971]—were indicative of this newly heightened status.)³ The change was partly driven by an influx of European cameramen (Almendros, for example, had worked extensively with Rohmer and Truffaut), who found themselves able to work, with notable restrictions, in the American industry for the first time since its unionization in the 1920s. But it was cemented by young American cameramen, many from the East Coast, who ultimately took control of the closed-shop Hollywood cinematographers' union Local 659, International Photographers of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), ending its monopolistic control of high-paying jobs and lowering the rigid barriers to entry into the profession.⁴ (Cinematographers had unionized and affiliated with IATSE, an AFL union, in 1928.)

Local 659 And Other Barriers To Entry

Until the 1970s, Local 659 was the most conservative of all Hollywood unions, restricting the number of persons who could serve as directors of photography (DPs) to 200 of its senior members. Since only approved union members could be hired by unionized major studios, these 200 cameramen (who were by the mid-1960s all age sixty and over) dominated the profession.⁵ When Conrad Hall (b. 1926), Haskell Wexler (b. 1926), Laszlo Kovacs (b. 1932), and Vilmos Zsigmond (b. 1930)—the four leading cinematographers of the early 1970s—began working in the 1960s, each had to overcome this archaic set of union rules before they could become DPs. (Kovacs and Zsigmond had emigrated together from Hungary after the 1956 revolution, which they documented in some 30,000 feet of film that was ultimately sold to CBS. They were both trained at the Budapest film academy, 1952-1956, but spent their entire professional careers in the American industry.) Most worked first as non-union cameramen for television or low-budget exploitation films, such as those produced by AIP, before breaking into the union, then struggled up its stepladder structure to become Group One cinematographers (who could plan camera set-ups and lighting but were not allowed to operate their own cameras) and full-fledged DPs. (Because of their early status as outsiders, Hall, Wexler, Kovacs, Zsigmond, and Owen Roizman [see below] made a pact never to take over a picture from another cameraman without that individual's approval.)⁶

The barriers to entry into the profession were considerable. As late as 1975, ten young cameramen, including Tak Fujimoto and Andrew Davis, filed a class action suit against Local 659 charging that they had been illegally denied entrance to the union, and therefore to jobs. (The suit was later settled out of court.) Moreover, if a production company wished to hire a foreign-born cameraman (as, for example, when BBS wanted to hire Almendros for a film to be entitled "Gone Beaver" in 1972), union regulations required that the film also employ a "standby" cameraman from its membership ranks, adding significantly—often prohibitively—to its costs.⁷ Furthermore, the Immigration and Naturalization Service required union support before granting a temporary work permit to the foreign cameraman, and such support was rarely forthcoming within the West Coast jurisdiction of Local 659.⁸ (Outside California, productions fared somewhat better—the great Belgian cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet was given permission to shoot Arthur Penn's Mickey One in Chicago in 1965, and Czech cameraman Miroslav Ondricek shot Taking Off for Milos Forman in Manhattan in 1968, with the tacit support of the New York local. However, Local 659 even made it difficult for American cinematographers from out-of-state to work in Hollywood—as when it refused to let New York-based Gordon Willis work on Hal Ashby's Harold AND Maude in 1971.)

Some directors were able to employ foreign cinematographers when they shot on location in Southern right-to-work states—Monte Hellman used Almendros on Cockfighter (1974), which was shot in Georgia; and Robert Altman hired French cameraman Jean Boffety to shoot Thieves Like Us (1974) on location in Mississippi.⁹ The turning point arrived in 1978, when producer Dino De Laurentiis threatened to move King of the Gypsies (Frank Pierson, 1978) out of New York City if Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, a frequent collaborator of Bergman, was not allowed to work on it.¹⁰ The dispute was resolved by the New York local in De Laurentiis's favor, and an important precedent was established for flexing union rules. Yet when the Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Bernardo Bertolucci's cameraman, 1970-1978, and the DP on Apocalypse Now [Francis Ford Coppola, 1979]) arrived in Hollywood to shoot the last five days of Warren Beatty's Reds (1981), having already shot the rest of it on international locations, Local 659 objected to his working in their jurisdiction and demanded that the film be finished by a union man—who was credited as "Director of Photography" while Storaro was given only a "Photographed By" credit. (In a letter to the American Society of Cinematographers, Storaro described this as "an act against the cinematographers of all nations as authors of their own work; an act against the very membership of the union in question; and act against the magic of the 'literature of light'—photography.")¹¹ Nevertheless, the Academy voted Storaro its award for Best Cinematography for his work on Reds (as it had done for Apocalypse Now), and although they were still prevented from working on union films produced in Hollywood, between 1978 and 1984 foreign cameramen took that award exclusively, so great had their stylistic influence become.¹²

New Cinematographers Enter the Industry Mainstream (and Help to Change its Course)

Yet during the 1970s the union began responding to an influx of younger men who would ultimately change the practice of cinematography in the American cinema—Hall, Wexler, Kovacs, Zsigmond, and a handful of dynamic others. Some were film school graduates like William Fraker (b. 1923) who had chosen to become cameramen precisely to bridge the generation gap created by the new producers and directors who came to dominate the youth-conscious Hollywood of the late 1960s (many of whom found it uncomfortable to work with older cinematographers and their preconceived notions about style dating from the studio era). In films such as Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968), Fraker was among the first to use heavily diffused light, making it an available fashion for colleagues like Conrad Hall, whose use of it for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) helped to win him an Academy Award. (Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here [Abraham Polonsky, 1969] is actually a better example of the technique.) Hall shot five features during the 1970s, and was particularly admired for his 1930s-style "period" photography on The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger, 1975). Fraker, who had been Hall's camera operator on The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966), shot several distinctively stylized films in the next decade, including Rancho Deluxe (Frank Perry, 1975), Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977), Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977), Heaven Can Wait (Warren Beatty, 1978), and 1941 (Steven Spielberg, 1979), and also provided additional photography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), most of which was shot by Zsigmond. Haskell Wexler won an Oscar for his black-and-white cinematography in Who'S Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966), and he experimented with desaturated color as early 1967 on In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison), anticipating a major 1970s trend. Wexler directed the landmark cinema verité-style feature Medium Cool in 1969, and in the 1970s he shot such important films as American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby, 1976)—for which he won a second Academy Award—and Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978); Wexler also did the initial photography for Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), collaborated with William Fraker and Bill Butler on the photography for Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and completed Nestor Almendros's work on Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) when Almendros had to leave to work with Truffaut.

As for the Hungarians, Laszlo Kovacs became associated with long-lens, rack-focus photography in the exploitation films he shot for Richard Rush (Hell's Angels on Wheels [1967]; Psych-Out [1968]) and Peter Bogdanovich (Targets [1968]), before becoming the house cinematographer for BBS (Easy Rider [Dennis Hopper, 1969]; Five Easy Pieces [Bob Rafelson, 1970]; The King of Marvin Gardens Rafelson, 1972], etc.). Kovacs had perfected long-take, deep-space staging as a economic necessity during his low-budget days, and used it to great effect in some of the decade's most notable period pieces—Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973), At Long Last Love (1975), and Nickelodeon (1976); Scorsese's New York New York (1977); Norman Jewison's F.I.S.T. (1978); and Richard Lester's Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979). In contrast to contemporary trends, Kovacs generally avoided lens diffusion and used bright, direct light whenever possible; the best example of this sharper, more naturalistic look is probably Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975).

Vilmos Zsigmond, easily the most distinctive stylist of the decade, cultivated a darker, more "textural" style based on soft light, long lenses, elaborate diffusion, and manipulated exposure.¹³ His innovative use of filters and lab processes dramatically extended the boundaries of creative cinematography.¹⁴ As a veteran of multiple 1960s exploitation films (many of which he and Kovacs worked on together, uncredited), Zsigmond was first widely praised for the impressionistic, sepia-toned photography of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), and for the constantly moving pan-and-zoom lens choreography of Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973). He soon became the most sought-after of the New Hollywood cinematographers, creating an uncharacteristically stark and desaturated look for the natural locations of John Boorman's Deliverance (1972), and lending Steadicam-like fluidity to the Panaflex camerawork of Steven Spielberg's debut feature The Sugarland Express (1974) and radiant luminosity to his Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977; additional photography by Fraker, but Academy Award for Best Cinematography to Zsigmond). He extemporized on Vertigo's diaphanous lens diffusion for Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976), re-created the smoky haze of a steel mill town for Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978; which he won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography), and used real smoke and dust to diffuse the natural light as it would have appeared in the late nineteenth-century Wyoming of Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). From his earliest exploitation days, the majority of Zsigmond's work was in the widescreen format (the low-budget horror films he shot for Al Adamson were all in Technoscope)¹⁵—in the 1970s, he worked most often in Panavision anamorphic (the contemporary version of Cinema-Scope) and his genius for composing in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio was well known.

Several of the new breed of cameramen came from the New York teleproduction industry, where they began as assistants and operators on commercials. Among the most notable are Gordon Willis (b. 1931) and Owen Roizman (b. 1936). After he began to make features in 1970 (Loving [Irvin Kershner]; The Landlord [Hal Ashby]), Willis quickly became known as a "cinematographer's cinematographer" among his peers, but was so consistently ignored by the Academy for the rest of the decade that he was rumored to have been unofficially blackballed. (In 1983, he was finally nominated for his work on Woody Allen's Zelig.) AS Todd McCarthy has remarked, however, if there was a conspiracy against Willis it was one of artistic conservatism rather than industry politics, because Willis's dark and brooding style violated the rules of classical Hollywood cinematography more than that of any of the other new DPs.¹⁶ At its most richly evocative in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and Godfather, Part II (1974), Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976), and Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), his work influenced a whole generation of younger cameramen for whom he became, in the words of John Bailey (who filmed Boulevard Nights [Michael Pressman, 1979]; American Gigolo [Paul Schrader, 1980]; and Ordinary People [Robert Redford, 1980]), the "preeminent American cinematographer."¹⁷ Willis was particularly admired for his collaboration with production designers (e.g., Dean Tavoularis on the Godfather films) to achieve a film's overall look, and his perfectionism made him the most respected cinematographer of his generation.

Owen Roizman acquired a reputation for gritty realism in urban crime thrillers like The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, 1974); but he was extremely versatile during the 1970s, shooting bright comedies (Play It Again, Sam [Herbert Ross]; The Heartbreak Kid [Elaine May], both 1972), open-air Westerns (The Return of a Man Called Horse [Irvin Kershner, 1975]), and expressive horror films (The Exorcist [William Friedkin, 1973]; The Stepford Wives [Bryan Forbes, 1975]).¹⁸ The Roizman collaborated most closely during this period with the director Sydney Pollack (Three Days of The Condor [1975]; The Electric Horseman [1979]; Absence of Malice [1981]; Tootsie [1982]), but he also did splendid work for Sidney Lumet (Network [1976]) and Ulu Grosbard (True Confessions [1981]).

John A. Alonzo (b. 1934) is another imaginative cinematographer who helped to give the cinema of the 1970s its unique look. Working first as an actor, then as a non-union camera operator, he won recognition assisting the legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe (1899—1976) on Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966), one of the most visually innovative films of its day.¹⁹ In the early 1970s, Alonzo was DP on several low-budget independent films (for example, Roger Corman's Bloody Mama [1970]) before shooting his first mainstream feature, Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971), for which he was chosen when Local 659 refused the director permission to hire Gordon Willis (see above). After that, Alonzo worked extensively with Martin Ritt (Sounder [1972]; Pete 'N' Tillie [1972]; Conrack [1974]; Norma Rae [1979]), as well as with Mike Nichols (The Fortune [1975]), Dick Richards (Farewell, My Lovely 1975]), Michael Ritchie (The Bad News Bears [1976]), and John Frankenheimer (Black Sunday [1977]). His most remarkable work of the decade was as cinematographer for Roman Polanski's period film noir Chinatown (1974), for which he won an Academy Award. Shot in the Panavision anamorphic ratio of 2.35:1, mainly with a 40mm lens, the film was an intense collaboration among Alonzo, Polanski, and art director Richard Sylbert, and is the most successful of numerous mid-1970s films (e.g., The Day of the Locust [1975]; Gable and Lombard [Sidney J. Furie, 1976]) that attempted to evoke in color what Todd McCarthy has called "the dreamy, nostalgic look of Hollywood in the early Panchromatic Age."²⁰ By and large, the film succeds because Alonzo strove to give Chinatown what he called a "classic" look that studiously avoided gimmicks."²¹

Toward the decade's end, several younger cinematographers achieved recognition—Michael Chapman (b. 1946) for his work with Philip Kaufman (The White Dawn [1974]; Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1978]) and Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver [1976], Raging Bull [1980]); Caleb Deschanel (b. 1944) for The Black Stallion (Carroll Ballard, 1979) and Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979); and Dean Cundey for his collaborations with John Carpenter (Halloween [1978]; The Fog [1980]; Escape from New York [1981]; The Thing [1982]), which set new standards for roaming Steadicam/Panaglide photography. Other cinematographers contributing materially to the visual style of specific films during the decade were Bill Butler (b. 1921), who shot The Conversation (1974), Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975; shared credit with Fraker and Wexler), and Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978); Richard H. Kline (b. 1926), DP on King Kong (John Guillermin, 1976), Who'll Stop the Rain (Karel Reisz, 1978), and The Fury (Brian De Palma, 1978); Mario Tosi, cameraman for Hearts of the West (Howard Zieff, 1975), Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), and The Stunt Man (Richard Rush, 1978; released 1980); and Bruce Surtees (b. 1936), who worked throughout the decade with both Don Siegel (The Beguiled [1971]; Dirty Harry [1972]) and Clint Eastwood (High Plains Drifter [1973]; The Outlaw—Josey Wales [1976]), as well as with Philip Kaufman (The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid [1972]), Paul Mazursky (Blume in Love [1973]), Bob Fosse (Lenny [1974]), Arthur Penn (Night Moves [1975]), Herbert Ross (The Turning Point [1977]), and John Milius (Big Wednesday [1978]).

As they became acknowledged masters of their craft, the new cinematographers were in constant demand by producers who valued both their discipline and their creativity in the new system of freelance packaging that replaced studio-originated production during the 1970s. Those in the top echelon found themselves positioned to pick and choose their projects based on their preferences for scripts, collaborators, and the relative artistic challenge of the production—very much like star performers, except that their salaries were regulated by union scale and rarely rose above $4,000 a week (Conrad Hall's $3,500 on Fox's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in fact, was the record through 1972).²² Haskell Wexler, for example, usually signed on to projects that reflected his liberal politics (Bound for Glory [1976]; Coming Home [1978]). Gordon Willis was known to favor scripts that promised particularly tricky lighting and focus situations (such as All the President's Men [1976], with its all-fluorescent, deep-focus news-room scenes). Many cinematographers found regular collaboration with certain directors the most rewarding way to practice their art (Zsigmond worked with Altman and Cimino; Willis with Pakula and Allen; Roizman with Pollack; and Alonzo with Ritt).

Whatever their aesthetic or cultural motives, however, all were heir to innovations in lens and camera technology that represented a quantum leap over the past—and they recognized this change and gloried in it. As John A. Alonzo said of the era in 1984: "We're in a marvelous period to be cinematographers, because of the new technology that keeps coming out. We look a thousand percent better to a producer than someone like Jimmy Wong Howe did. Yet they didn't know what he went through. I mean, that man was running around with a 165-pound camera and here we run around with a 45-pound camera [the Panaflex] that you can manipulate and move around [via the Steadicam or Panaglide system]…. You can put the Panaflex in a bathroom without tak ing the walls out and shoot scenes in there…. [I]n the last ten years there have been radical changes."²³

Lens Technology and Aesthetics

Zoom Lenses: Form and Function

The use (and abuse) of the zoom lens is an unmistakeable hallmark of late 1960s' and early 1970s' film style in the United States and Europe. Most historians attribute this to the influence of television, whose cameras had been equipped with permanently mounted zoom lenses since the 1940s.²⁴ During the 1950s and 1960s, as more and more films came to be shot on location, television production techniques were adapted to feature filmmaking for their flexibility and economy. As early as 1960, for example, Hitchcock employed a television crew to shoot an entire theatrical feature (Psycho), and soon after that directors like John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate [1962]; Seven Days in May [1964]) were using television news-gathering styles to lend their films a cinema-verité-like immediacy. The zoom lens proved especially valuable in location shooting because of its capability for variable focus, since it could function as a telephoto lens at one extreme and a wide-angle lens at the other, traversing all of the stops in between. In 1963, the French Angenieux company introduced a zoom lens designed exclusively for film production with a zoom range of 10 to 1 (25mm to 250mm for 35mm cameras; 12mm to 120mm for 16mm cameras).²⁵ But American directors tended to avoid conspicuous zooms until the late 1960s, when the influence of various European "New Waves" began to be assimilated via such popular films as Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965) and Un Homme et une femme (Claude Lelouch, 1966). (Similarly influential were the snap-zooms in Richard Lester's two Beatles films A Hard Days Night [1964] and Help! [1965], which borrowed the device from cinema verité styles.) Since the zoom lens distorts optical space by either collapsing it (telephoto position) or expanding it (wide-angle position), its use in narrative features tends to be self-reflexive; in teleproduction it was largely functional—providing optical enhancement for the coverage of live events (sports and news), and in dramatic programs it was a cheap substitute for tracking.

The European new-wave cinemas employed the lens expressively to create pictorial abstraction (Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert [1964]) or to structure scenic space by hovering and focusing selectively within it (Miklos Jancso's The Round Up [1965]; The Red and the White [1967]), but when American directors embraced the zoom in the late 1960s they initially used it to isolate detail within the frame, following the practice of television. In fact, many of them were veterans of television—Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah, John Frankenheimer, Robert Altman, Robert Mulligan, Sidney Lumet, Sydney Pollack, and Stuart Rosenberg—and some indulged in orgies of self-conscious zooming in otherwise worthy films (e.g., Lumet's The Deadly Affair [1967]; Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke [1967]; Pollacks They Shoot Horses, Don't They? [1969]). Soon, however, zooming to create dramatic emphasis was blended with expressive stylization—Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde [1967]; Little Big Man [1970]) and Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch [1969]; Straw Dogs [1971]), for example, used zooms to heighten the optical violence of montage; and there was a mercifully brief fetish for using zooms to evoke the experience of tripping on LSD (The Trip [Roger Corman, 1967]; Easy Rider [Dennis Hopper, 1969]). Slow, deliberate, but dramatically ambiguous zooms punctuated several landmark films of the era (notable among them are the poignant track-out zoom-in on Alice that concludes Penn's Alice's Restaurant [1969], the crane-and-zoom through woods that begins Robert Mulligans The Other [1972], and the strangely unmotivated zoom that opens Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation [1974]), but no American directors of the 1970s were more closely associated with the aesthetics of the zoom than Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick.

Composing for the Zoom: Altman and Kubrick

Altman probably used the zoom more systematically during the 1970s than any filmmaker before or since. His most salient films in this regard are M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), and 3 Women (1977), but virtually all of his 1970s work is composed of long takes structured by panning and zooming. Robin Wood wrote of Altman during this period, "the zoom is at once his means of guiding the audience's consciousness and of asserting his own presence in the film; but he has also grasped its potential for dissolving space and undermining our sense of physical reality."²⁶ Altman's cultivation of a fast, flexible panand-zoom style went hand-in-hand with his use of actor improvisation and ensemble playing, which in turn placed considerable creative responsibility on his cinematographers. According to Vilmos Zsigmond, Altman's director of photography on McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images (1972), and The Long Goodbye, DPs had to operate their own cameras in such improvised situations in order to "grab" significant action.²⁷ By the early part of the decade, new camera viewfinders working on the principle of the single reflex lens made it possible for cinematographers to frame action more precisely than ever before, permitting the measured combination of zooming and tracking or rack focus that became the hallmark of Altman's work. Furthermore, two new high-resolution, high-speed zoom lenses had become available early in the decade—the Taylor-Hobson Cooke Varotal 5-to-1 (20mm to 100mm), and the Canon 5-to-1 (25mm to 125mm)—increasing the flexibility and precision of pan-and-zoom stylistics.²⁸

Altman's use of the zoom was essentially nondemonstrative, sometimes even subliminal, approximating the mental processes of the viewer as he or she focused, panned, and refocused on significant details within a seemingly arbitrary visual field, and it was ideally suited to his sense of American social reality as both ambiguous and random. Stanley Kubrick's resort to the zoom was more restrained and magisterial but no less decisive in terms of aesthetic design. As early as Dr. Strangelove in 1964, Kubrick had used a series of snap-zooms into the SAC bomber's control panels to bring the arming of its nuclear payload into tight close-up; and in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was shot in a 65mm anamorphic process with a Super-Panavision lens for release in 70mm Cinerama, he used several zooms as part of the elaborate special effects. But for A Clockwork Orange (1971) Kubrick envisioned the use of a 20-to-1 (24mm to 480mm) zoom lens, then manufactured by Angenieux only for 16mm filming. He rented a similar lens (25mm to 500mm) from Samuelson Film Service in London, and commissioned Ed DiGuilio of Cinema Products Corporation in Los Angeles to fit a 16mm Angenieux with a 1.6 extender so that it could be used for 35mm filming on a modified, nonreflexed Mitchell BNC camera. (Kubrick liked to own his production equipment and even built a customized location van for A Clockwork Orange.)²⁹ Renamed the Cine-Pro T9, the lens came equipped with a joystick control designed by DiGuilio to insure its fluid automatic operation, since the motorized zoom controls of the era often caused a slight vibration at the end of a movement; and it was delivered in time for use on Barry Lyndon (1975). Meanwhile, working closely with cinematographer John Alcott (DP Geoffrey Unsworth's assistant on 2001), Kubrick used the rented Samuelson lens to accomplish the slow zoom-outs that open key scenes in A Clockwork Orange (for example, those in the Korova Milkbar, and the scenes of Alex walking along the Thames), and he used multiple shorter zooms in montage sequences of violent action (the gang rape by Billyboy and his droogs; Alex's murder of the Cat Lady).

Kubrick's most elaborate use of the 20-to-i zoom was reserved for the Cine-Pro T9 in his epic Barry Lyndon (1975). The entire film was structured around a series of slow backward zooms from telephoto close-up to panoramic wide-angle, evoking the two major eighteenth-century painting genres (portraiture and landscape) and suggesting the rigidly ordered sociopolitical regime that will doom its title character. John Alcott, who remained Kubrick's DP through The Shining in 1980, told Millimeter magazine that the zoom in Barry Lyndon "was used throughout the picture integrally and not simply as a device to speed up production,"³⁰ and he later remarked of the practice to Michel Ciment: "Each time, it became an image in itself and not, as is usually the case, a means of moving from one point in space to another…. [so] each shot was a composition, like the zoom which moved out from the pistol during the duel at the river's edge."³¹ Alcott also used the telephoto end of the Cine-Pro to shoot close-ups during the film's large battle sequence, which was photographed by three cameras with lenses of various focal length moving on an 800-foot track.³² Here he anticipated the now-standard use of the zoom as if it were a straight lens; this practice, as cinematographer Mario Tosi (Hearts of the West [1975]; Carrie [1976]; The Stunt Man [1978]) has pointed out, can give a "continuity of look" to all shots in a sequence since the lens has the same optical properties (e.g., color values) at all focal lengths.³³ (Tosi further noted that, as opposed to a fixed lens, the zoom provides "much more freedom to find the frame size that fits perfectly" and can be used to make "small framing adjustments on motion during a pan to control the composition.")³⁴

By the time of the The Shining (1980), Kubrick and Alcott were composing their shots for the Steadicam rather than the zoom, although few viewers will forget the slow zoom into the model of the Overlook's hedge maze that takes us outside, via a special effect, into the real thing. That same year Angenieux began to market a 25:1 ratio zoom (25mm to 625mm) for 35mm photography, signaling that the variable focal length lens had passed through its experimental stage to become an industry standard.

Although Altman and Kubrick set the standard for the expressive use of the zoom lens during the 1970s, it is difficult to imagine most American films of the decade without it. The lens appears ubiquitously across genres, and many works would be lesser achievements for its absence. In Sydney Pollack's 1972 Western Jeremiah Johnson, photographed by Duke Callaghan, for example, long slow zoom-outs are essential to establishing the connection between the title character and the land. These rhythmic optical movements contribute to the saga-like quality of the narrative, and lend the film a majesty that straight lenses couldn't then afford. Jaws (1975), which was shot in anamorphic Panavision by Bill Butler, is largely staged in wide-angle depth, but at the crucial moment of the second shark attack on a young boy, Roy Scheider (the local sheriff), watching in horrified close-up from the beach, becomes object of a Vertigo-style track-out zoom-in that transfers his moment of psychological dislocation directly to the audience. Much of Alan J. Pakula's work of the 1970s depended on elaborate zoom effects, especially All the President's Men (1976), shot by Gordon Willis, where slow aerial pull-backs are used to show Woodward and Bernstein trapped in maze-like configurations whose shapes are perceptible only from a bird's-eye view—for example, the famous Library of Congress shot where the camera pulls up from a close shot of the two men at the card catalogue to an aerial perspective from the ceiling in what appears to be a single continuous shot (but is actually a combination of tracking, zooming, and two dissolves).³⁵ According to Willis, the most optically difficult zoom in the film was a shot of Robert Redford (Woodward) on the telephone that pulls slowly back over several minutes to reveal the entire Washington Post newsroom, with action occurring on several different focal planes during the shot. (Willis had to use a split diopter to achieve this and other such shots in the film—that is, a partial lens element that splits the visual field so that the cameraman can focus on close and distant planes of action simultaneously.)³⁶

Of course, for every calculated aesthetic use of the zoom during the decade, there were many more abuses of it to create specious interest where none inhered in character or plot, or to cut corners on camera movement, lighting, editing, and, at worst, actors' rehearsals. Furthermore, when it was still a novelty, even so masterful a director as Vittorio de Sica could allow the zoom to become obtrusive, as he does in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), where it seems to account for every third shot. (This was an unfortunate but understandable consequence of the fact that the Italian cinema embraced the zoom even more passionately in the early 1970s than the American—the list of major Italian films of the era whose form depends upon the zoom includes Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist [1971]; Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice [1971] and Ludwig [1972]; Lina Wertmuller's The Seduction of Mimi [1972], All Screwed Up [1974], and Swept Away [1975]; Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter [1974]; Federico Fellini's Amarcord [1974]; Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo [1975]; and Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger [1975].)

Lenses of Fixed Focal Length

Besides the refinement of the zoom, there were several other significant innovations in lens technology during the 1970s. Canon, the Japanese company known worldwide for its still-camera lenses, entered the field of professional cinematography in 1971 with normal and anamorphic zoom lenses that possessed a new "Macrophotgraphy" feature, allowing for extremely close focus through the front element via a simple ring adjustment. This Macro facility made it possible for cinematographers to shoot very small objects with great magnification and no loss of definition. In 1974, Canon introduced a new series of fixed-focal-length "aspheric" lenses whose curvature was produced via computer technology rather than spherical reduction.³⁷ These high-resolution, high-speed lenses were widely adopted for long and intermediate range photography because they were less subject to optical distortion than spherical lenses. The German Zeiss Company also used computer technology to develop its SuperSpeed aspheric lens series in 1974—lenses of fixed focal length that had floating internal elements to vary focus. Moreover, Zeiss had produced the super-fast 50mm still-photography lens for NASA that Ed DiGuilio adapted for Kubrick to shoot the candle-lit interiors of Barry Lyndon (1975);³⁸ and a whole range of Zeiss lenses, from 18mm to 85mm, were used for The Shining (1980).³⁹ Finally, Barry Salt notes a minor trend in 1970s cinematography toward the use of extremely wide-angle lenses (c. 10mm to 15mm) in normal dramatic scenes; he cites Rancho Deluxe (Frank Perry, 1975), Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973), Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), and—in 70mm—Patton (Franklin Schaffner, 1970) as examples of this trend, linking it not to functional depth staging but contemporary fashions in still photography.⁴⁰

"Pushing" and "Flashing" for Wide-Angle Photography

Most wide-angle lenses are "slow," because they employ large apertures to admit all available light. And because of the large aperture required for its wide-angle stops, the zoom is also a relatively slow lens, requiring either high illumination or "pushing" the film at the laboratory to increase its speed. This latter process, technically known as "forced development," enabled film stocks to be exposed with less light than was correct for their normal ASA rating. Underexposure, followed by overdevelopment to compensate, had been used for shooting night exteriors on location since the introduction of Kodak Ektachrome E.F. in 1965, and it was widely practiced during the 1970s to achieve aesthetic effects as well as functional ones. Gordon Willis, DP on The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974), had his stock forced one stop in development to give the films a look that he described as "brown and black in feeling."⁴¹ DP Michael Chapman pushed night-rated film an extra stop for Taxi Driver (1976) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) to achieve dense blacks illuminated only by neon signs.⁴² Nestor Almendros did the same for Days of Heaven (1978), many of whose scenes were shot out-of-doors in what director Terrence Malick called "the magic hour"—the twenty to twenty-five minutes of light left after the sun had set.⁴³ To lend a documentary texture to the urban street-life dramas The French Connection (1971) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), New York-based cinematographer Owen Roizman force-developed the entire footage of both films, and Vilmos Zsigmond pushed the film for The Long Goodbye (1973) to accommodate both its low lighting levels and Altman's improvisational pan-and-zoom style.⁴⁴

A similar laboratory procedure known as "flashing" or "fogging" was used by a number of innovative cinematographers during the 1970s. This was the process of exposing the negative briefly to white light in a printer before or after exposure in the camera to achieve certain visual effects. Like pushing, flashing produced a speed increase, but it also desaturated the color, and was first used for expressive effect in the late 1960s, most notably by DP Conrad Hall in Hell in the Pacific (John Boorman, 1968) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).⁴⁵ The cinematographer most closely associated with flashing in the 1970s was Vilmos Zsigmond, who used it to lend an old-fashioned, faded quality (modeled on the paintings of Andrew Wyeth) to the images of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and Heaven's Gate (1980), for which he flashed both the negative and the print.⁴⁶ To achieve a similar softening of shadows and pasteling of colors, Haskell Wexler flashed nearly all of the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory (1976).⁴⁷ Lightflex, a system for flashing a predetermined amount of light on the film stock via a mechanical unit attached to the camera matte box, was introduced commercially in 1977 for Oswald Morris's shooting of The Wiz (Sidney Lumet, 1978), and it took much of the guesswork out of the process, which during the early 1970s required extra handling of the negative in the lab.⁴⁸ Originated as "Colorflex" by the British cine-matographer Gerald Turpin as a way of adding tints to Young Winston (Richard Attenborough, 1972), Lightflex allowed cinematographers to introduce color and contrast variations in the film stock by selectively controlling the exposure during shooting.⁴⁹

Lighting and Film Stock

The nearly complete transition from studio to location shooting during the 1970s led to improvements in lighting equipment and color film stock that opened new creative vistas for cinematographers, who, as noted earlier, had become increasingly sensitive to aesthetic issues as a by-product of auteur criticism. As Barry Salt points out, all-location production demanded smaller, lighter, and more powerful lighting units, and two new kinds of light source were introduced to meet this challenge.⁵⁰ The first was the xenon arc, which produced illumination of daylight intensity (a color temperature of 6,000 degrees Kelvin) by enclosing an electric arc within a quartz bulb filled with pressurized xenon gas. Originally marketed in 1970 as the "Sunbrute," xenons were first used as daylight fill for exterior locations and could be powered from a 30-volt D.C. source. (One of the earliest creative uses of xenons was to shine them through windows covered with translucent plastic sheets to light the daytime interior locations for Kubricks Barry Lyndon.) The other new light was the metal halide arc, developed for European television and adapted to film as the Osram HMI in 1974. In this unit, light was emitted from current arcing between two electrodes powered by an ordinary 120-volt A.C. source. Like the xenon, it produced two to three times more light (at 5,500 degrees Kelvin) than ordinary lamps, but consumed less power than xenons did.⁵¹ HMI metal halide units were manufactured by Mole-Richardson in the United States after 1975.

As far as film stock is concerned, Eastman introduced new color negative type 5247 (7247 for 16mm) in 1973, with improved sharpness and finer grain, as well as simplified processing that benefited the laboratories.⁵² But American cinematographers did not warm to this stock because of its increased color saturation and relatively low ASA rating (100). DP John Alonzo seemed to speak for the entire American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) when he said, "I think that 5247 is a very fine piece of material but why start out using it on a film and then find you can't shoot with it because you run into some dark sequences?"⁵³ In response, Kodak modified the emulsion to widen its exposure latitude and re-released the stock as "5247 Series 600" to great acclaim. It was adopted almost immediately for prestige productions like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) because of its fine grain, and its versatility made it the preferred stock of such innovative cinematographers as Vilmos Zsigmond.⁵⁴ At about the same time that Kodak started marketing 5247, the Japanese photographic manufacturer Fuji introduced a motion picture negative stock that had the same ASA rating as the Eastman material but was significantly cheaper.⁵⁵ In the United States, Fuji was rarely used for features during the 1970s because it had less color fidelity than Kodak stock, but it was widely used in American teleproduction and in low-budget European features. One mainstream production shot on Fuji was the period film noir Farewell, My Lovely (1975); DP John Alonzo chose the stock because he wanted to give the film a different look than his work in Chinatown.⁵⁶ Near the end of 1980, Fuji introduced A250, a new fast negative stock (ASA 250), and the company became a leader in high-speed film for the next two decades.⁵⁷

Camera Technology

According to Barry Salt, the 1970s was one of the most active periods in film history for the development of new cameras. In 1971, the French Eclair company introduced its lightweight ACL 16mm camera that could run off of one-lb. nickel-cadmium batteries. In 1972, in Germany, the Arnold and Richter company introduced the self-blimped (acoustically insulated) 35mm Arriflex 35 BL, which could be fully balanced on the cameraman's shoulder and weighed 15 lbs. unloaded. The Arriflex 35BL debuted in America in 1972, when it was used by DP Jack Priestley for location photography in Harlem for the United Artists production Across 110th Street (Barry Shear, 1972).⁵⁸ But in Hollywood, Panavision became the industry leader with the appearance of the new Panaflex camera in 1973.

Panavision, Inc., and the Panaflex 35mm Camera

Panavision, Incorporated, founded by Robert E. Gottschalk in 1953, had risen to prominence during the 1950s and 1960s by manufacturing the lenses that came to dominate widescreen filmmaking—the prismatic anamorphic lenses, which replaced the cylindrical CinemaScope lenses made by Bausch & Lomb, and the spherical lenses for 1:85 photography and 70mm Super Panavision (originally Ultra-Panavision 70). Initially, Panavision had designed its lenses to fit the studio workhorse Mitchell BNC, but in the early 1960s the company introduced its own camera, the Panavision Silent Reflex (PSR), which went on to become one of the world's most popular, not least because its reflex viewfinder was ideal for use with the newly popular zoom lens. The PSR, however, was relatively heavy, and Gottschalk committed Panavision to produce a new generation of cameras that would be light enough to be carried by hand but studio-durable.⁵⁹

The result, after four years of development, was the Panaflex—a 35mm synch-sound reflex camera weighing just 25 lbs. when loaded with a 250-ft. magazine (34 lbs. with a 500-ft. magazine) and equipped with a variable speed motor (6-32 fps). It was first used by Vilmos Zsigmond on Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express (1974) to shoot extensive handheld dialogue sequences among three people inside of a moving police car.⁶⁰ Another early use of the Panaflex was by Sven Nykvist, the regular DP for Ingmar Bergman, to shoot The Dove (Charles Jarrrott, 1974), which took place mainly aboard a twenty-three-foot sailboat during a five-year trip around the world.⁶¹ DP John Alonzo reported that the new camera proved invaluable in shooting Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), because "[y]ou can put a Panaflex in a bathroom without taking the walls out and shoot scenes in there."⁶² The Panaflex underwent constant modification throughout the 1970s—for example, the viewfinder was redesigned to increase its brilliance, a thermostatically-controlled heating system was built in so that the camera could be used in sub-zero temperatures, and a one-hour 16mm conversion kit was introduced; as were several new lenses, including a series of super-fast wide-angle lenses (the "Ultra-Speed" series) and two new 10-to-1 zooms—a 25/250mm spherical and a 50/500mm anamorphic.⁶³ By the end of the decade, the Panaflex had become the industry standard in the United States and many other parts of the world, including the People's Republic of China, where it was adopted by the Beijing Film Studio in 1981.⁶⁴

Mitchell Camera and Others

In the United States and elsewhere, Panavision did not sell its equipment outright but rented it to production companies and cinematographers; the company also required a footage royalty on released prints struck from any negative made with Panavision cameras. Thus, despite the clear superiority of Panavision technology, many producers sought alternative equipment, creating a market for older companies like the Mitchell Camera Corporation and newer ones like Cinema Products, founded by former Mitchell engineer Edmund (Ed) DiGuilio in 1968. Mitchell made a number of efforts to compete in the new lightweight camera category, most notably with its Mark III 35mm, but met with little success. Cinema Products, on the other hand, made a small fortune by converting Mitchell BNCs into reflex cameras, and in 1973 introduced it own camera with the X35R. This was basically an improved BNC with an integral reflex shutter, which weighed 93 lbs. unloaded. Equipped with an Italian Technovision anamorphic lens, the Cinema Products X35R was used by Vittorio Storaro in shooting Apocalypse Now (1979).⁶⁵

Stabilization Systems and Camera Mounts

New cameras, lenses, and film stock notwithstanding, the most important innovation in cinematography during the 1970s was in the area of "floating" camera mounts.⁶⁶ Once professional hand-held 35mm cameras had been integrated into mainstream Hollywood production, there was a need for systems to stabilize them during movement. Early in the decade there was a variety of devices introduced to facilitate stability for one purpose or another. These included the "gyrocamera," a gyro-stabilized pan head developed for the Arriflex; the "Dynalens," a gyro-controlled liquid lens system designed to eliminate image wobbling in moving shots; the "Super-Grip," designed for mounting a hand-held camera on any smooth surface; the FERCO Dolly, a monorail system for tracking over rough terrain; and the "Fleximount," a large harness-braced camera support worn by the operator.⁶⁷ This latter was probably the model for Garrett Brown's revolutionary Steadicam system, which was first marketed by Cinema Products Corporation in 1976 and brought an extraordinary new mobility to American production practice. (Brown and Cinema Products, in fact, shared a 1978 Academy Award for its invention.)

The Steadicam Revolution

Years in development, the Steadicam was a gimbal-jointed camera mount that attached to the operator's chest and waist by means of a harness; a small video camera attached near the lens fed a high-intensity monitor that acted as a viewfinder, enabling the operator to frame his shots while in motion. (The video framing monitor was borrowed from the design of two anti-vibration helicopter mounts introduced in the late 1960s—the Tyler Camera Systems mount [1966] and Albert Lamorisse's "Helivision" [1967].)⁶⁸ The Steadicam was first used commercially by Haskell Wexler in Bound for Glory (1976), who deployed it to achieve a variety of "combination shots," where the camera begins on a moving crane or dolly then "steps off" with the operator to execute an elaborate maneuver that could not be done on the crane or dolly itself (such as going through a doorway, then twisting and turning down a hall). One famous example in Bound for Glory starts with a high-angle shot from a crane as it moves slowly over the set of a huge migrant labor camp and then booms down to pick up David Carradine (Woody Guthrie) sitting on a car; here the operator steps smoothly off the crane and follows Carradine as he makes his way through a crowd until he reaches another actor, after which the two of them walk together through more crowds of people and finally under the flap of a tent. The vibration-free quality of the Steadicam in such shots was a function of both its shock-absorbing harness and its video viewfinder, as Wexler immediately understood: "…[T]he basic principle of Brown's device is that, since the viewing system on the camera is video, your eye does not have to be to the camera. Since your head is not attached to the camera, it's possible to actually run up and down stairs, to run through narrow passageways, or to hold the camera extended weightless in your hand and make shots which, when you see them on the screen, look like they were made from a miniature helicopter."⁶⁹

It was clear to Wexler and other cinematographers who first used it that the Steadicam would significantly increase the fluidity of the camera by allowing it to go where it was either impossible or economically infeasible to lay dolly tracks—in short, virtually anywhere that the operator could physically carry it. As Ed DiGuilio of Cinema Products pointed out in American Cinematographer, the system made possible moving shots "of a totally different nature than have been possible heretofore." At the same time, it cut production costs by making it possible to shoot in tight interior locations, simulate crane shots from improvised ramps or stairs, and turn any vehicle—from a helicopter to a galloping horse—into a perfect camera platform since the Steadicam stabilizing devices had a shock-absorbing capacity of two to three feet, as opposed to only a few inches for previous stabilizers.⁷⁰ (Not all cameramen welcomed this stability—Bill Butler and his then-operator Michael Chapman preferred their choppy hand-held Panaflex shots on the water in Jaws to the fluidity that the Steadicam could have lent the situation.)⁷¹ Another value of the Steadicam was discovered by Conrad Hall when he was shooting chase scenes for The Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976) with Dustin Hoffman in the streets of New York City. With only the operator present (in this case Garrett Brown himself), the actor could run down the street with the Steadicam either ahead of him or behind him and attract minimal attention—because the operator was not looking through a camera viewfinder as he followed the action, bystanders didn't realize that a film was being shot, enhancing the sequence's verisimilitude.⁷² DP James Crabe created a similar Steadicam sequence for Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) when he followed the boxer on his famous run through the streets of Philadelphia and up the steps of the art museum. Another landmark use of the Steadicam (actually "Panaglide," which was Panavision's proprietary version of the system) was in the ur-slasher Halloween (1978), where cinematographer Dean Cundey's subjective hand-held tracking shots replicated the point of view of a psychotic killer as he stalked his victims—an innovative conceit imitated in hundreds of slasher and horror films to follow (whether as crudely as in Friday the 13th [Sean S. Cunningham, 1980], or as creatively as in Wolfen [Michael Wadleigh, 1981], whose surrealistic stalking shots were provided by Garrett Brown.)

The film that most clearly demonstrated the full dynamic range of the Steadicam, however, was Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), which had been conceived with the new system in mind. The interior sets of the hotel were designed by Roy Walker as a series of interconnecting rooms without flyaway walls or dolly-smooth floors; the exterior set of the hedge maze was designed so that only the Steadicam could be used to shoot it.⁷³ (Kubrick's affinity for this kind of movement was seen as early as the tracking shots along the trenches in Paths of Glory [1957] and more recently in the hand-held orgy sequence in A Clockwork Orange [1971].)⁷⁴ Kubrick had been impressed with demonstration footage from a prototype of the system in 1974 and arranged to meet Ed DiGuilio and Garrett Brown at FILM 77, a film equipment exhibition, in London in the summer of 1977. He subsequently hired Brown to shoot much of The Shining with the latest model of the Steadicam, which included a new 3-channel wireless servo lens control that allowed focus- and iris-pulling by radio remote. (Technically, Brown was the camera operator; John Alcott was DP, responsible for the film's complex lighting schema.) There was also a new video remote unit that transmitted the images that the Steadicam was filming to a monitor so that the director could observe camera movement, image composition, and actors' performances in process.⁷⁵ The most memorable Steadicam shots in The Shining are those that follow Danny hurtling through corridor after corridor of the Overlook on his Big Wheel, with the camera riding just a few inches above the floor, and those that follow Jack and Danny running through the maze; but most of the film was shot with the Steadicam, including many of the stationary shots within constricted sets like the Torrances' apartment. (There are moving shots in the film that were taken from a conventional dolly, but Kubrick correctly assumed that the Steadicam would be given credit for these too.) For both moving and motionless shots, Brown employed an extreme wide-angle lens, the Cooke 18mm, that allowed him to pass close to walls and doors without optical distortion, further enhancing the Steadicam's mobility.⁷⁶ Brown would later refer to his assignment on The Shining as "the Steadicam Oympics," because Kubrick pushed the system to its limits in that film, fulfilling the prediction he had made in 1974 that the system would "revolutionize the way films are shot."⁷⁷ Aesthetics aside, however, the Steadicam was widely embraced as an economic boon to the industry—which, in a time of rapidly rising production costs, would no longer have to invest in expensive dollies and tracking setups.

Wesscam and the Louma Crane

Another stabilization system deployed during the 1970s was Wesscam, conceived by the Istec Corporation of Canada in 1972 and subsequently manufactured by Westinghouse. Wesscam was a remote-controlled gyro-stabilized camera system enclosed in a sphere that could be suspended from a helicopter or mounted on a crane with equal equanimity, and it was used extensively to film the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games.⁷⁸ Appearing among many impressive feature credits during the 1970s, the system was responsible for the elaborate maze shots in Sleuth (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1972) and the remarkable penultimate shot of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), in which the system was transferred from an overhead track to a crane, with the camera running, in a single unbroken eight-minute trajectory.⁷⁹ Useful though it was, Wesscam lacked the simplicity of the Steadicam, but another remote system did not.

The Louma crane, developed in France and manufactured by Samuelson Film Services in London, was a remote-controlled camera crane similar in design to a microphone boom.⁸⁰ Whereas formerly the operator, focus puller, and director all rode the crane together, the Louma crane was fitted with a gyroscopic pan-and-tilt mount that was controlled by servo-motors and was observable through a remote video viewing system.⁸¹ The director and camera crew were relocated to a more convenient place from which they could aim the camera and control the lens aperture, focus, and zoom, without having to ride the crane itself. Because it was small and flexible, with a boom arm that could extend up to seven meters, the Louma could go where other cranes could not, and it was used in late 1970s Hollywood to shoot scenes for Superman (Richard Donner, 1978), Moonraker (Lewis Gilbert, 1979), and 1941 (1979), among others. A much simpler version of this idea was the "Little Big Crane" (so designated by key grip Richard Deats), a lightweight portable crane that could be totally disassembled and carried into a building. It had the obvious advantage of being able to go where conventional cranes could not because of their size and weight, and was used extensively in the production of Heaven's Gate (1980).⁸²

Conclusion

The Steadicam and the Louma crane are prominent examples of the movement throughout the 1970s toward smaller, lighter, and more flexible equipment in response both to aesthetic demands and financial pressure to cut production costs. Both systems relied on new technologies of remote video viewing and computer-assisted motion control that would find other applications within the industry as the decade drew to a close. The former lead to the widespread use of video-assist technology as a production tool, and the latter to a revolution in special effects that tilted the mainstream industry toward the once marginal genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror for much of the 1980s and beyond.

Video-Assist Technology

In the American cinema, video was first used to monitor production quality by Jerry Lewis in two 1960s films (The Nutty Professor [Jerry Lewis, 1963] and Who's Minding the Store? [Frank Tashlin, 1963]). Lewis set up a video camera to run beside the film camera so that he could evaluate his performance on playback.⁸³ This idea of using video "rushes" caught on with several other directors. Carol Reed, for example, used video playback to check the lip synchronization and choreography of the seventeen musical numbers of Oliver! (1968), and by 1970 an engineer named Bruce Hill had modified a Mitchell BNCR to accommodate an Ampex one-inch videotape recording and playback unit.⁸⁴ A version of the Hill system was used by John Guillermin to monitor the helicopter shots in The Towering Inferno (1974)—the first use of video assist to coordinate the shooting of a major Hollywood production, as opposed to checking performances after the fact. With the advent of the Steadicam and its video viewfinder in 1976, the possibilities for monitoring increased enormously. As Haskell Wexler was among the first to point out, the system represented a "marriage of the film and video media," and soon, he predicted (accurately), a small transmitter would be added to the Steadicam package that would send the video image to a Sony VCR "so that it will be possible for the director, or anyone else,…to see the shot on video tape immediately after the camera operator has made it."⁸⁵

One interesting application of this principle appeared during the shooting of The Muppet Movie in 1979, where the film cameras were modified to incorporate compact, high-resolution video cameras whose images were carried by cable to both a VCR and as many as fifteen monitors, most of which were used by the individual puppeteers concealed beneath the set to position their Muppets for the cameras; larger monitors were used by the production staff to troubleshoot each take.⁸⁶ By the time of The Shining (1980), Kubrick was able to order two or three perfect takes on each scene for editing in post-production, monitoring all of them by video remote. As Garrett Brown wrote of the filming of the maze sequence, the director "mostly remained seated at the video screen, and we sent a wireless image from my camera out to an antenna on a ladder and thence to the recorder [for playback]."⁸⁷ (Kubrick had used video as early as 1967 to monitor the filming of the centrifuge sequence in 2001, and more recently to coordinate the camera work of Barry Lyndon.)⁸⁸ Francis Ford Coppola employed videotape to pre-edit parts of Apocalypse Now (1979) on location, and in the early 1980s, he valorized video-assist technology as never before by making it the basis for his "electronic cinema" method.⁸⁹ Used initially in the production of One From the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982), this was basically a way to "pre-visualize" a film on video, creating an "electronic storyboard," so that it could actually be edited before it was shot (see below). According to Thomas Brown, director of Electronic Cinema at Zoetrope Studios, this meant that "the whole movie could be seen at any time" by the production crew and cast, before any film footage had been shot.⁹⁰ Used in this way, video assist enabled Coppola "at the beginning of each production day, to view an edited version of the previous day's shooting, complete with music and sound effects."⁹¹ Although the electronic cinema method proved far less cost-effective than Coppola had envisioned (he used it only twice more himself—in The Outsiders and Rumble Fish [both 1983]), elements of it took root in the production community, and video-assist technology was adopted by most American directors over the next decade, with or without playback.⁹²

Special Effects and Motion Control

In the same way that video assist technology changed the parameters of producing live-action sequences, so did automated motion control transform the production of special effects. Despite the well-deserved praise and the Academy Award accorded the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, the technology of special effects had changed very little from the 1920s to the 1970s. The key to their achievement was traveling matte or "blue-screen" photography, in which models and miniatures are manipulated for the camera frame-by-frame in front a blue screen that leaves the background of the shot unexposed. The background is then superimposed—or "matted in"—during the printing process through double exposure. Any number of images can be layered on to the same piece of film in this way, but the matching of elements must be absolutely precise for the illusion to be seamless. The extraordinary verisimilitude of 2001's effects was accomplished through the painstaking efforts of Kubrick, and special photographic effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull and his crew, who spent 18 months and $6.5 million—or 60 percent of the film's total budget—to produce them. But except for its use of front projection on a vast scale in the "Dawn of Man" prologue and Trumbull's "slit-scan" photography in the "Stargate Corridor" sequence, there was nothing technically innovative about the film's special effects. The real secret of their success was the director's obsessive perfectionism.

By the mid-1970s there was a clear sense among production artists that the practice of special effects had not kept pace with the general technological acceleration of the industry. This can be observed, for example, in the ambivalent discourse surrounding the use of lasers and holograms in the science-fiction epic Logan's Run (Michael Anderson, 1976), whose special effects were touted to surpass those of 2001. In an article in American Cinematographer, L. B. Abbott, who would win a Special Achievement Award from the Academy for the film's visual effects (and had shared another with A. D. Flowers for The Poseidon Adventure in 1972), lamented the decline of matte painting at the same time that he enthused over the use of laser holography to create futuristic effects.⁹³ Ironically, the matte paintings in Logan's Run were much more credible than the holograms, which didn't photograph very well, and most of its effects were rendered by conventional means. In fact, Abbott created much of the film's twenty-third-century environment through miniature, model, and matte-work techniques that had been available since he entered the cinema in 1926, the same ones used by virtually all special effects artists until Star Wars (George Lucas) appeared in 1977 and revolutionized the practice of special effects for another twenty years—after which it came to be dominated by computer-generated imagery (CGI).

The Innovations ofStar Wars

Like those of 2001 (and parts of Logan's Run), the special effects in Star Wars were accomplished through traveling matte photography. The crucial difference was that Lucas and his team at Industrial Light and Magic used a computerized motion-control system designed by John Dykstra (patented as "Dykstraflex") to make traveling matte work cost-effective for the first time. At its heart was a motorized camera mount governed by multi-track magnetic tape, which permitted the camera to pan, tilt, roll, and track eight vertical feet or forty-two horizontal feet in precisely repeatable movements. Operators could program their cameras to execute complicated maneuvers one frame at a time, and the sequences could then be infinitely repeated through numeric control.

The automation of traveling matte photography enabled the creation of special effects that were at once more complex and less expensive to achieve than ever before. Whereas Kubrick, for example, had spent $6.5 million to create thirty traveling mattes for 2001, Lucas spent only $2.5 million to create 365 traveling mattes for Star Wars, and those of Star Wars were arguably more dynamic.⁹⁴ (Another reason for the cost differential was that Kubrick shot his special effects sequences as complete takes and then edited them as if they were live-action footage; whereas Lucas followed the more conventional practice of pre-editing his effects sequences to the frame, so as not to shoot any footage that might wind up on the cutting room floor.)⁹⁵

The epoch-making commercial success of Star Wars created a late-1970s boom in state-of-the-art special effects and genres that supported them (most obviously, science fiction), reducing the high unemployment among film workers caused by the artificial "product shortage" at mid-decade. In a front-page article headlined "Film Effects Men Turn Trick at B. O.," Variety reported in July 1977 that a new breed of technicians was being attracted to Hollywood, one whose original training was not in the motion picture arts but in electronics and micro-circuitry.⁹⁶ These newly arrived electronics engineers and software programmers worked on the proprietary motion-control systems that appeared overnight to compete with "Dykstraflex"—Paramount, for example, overhauled its Magicam system, originated in 1975, though the studio switched to Dykstraflex for Star Trek—The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979).⁹⁷ Dykstraflex, which earned John Dykstra a 1977 Academy Award for "Scientific and Technical Achievement," was adopted by the producers of television's Battlestar Galactica series, but was replaced at ILM by Richard Edlund's even more sophisticated "Empireflex" system, used to film The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980); and Disney unveiled its $1-million ACES ("Automatic Camera Effects System") in 1979.⁹⁸ This latter used computer automation to control both camera and model in combination with Matte-Scan, another Disney system, that permitted the integration of matte paintings with live-action scenes while the camera was in motion on several axes; both were engaged to create the elaborate special effects for the studio's $17.5-million space epic The Black Hole (Gary Nelson, 1979).⁹⁹

After Star Wars, motion control became the industry standard for most traveling matte and miniature work, although it worked best with inanimate objects. It could not, for example, be used for the flying sequences of Superman (1978) because the movements of a human actor could not be precisely repeated for automated multiple exposure; after much costly trial and error, that film and its sequels adopted a system called "Zoptic, " designed by Zoran Perisic, which basically combined front projection with zooms, pans, and tilts in continuous sequence.¹⁰⁰ Computer animation and computer graphics, which came to dominate special effects at the close of the century, were in their infancy for much of the 1970s, but at the end of the decade several groups were exploring their possible applications to film. There was interest among professional animators at several studios in automating some of their work, computer graphics research was in progress at Lucasfilm/ILM, and at Disney a project was in development that became Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982), a landmark in early digital effects that featured sixteen minutes of computer-animated shots and twenty-five minutes of computer animation blended with live action.¹⁰¹

Dolby Stereo Optical Sound

That standards for sound recording and playback during the 1970s had not kept pace with advances in cinematography was well understood by filmmakers at mid-decade. As late as 1976, Arthur Penn could remark of his experiments with sound in The Missouri Breaks: "[T]he question of sound is still very thorny. It doesn't match the visual sophistication….We're all working still with radio [quality] mikes, trying to deal with it. I don't know what the solution is going to be, but it's clearly the next major avenue of technology in films to be resolved."¹⁰² Commenting at about the same time on the quality of theatrical reproduction, Robert Altman said: "Sound in theaters—the overwhelming majority of theaters—is just terrible. The acoustics, the speakers, everything."¹⁰³ Both directors were dead right, but a major innovation in the technology of sound lay just ahead with the introduction of Dolby-encoded stereo optical recording and playback. As with so much else, the watershed for Dolby was Star Wars, the first wide-release Dolby stereo optical film, whose epoch-making success was understood to depend at least partially on its high-powered, high-quality sound track. Early research by 20th Century-Fox indicated that Dolby-equipped theaters significantly outgrossed non-Dolby ones on the film's initial release, and Variety proclaimed "'Star Wars' Booms Optical Tracks For Sound."¹⁰⁴ By Christmas 1977, five of the season's biggest releases carried Dolby tracks, and the number of Dolby-equipped theaters had nearly doubled to 200; it would increase to 800 by the end of 1978.¹⁰⁵ What followed has been accurately called "the Second Coming of Sound," with Star Wars as Dolby's The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), because within eight years of that film's release only a handful of American films would be released in any other format.¹⁰⁶

In 1977 most of the nation's 15,000 theaters were equipped to play optical prints only, which until that point meant monaural sound. Stereophonic sound was the province of magnetic recording and playback, and there were two magnetic systems available to American theaters before Dolby—four-track CinemaScope stereo for 35mm anamorphic, introduced by Fox in The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953), and six-track Todd-AO stereo for 70mm, introduced in Around the World in Eighty Days (Michael Anderson, 1956). Both of these systems placed their separate magnetic tracks directly on the theatrical print of the film, outside the picture frame. Although magnetic prints offered a very high quality of sound reproduction, magnetic striping and recording could add as much as 50 percent to their cost over optical prints, and they degraded faster because of excessive playback-head wear in the projector.¹⁰⁷ In the mid-1970s magnetic prints cost about $1,200 to produce, while optical prints cost $800; and optical sound tracks could be counted on to last for the life of the print, whereas magnetic sound tracks usually wore out well before their images.¹⁰⁸ Moreover, exhibitors had to make expensive adjustments to projection equipment in order to play magnetic prints at their proper frequency response (flat to 12kHz), and, because only about one-fourth of America's theaters ever installed stereo magnetic equipment, distributors had to supply both optical and magnetic versions of every stereo release. (An expensive compromise adopted by Fox in the late 1950s was to produce "mag-optical" sound tracks, which had both formats running side-by-side on the same print.)¹⁰⁹ For these reasons, most producers chose not to invest in stereo recording and mixing, and before 1977 the American industry was geared to the production of monaural optical sound tracks, with stereo magnetic sound reserved for 70mm road shows and other special presentations. (There were a few exceptions—Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth [1976] was released in 35mm non-Dolbyized stereo magnetic—but these were rare.) Many 1970s films notable for their sound tracks—Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972), The Exorcist (1973), and Jaws (1975), for example, all of which won Academy Awards for Best Sound—were recorded on film and played in theaters exclusively in monaural.

Since monaural films were the norm, stereo could have a defamiliarizing effect on movie audiences during the 1950s and early 1960s. As John Belton has pointed out, audiences were sometimes distracted by the practice of "voice-panning" whereby dialogue would travel from one speaker to another behind the screen to represent the movement of action across the frame.¹¹⁰ The best stereo mixes of the era used voicepanning to create a spatial sound field that was directional and rich for both dialoguemusic performance (as in The King and I [Walter Lang, 1956]; and My Fair Lady [George Cukor, 1964]) and mass action scenes (Spartacus [Stanley Kubrick, 1960]; Taras Bulba [Lee Thompson, 1962]), but stereo was associated exclusively with spectacle until it entered the mainstream home entertainment environment in the mid-1960s.¹¹¹ There it established itself somewhat arbitrarily as a two-channel, two-speaker format, although the earliest experiments with the technology at Bell Labs had been conducted with three distinct channels and at the time stereo magnetic movie sound tracks used at least four. (The term stereo derives from the Greek root for "solid," and the technique of stereophonic sound requires that multiple sources of sound be placed around the listener to re-create a three-dimensional sonic experience.)¹¹² Although Quadrophonic systems, which employed four speakers, were marketed briefly during the 1970s, binaural stereo imaging became the home entertainment standard through the era of the compact disc (CD). Most 35mm movie theaters, on the other hand, deployed three speakers—left, right, and center—behind the screen, and for films with monophonie optical sound tracks they were all fed by a single channel. Theaters capable of stereo playback normally had four speakers (six for 70mm)—left, center, right, and rear—one for each stereo magnetic track (the extra two speakers for 70mm were for tracks carrying base enhancers, or "baby boom" channels). Dolby stereo optical was a two-track, four-channel 35mm format that could maximize the dynamic range and frequency response of either theater system.

Dolby stereo optical grew out of the Dolby noise reduction (Dolby NR) system, which electronically reduces background noise and increases frequency response. Dolby NR was developed by Ray Dolby at Dolby Laboratories during the late 1960s for use in the recording industry (where, among other things, it helped to innovate stereo cassette recording by removing its inevitable hiss), and it entered the film industry in 1971 when Stanley Kubrick used it during the mixing stages of A Clockwork Orange (1971), although the film itself was released with a standard monaural sound track. Dolby NR was subsequently applied to several musicals, where it was used for both monaural optical (Steppenwolf [Fred Haines, 1974]; Stardust [Michael Apted, 1975]) and four-track stereo magnetic sound tracks (The Little Prince [Stanley Donen, 1974]; Nashville [1975]) in both recording and theater playback.

Beginning in 1973, however, Eastman Kodak, RCA, and Dolby worked together to develop a simple two-channel stereo optical system that would have its left and right tracks running side-by-side in the area normally occupied by the monaural optical track.¹¹³ (Monaural tracks were already bilateral, carrying two identical variable area channels to compensate for sound-head misalignment in the projector.)¹¹⁴ This meant that an unconverted projector could run a stereo optical track and still generate a monocompatible signal.¹¹⁵ In the theater, Dolby stereo optical (Dolby SR) reproduced its two stereo tracks through the left and right speaker, and a third channel—synthesized by a logic circuit in the "Dolby Cinema Processor" from different phase relationships between the left and right track signals—was sent to the center speaker. The sound thus produced was indistinguishable from multi-track stereo magnetic, making high-fidelity stereo possible for the relatively modest conversion cost of about $5,000 per theater.¹¹⁶ (Houses with outdated monaural equipment, however, could cost as much as $20,000 to convert, and there were plenty of these at the time.)¹¹⁷ On the production side, it cost about $25,000 more to dub a film in Dolby stereo than in monaural and the conversion of an existing film-mixing studio to Dolby cost around $40,000, but these were relatively modest sums at a time when average negative costs had risen to $5 million per picture. Furthermore, the print cost of a Dolby stereo release was about the same as for a monaural production, and Dolby SR was so manifestly superior to its competition (for example, the short-lived Fox "Sound 360" system)¹¹⁸ that the company's business quadrupled in the year following the release of Star Wars.¹¹⁹

Before that occurred, however, Dolby developed a way of adding surround information to the optical track at the mixing stage via "stereo matrix" circuitry that encoded the information onto the two-track signal; the matrix was then decoded by the Dolby Cinema Processor in the theater to create a fourth channel.¹²⁰ The resulting surround signal was either sent to the rear speaker in existing four-speaker theaters, or could be distributed among new speakers positioned around the auditorium's side and back walls, so that the audience was literally "surrounded" by dimensional sound appropriate to a film's action—for example, helicopters flying overhead or source music (like a band playing) temporarily moving off-screen. There were several precedents for surround sound. Four-track CinemaScope magnetic had employed an "effects channel" which, like voice-panning, was designed to put the audience into the action.¹²¹ And although it was technically more sophisticated, Dolby surround also had similarities with "Sensurround," the low-frequency sound system developed by MCA/Universal to simulate the seismic tremors in Earthquake (Mark Robson, 1974) and used for similar effects in Midway (Jack Smight, 1976) and Rollercoaster (James Goldstone, 1977). Essentially a monophonic amplification process combined with enormous speakers stationed at each corner of the auditorium, Sensurround filled the theater with a very low base and was capable of creating sound pressure waves comparable to those of an actual earthquake (8-14 Hz at 110-120 dB).¹²² By selectively raising the volume of high frequency sounds in the mix, sound could be steered around the theater to create a quadrophonic effect not unlike that of Dolby surround. However, the obvious gimmickry and technical clumsiness of Sensurround doomed it after the arrival of Dolby stereo, and the system was last used in 1979 when added to Battlestar: Galactica (Richard A. Colla) in post-production.¹²³

Dolby stereo optical, then, was a two-track, four-channel 35mm format; it was first used in the musicals Tommy (Ken Russell, 1975), Lisztomania and A Star Is Born (Frank Pierson, 1976); also in 1975, Warners released Barry Lyndon in partial Dolby, and Logan's Run (1976) became the first non-musical to be recorded entirely in the process (the film was also released in 70mm six-track stereo magnetic).¹²⁴ George Lucas and his producer Gary Kurtz approached Dolby Laboratories in 1975 to help them design a superior sound track for Star Wars (1977), and Dolby saw the film as the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the range of its new system. Dolby engineers were involved at every stage of the film's planning, production, and mixing, with the goal that the sound heard in the theaters should be identical to that heard by the director during the mix.¹²⁵ The general release prints were Dolby-encoded stereo optical with a surround track and the 70mm six-track magnetic prints were also Dolbyized. As the first film to be both recorded and released in four-channel Dolby stereo (and the first to use Dolby NR throughout production), Star Wars produced a revolution in theater sound that very soon caused a large-scale conversion to the system. (In production, however, audio still took a back seat to visual effects—only twenty workers handled the audio for Star Wars, while 150 were employed on visual effects.)¹²⁶ It was followed almost immediately by several other blockbusters that exploited Dolby effects and confirmed its market potential, especially with young audiences (Close Encounters of the Third Kind [1977]; Saturday Night Fever [John Badham, 1977]; Grease [1978]; and Superman [1978]), as well as by other films that had the lifelike reproduction of sound at their conceptual core (The Last Waltz [Martin Scorsese, 1978]; The Shout [Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978]; and Days of Heaven [Terrence Malick, 1978]), which later (like Grease) were shown in 70mm Dolby-encoded stereo magnetic because of the improved sound quality made possible by the wide-gauge format. (Early Dolby also had its share of flops—including The Wiz [Sydney Lumet, 1978], FM [John A. Alonzo, 1978], American Hot Wax [Floyd Mutrux, 1978], Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [Michael Schultz, 1978], and Hair [Milos Forman, 1979].) By the end of the decade, there were 1,200 Dolby-equipped American theaters, and by the mid-1980s Dolby counted over 6,000 installations worldwide, and almost 90 percent of all Hollywood films were being released in four-channel Dolby stereo.¹²⁷ For motion picture and theater sound, then, as for so much else, the 1970s were a formative decade, beginning as generally monaural and ending on the road to full stereo optical surround.

Sound Design and Post-Production

Michael Cimino, using Dolby SR for the first time during the production of The Deer Hunter (1978), said that it gives a director "the ability to create a density of detail of sound—a richness so you can demolish the wall separating the viewer from the film."¹²⁸ Yet as subtle as Dolby stereo optical would prove to be at registering such sounds as insect chirps, bird calls, and human breathing, voices and lip movements were occasionally out of synchronization and directional stereo separation was often problematic. It soon became clear that to achieve an effective Dolby mix, the sound track had to be planned and even scripted as part of a film's overall production design—an imperative most brilliantly realized in Walter Murch's sound design for Apocalypse Now (1979) and one that has become a central component of mainstream filmmaking ever since.

Sound Design

Murch was the conceptual and practical architect of what has become known as "sound design." Although the term didn't come into common usage until the mid-1970s, sound designers would have been called supervising sound editors in the pre-Dolby era. To paraphrase Marc Mancini, they are to modern multi-track sound systems what cinematographers are to lighting and visual composition or production designers to set construction and scenic display: they sculpt the sound of a motion picture from storyboarding through post-production, coordinating the work of a large number of performers, artists, and technical engineers, including the production sound mixer, the sound editor, the composer, the music editor and mixer, the ADR (automatic dialogue replacement) editor and mixer, the Foley artists, and the re-recording mixers.¹²⁹ It has been estimated that some 400 to 600 individual sound and source tracks are typically used to create a full feature-length sound track, and assembling one is an enormously complicated business.¹³⁰ The innovation of Dolby technology increased both the complexity and artistic range of the task, so that film school-trained specialists like Murch and Ben Burtt—the sound designer for Star Wars and its sequels, as well as for the Indiana Jones films and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)—were attracted to sound design as a major creative component of the filmmaking process.¹³¹ As Murch put it in 1978 while working on Apocalypse Now: "The chal lenges of putting together a sound track are not totally on the technical level. That's a very important part, but eighty percent is in finding the right and appropriate combination of sounds—and putting them in the right place."¹³²

Murch's example is paradigmatic and exceptional at the same time. While still a student at the USC film school, he created the futuristic sound track for George Lucas's first features THX-1138 (1971; which he also co-wrote) and American Graffiti (1973), and went on to design the sound for two of 1974's most critically esteemed films—Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II and The Conversation. For the latter, which was self-reflexively about electronic surveillance, Murch was nominated for an Academy Award, and he began using the credit "Sound Montage " for his sonic fabrications. Much of Murch's work at this stage involved the use of synthesizers to create experimental wave forms to suggest computers and other electronic noise for which there was no empirical analogue. What is now called Foley recording (see below) was available but not well developed at mid-decade, and Murch chose to record each of his effects separately and synchronize them by hand.¹³³ By the time of Apocalypse Now (1979), which is considered to be a landmark in sound design, Murch was using ADR (automatic dialogue replacement, or "looping") sessions to supplement the detailed mapping of a 360-degree, spatially dimensional sound field for playback in Dolby 70mm six-track magnetic stereo—a full-frequency quadrophonic system that employed "split-surround," or "stereo surround," permitting the illusion of sound moving through all four quadrants of the theater, as when the helicopter in the film's credit sequence begins in the right rear, travels to the left rear, then moves to the left front and then to the right front.¹³⁴ (Although similar effects have been achieved since the early 1990s through Dolby Digital Stereo, DTS [Digital Theater Systems], SDDS [Sony Dynamic Digital Sound], or competing digital technologies; all movie sound before that time, both mono and stereo, was analog.)¹³⁵ Though Apocalypse Now has not been re-released theatrically since 1979, Murch took advantage of the optical laserdisc format to remix its sound track twice: first in Digital Stereo in 1991, and then in 5.1-channel AC-3 in 1997, attempting to reproduce the original 70mm experience. Murch won an Academy Award for Best Achievement in Sound in Apocalypse Now and inaugurated the "Sound Design" credit used in major films ever since. Over the next few decades, the sound designer became an integral member of the production team, often hired as early as the production designer and the DP, and as sound recording moved into the digital age, the role became increasingly complex. (Digital signal processing was first used in the post-production of a major Hollywood film to mix acoustical re-recorded sound with synthesized sounds for Star Trek—The Motion Picture [1979].)¹³⁶

Foley Recording

Like sound design, Foley recording came of age in the late 1970s. Named for Jack Foley, the Universal sound engineer who first conceived the idea during the late 1940s, Foley is the art of performing sound effects in post-production dubbing sessions rather than recording them while shooting (or, as in the studio era, cutting them into the sound track from a library of pre-recorded sounds). Foley is thus the sound-effects equivalent of ADR, in which actors watch their filmed performances on a screen and re-record some of their lines for remixing in a studio. A "Foley stage" is a dedicated recording studio that contains a variety of surfaces (for example, pits filled with concrete, sand, gravel, and leaves) and a large number of props (car doors, furniture, guns), as well as a movie screen or video monitor where Foley artists can study a film's action for synchronous, real-time recording of effects. Common Foley effects include footsteps, floors creaking, chairs scraping, clothes rustling, keys jingling, water splashing, etc. (Jack Foley once simulated the sound of Niagara Falls by spraying water from a garden hose onto a billboard.)¹³⁷ Foley artists can also remove incidental sounds that have been accidentally recorded in shooting and redub the sound track with more appropriate ones.

In 1971 there were only six to eight Foley artists in Hollywood, according to former sound editor Ross Taylor, who (with his partner Kitty Malone) performed the Foley on some of the 1970s' most important films, including Cabaret (1972), The Godfather (1972), The Exorcist (1973) (with its repulsive pea soup vomiting sequence), Chinatown (1974), Star Wars (1977), The Deep (Peter Yates, 1977), and Apocalypse Now (1979).¹³⁸ Taylor and Ross provided Foley dance steps for Cabaret (all of the sound in the "Money-Money" number is Foley except the voice performances), machine-gun fire for The Godfather, and the notorious vomiting sequence for The Exorcist. For The Deep, they collaborated with Hal Landker to develop a portable Foley system that included a twelve-by-three-foot swimming tank in which to produce the underwater effects.¹³⁹ The laser blasts in Star Wars were created by hitting a tension wire that supported an antenna with a hammer and processing the sound in a synthesizer.¹⁴⁰ Yet the practice of Foley was so rare that until the mid-1970s there was no established pay scale for it. By the 1980s, however, there were thirty or more full-time Foley artists, including a whole sub-group of "Foley walkers" who specialized in all sounds created by human feet, and ADR and Foley mixing had become a regular component of post-production sound engineering.¹⁴¹ Foley became increasingly important with the advent of digital sound playback in theaters, whose precision demanded the vividness of studio-produced effects, and in 1990s it was a rare film that did not feature several Foley credits.

Experiments in Electronic Editing

In addition to its innovations in electronic sound, the 1970s also witnessed the beginnings of electronic film editing. In 1967 the American broadcasting industry had adopted a time code to facilitate the electronic editing of NTSC videotape. This is essentially a system that encodes synchronized signals for each frame of video for the length of the tape so that it is "frame addressable" by computer, and therefore subject to precise (and speedy) electronic manipulation. In 1971, CMX, Inc., a partnership between CBS and the Memorex Corporation, introduced an electronic computerized editing system under the acronym of RAVE (Random Access Video Editing). This system, described as "a sophisticated fusion of tape recorders, computer memory banks and magnetic disks," was designed to read video time code, but CMX also touted its potential to reference motion picture edge numbering in the same way: "For a feature film, the computer could read out on paper the prescribed order of frame numbers for an entire production…[and a] technician then could cut the film according to instructions without recourse to the present method of winding and rewinding."¹⁴² As it turned out, computer storage and access was still too limited to handle the amount of footage generated by a feature film, but visionary filmmakers like Coppola and Murch thought they could see the future in CMX technology. Together, they prepared a proposal to edit The Godfather using the CMX system, which was rejected by Paramount, but six years later Coppola employed a linear video editing system to experiment with different story structures for Apocalypse Now. Murch actually used it to compose the series of four-element overlapping dissolves in the first reel of the film, but the rest of it was put together on conventional editing machines (two flatbed Moviolas and two KEM eightplates).¹⁴³ Coppola's unique perspective notwithstanding, there was considerable indus try interest throughout the decade in the possibility of adapting time code and video editing techniques to film production, but a major stumbling block was the fact that film runs at 24 frames per second and video at 30. By mid-decade, it was possible to transfer film to video via a telecine conversion chain using the so-called "3-2 pulldown," which worked as follows. Because each video frame is composed of two interlaced fields of scan lines, the frame can be split in half and remain legible from top to bottom. In 3-2 pulldown technology, the film-video frame rate differential is addressed by allocating three fields of video to every second frame of film and two fields to the others. With the film thus transferred to video, it was then possible to edit the tape electronically, but converting the tape back into film was problematic because, as an article in American Cinematographer noted, "If one attempted to correlate video time code to film counts, the video frame on which a cut occurs may correspond to two different film frames."¹⁴⁴ This meant that until someone either a) devised a coding system that could distinguish between fields rather than frames, or b) developed a method for recording time code on the film stock itself, video could only be used to "pre-edit" films in the manner of Coppolas One From the Heart (1982; see above), or Hal Ashby's Second-Hand Hearts (1981), where cameras were run through a video editor and onto videotape so that the director could both evaluate shots and pre-assemble them.¹⁴⁵

In 1982, Kodak would introduce a way to record an eight-digit SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) time code for each frame via a transparent magnetic coating on its film stock, creating the prospect of random-access electronic editing, research for which was ongoing at Lucasfilm Ltd., Zoetrope Studios, Lion's Gate, and other innovative production companies.¹⁴⁶ At the same time, CMX introduced a semi-computerized flatbed system called FLM-1, which correlated frame counts from film-to-tape transfers with conventional SMPTE time codes by running the film in constant synchronization with a 3/4-inch videotape recorder, obviating the 3-2 pulldown of a normal telecine chain.¹⁴⁷

Projection

Before the 1970s, projection technology had changed little since the early days of the industry. In that decade, however, two significant innovations took place that greatly reduced the labor involved in projecting a 35mm or 70mm film on a screen, as well as cutting investment in projection hardware nearly in half. First, the high-intensity carbon arc lamps in projectors were replaced by more efficient xenon bulbs. Carbon arcs—in which electrical current arced across the gap between two carbon nodes—provided a brighter, whiter light than xenons (which nevertheless yielded a daylight-type light of a color temperature 6,000 degrees Kelvin), but they required constant vigilance for safety.¹⁴⁸ Xenons, originally developed by Xenotech, Inc. as searchlights for U.S. Army tanks, also contained an electrical arc, but one that was enclosed inside a quartz sleeve under high-pressure xenon gas, so that they could be left to operate unattended.

The other labor-saving device introduced during the 1970s was the horizontal platter system, in which the entire film was spliced together reel-by-reel and mounted on a four-foot-diameter platter for feeding into the projector; as the film wound its way through the machine, it was taken up by a lower platter. While this system required that the film be assembled into a single reel for presentation and disassembled for shipping after its run, it meant that there were no reel changes during projection, so that the projectionist could shuttle among several auditoria at once—a practice crucial to the operation of multiplexes. Once plattered, the film could be shown again and again over the length of its run by a relatively unskilled operator, eliminating the necessity for a unionized professional projectionist. (The membership of the Motion Picture and Video Projectionists Union was decimated as a result of this automation, declining in some parts of the country by as much as 90 percent.)¹⁴⁹ Finally, since there was no need to alternate reels, the platter system cut the number of projectors necessary to run a film in half, another big plus for the owners of multiplexes, enabling them to subdivide their equipment as cost-effectively as they had subdivided their auditoria. It was due in part to savings like these that exhibitors were able to continue to expand their holdings and prosper during an era of maximum "product shortage."

Coda: Technology and Narrative Form

Despite the many "revolutionary" innovations discussed above, between 1970 and 1979 the narrative form of American films changed very little as far as audiences were concerned. The trend toward rapid cutting that began in the 1960s under the influence of the French New Wave reached its zenith in 1976, when the average shot length approached six seconds; but jump cutting itself was largely abandoned as a means of scenic transition, and the long take remained the province of the European art film.¹⁵⁰ Lighter cameras contributed to a steady increase in location shooting (although the primary force was soaring studio overhead)—Vilmos Zsigmond, for example, used the new 25-Ib. Panaflex camera to shoot extensive dialogue sequences inside a moving car for The Sugarland Express (1974), but they don't appear to be much more realistic than the similarly staged process shots of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). In the same way, there was an increase in complicated moving-camera shots after 1976 thanks to the introduction of Steadicam/Panaglide technology, but the hand-held traveling shots of Jaws (1975) don't look much different from the Panaglide stalking sequences of Halloween (1978)—there are just more of them. Audiences that had gasped at the opening moments of The Ssandpiper (Vincente Minnelli) in 1965, in which the camera seems to float above the crests of the waves off the Monterey coast via an extended helicopter shot,¹⁵¹ had gotten used to cameras that roamed apparently free of physical limitations by the year of Jaws, Nashville, and Barry Lyndon. The ability to see beyond the pale of the natural universe delivered by the motion-control systems of Lucasfilm Ltd. in Star Wars (1977) looked at the time like 2001: A Space Odyssey in overdrive (which, in a purely technical sense, it was); it would take another five years for the genres sustained by special effects—science fiction, fantasy, and horror—to consume the industry's production schedule and, in the terms of Peter Biskind, "infantilize" the American audience "by overwhelming it with sound and spectacle."¹⁵² It was, in fact, in the domain of sound alone that a major formal change was apparent during the 1970s: audiences attending Dolby-equipped theaters showing Dolby-encoded films in the latter part of the decade would have detected a perceptible shift from undistinguished monaural to precisionhoned stereo surround. Yet, as noted earlier, some of the 1970s films most notable for their sound tracks—The Godfather, Cabaret, American Graffiti, The Exorcist, and Jaws, for example—were recorded and played in monaural.

The most striking change in American films during the 1970s came not at the level of form but of content, and two phenomena that bracketed the decade insured this. At its outset, the malfunctioning of the new MPAA ratings system gave the imprimatur of mainstream entertainment to the pornography of hardcore sex and graphic violence. Once that had occurred, both became irresistible box-office attractions, and everyone in the industry, from auteurist directors to studio financiers, had to acknowledge it—and then, of course, to compete with it. Thus, exploitation films like The Exorcist (1973) and Jaws (1975) were engineered by their producer-distributors to become international blockbusters, and serious filmmakers were forced to limn a fine line between art and decadence to sell their product at all. The fact that fallout from the twin calamities of Watergate and Vietnam was simultaneously poisoning the culture helped the process along, so that one of the decade's most distinguished films is about a deranged veteran of that war who goes on an ultraviolent killing spree to "rescue" a twelve-year-old prostitute from her pimp, having earlier tried and failed to assassinate a popular political candidate—Lee Harvey Oswald as John Wayne. Martin Scorseses Taxi Driver (1976), which trades heavily in the depiction of paranoia, racial bigotry, perverse sexuality, and graphic gore, could not have been made in the United States before the MPPA began the segregation of audiences by age in late 1968. Yet by the end of the decade, Scorseses film had been licensed for sale on home video—a medium that hadn't existed five years before, and one that would siphon off hardcore sexual materials from the nation's theaters into its homes. Together with much else.

In fact, what home video did for hardcore films it did for all movies—reduce them (literally) in stature and turn watching them, with or without masturbation, into a private act. How perfect, then, that what Tom Wolfe had branded as "the Me Decade" should end by making one of twentieth-century America's great public rituals a form of narcissistic gratification. (Although, if psychoanalytic film theorists are right, the movies may have never been anything else.) The crowning irony of the American Film Institute's 1998 ranking of great American films ("AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies") was that by 1998 most Americans had never seen them on a movie screen. And whatever one may think of the AFI's list, it is noteworthy that twenty of the one hundred were made between 1969 and 1979 (including Jaws [1975], as number 47; and Taxi Driver [1976], as number 48), more by far than for any other decade, signaling the astonishing richness of the period. It was the last time in American film history that so much talent, so much art, and so much money have converged on the site of the motion picture screen. The results were often extreme, even explosive, because the films themselves mirrored our society at a time when it seemed to be coming apart, but the industry has never produced better ones, not even during the studio system's golden age. Yet for all of their innovativeness and energy, the films of the 1970s were in some sense autumn fruit, ripened through seven decades of economic, technological, and aesthetic development whose dynamics would change dramatically as the movies were shrunk and then digitized for electronic distribution in the decade to come.