This Week's Column: The Mid-Summer Wrap

[AndyDursin]

Lots going on this week, but managed to get this cranked out -- a little of "this and that", Shout and Criterion titles, a few new releases as well:

https://andyfilm.com/2019/07/26/7-30-19 ... mmer-wrap/

[andy b]

Andy

as you never saw this back in "81 I can tell you that from Europe the film came over from Embassy & was due to go to VHS. Brent Walker Distributors picked it up for a cinema release from what I recall almost last minute.

The film was double billed with Straw Dogs & wow was it a hard sell, we only ever got second or third screens, played for a week & then just fell off the radar until the tape release. Other than the poster, that did the "right 1980's sales pitch" there was nothing to promote this on & due to the number of "adult" type releases the poster in the long run did us no favours as it's a cop thriller film & not "adult" as such, by the way the poster was just ideal to turn into a VHS cover, so no real marketing was ever considered for the film, unlike the Shout art. So it just faded into 1980's oblivion & if I am correct like so much of that era found a home on tape.

Good to see it get a new life & maybe a new audience or some "old timers" out there will get to revisit a bit of their film going past.

regards
Andy b

[Paul MacLean]

I always found it genuinely bizarre that Vice Squad, a gritty, urban, LA-based "B movie", was photographed by John Alcott -- the man who shot A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Greystoke!

I wonder if he took the job on this (likely non-union) low-budget flick simply to rack-up points, so he could join the union and work on higher concept American pictures.

[AndyDursin]

According to a couple of things I just read, Alcott wanted to get more work so he moved to the US (with the British film industry slowing down in the 80s), and then worked with producer Sandy Howard on a whole bunch of his productions, including VICE SQUAD (also explains why he shot TRIUMPHS OF A MAN CALLED HORSE!).

He had shot TERROR TRAIN for Sandy Howard too -- here's an interview snippet with that movie's director, Roger Spottiswoode (they later worked on UNDER FIRE obviously)...I didn't know Alcott invented Super 35 all by himself!

TT: Let’s talk about John Alcott, the cinematographer for Terror Train.

Alcott was truly established in the industry at that point, and had just finished Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. He really was Kubrick's chosen photography man, having also worked on A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.

How did he get on board Terror Train?

RS: John came with Sandy, thank goodness. It was a wonderful thing. Sandy said, “I want you to meet John Alcott.” I was proud to meet him but frankly, I wondered why he would want to do Terror Train.

So I met with John and I asked him. I said, “Look, I’ve got twenty-five days to shoot this. I’m going have to shoot thirty set-ups a day. I’m gonna have to go like the wind.”

And he responded, “Well, Roger, if you can shoot thirty set-ups a day, you’ll make me a very happy man. I’m not used to that. On The Shining, I did ONE set-up a day.” It was the same with Barry Lyndon. It was often one or two set-ups a day and he thought it was boring! “I adore Stanley," he said, "but thirty set-ups a day means a lot of fun for me.” (Laughs.)

TT: That’s great.

RS: He was so brilliant. I had him on two films. Terror Train and later, Under Fire. We became friends and he was just the most fascinating person. As I’m sure you know, he had been hired on 2001: A Space Odyssey and was promoted from focus puller straight to DP.


Whether it’s true that he didn’t know how to use a light meter when he was promoted, or whether he just said that, I was never sure. But he didn’t use a light meter. He didn’t have one.

On Terror Train, when we were on the train, we didn’t have many candles. We certainly didn’t have candles like [Alcott used] on Barry Lyndon.

In a number of scenes, there would be complaints from visiting stills photographers: “When are you gonna turn on the lights and start shooting?”

Alcott had his little f/1 lens that he brought with him from Barry Lyndon. We’d shoot wide open at 1:2 or 1:4 and the stills photographers couldn’t shoot with so little light. We were shooting in almost complete darkness.

TT: It’s been said that Alcott used his hand to see how the reflections and light worked instead of a light meter.

RS: Yes. And he did it on all films, as far as I know. He’d look at the back of his hand and say to Lou Bogue and the focus puller in his very London accent, “It’s a solid 1.8. Well, fairly solid…what do you think? Make it a 1.4/1.8 split, gentle on it! But not too gentle.” He’d talk about it like that.

TT: What did you think when you would see the dailies?

RS: The dailies for Terror Train were extraordinary. Everything was perfect.

All the dailies were one-light dailies. That means they all go through on the same bath, the same exposure. No treatment. Not like nowadays when people fiddle with it. Ours were all perfectly matched.

John had a safety backup, so to speak. He would light with the back of his hand and his amazing eye of course. He never looked through a camera. He’d know what it was and what we were looking at. And when it was lit, he’d put his hand out and the gaffer (Lou Bogue) would put his Polaroid into it. He had an old bellows Land Polaroid. They fold out. You can still buy them on Ebay.

He would take a shot and then unpeel the back and peel off the Polaroid. And then we’d wait forty seconds while he had the black & white picture under his arm, warming and processing.

He would unwrap it once more, taking off the last layer - and look at it…never showing it to anyone. He’d put it in his pocket and say, “All right, we can shoot!” That was really a double check for contrast values, I think. The model of the Polaroid camera he used, was already ten or fifteen years out of production. They still made film for it and I think they probably made it just for Alcott. Because by then, he was so well known.

At that time, John was inventing Super-35. It’s still in use now. Super-35 uses spherical lenses to shoot a widescreen 2.35:1 format.

Nowadays, many of the big special effects films are still shot with Alcott's system and not with anamorphic lenses, because anamorphic lenses make CGI work much more complicated.

TT: What's the reason for that?

RS: When you shoot widescreen, that’s 2.35:1 - the very wide, wide screen - when you shoot that ratio, you can do it two ways.

You can shoot with spherical lenses, which means that it doesn’t distort the image at all, but the image has to be recorded onto a smaller part of the negative. Imagine something that shape, it goes onto a smaller part of a 35mm negative because it doesn’t use the top or the bottom. And the whole thing has to be very reduced to go from one side to the other.

An anamorphic lens squeezes the image so it completely uses the old 1.85 frame…it uses all the space on the negative. When you project that, you have to project it back out through the same lens and that unsqueezes it and makes it wide again.

During post-production, if images are to be altered digitally (CGI), altering a squeezed image will be more complex than altering an image which is not squeezed.

http://www.terrortrap.com/interviews/rogerspottiswoode/