This is a story out of the memory archives of embarrassing lessons learned...
Something was VERY wrong! The images moving through the Moviola viewfinder all bore a strange halo around every light fixture. The lab really screwed up, but how?
Rewind...
The 16mm film dailies being screened by yours truly in the middle of the night in the USC Film School Editing Room was footage from the first night of shooting on what USC grads will know as a 310 two-man film project (a required production course for film majors in the School of Cinema/TV at the University of Southern California). During the semester you pair up with another student and one of you directs and edits while your partner runs camera and does sound design. Then you switch. My 310 partner was a fantastically creative guy named Jim Barr. Since we had no budget for graphics or process shots, Jimmy came up with the idea of putting our main titles on slides. He set up a screen and two slide projectors (do they still even MAKE slide projectors?) with a dissolve unit on the floor of his tiny apartment in Hollywood. We filmed the screen with a locked off camera. It looked on film like we had spent a ton of money to create a major title sequence at the lab. Brilliant! That was Jimmy...
I, on the other hand, have never been known as mechanically inclined - unless pounding a hammer will fix it. (Just ask my wife Gloria and my kids...It's true!) My son David on the other hand can fix ANYTHING and seems to enjoy tinkering with the insides of almost anything. My dad was a finish carpenter and loved making stuff with his hands. That gene skipped my generation... A demonstration of this truth is about to be told (the title of this blog should be a hint!)
So, I had to pick a topic for my film project. At the time, besides going to school I was also working as a young TV director for an ad agency whose offices were directly across the street (to the east) of the famous Graumann's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. (Since then, the building I was in has been torn down and replaced with a shopping complex and the Academy Award Theater where the Oscars are handed out each year.) In those days there was only an open parking lot between my office window and the theater.
The side of the theater facing my office was a solid brick wall, maybe 50 feet high and half again as wide. Every few weeks I would see a team of billboard painters hang their rigging on the side of the theater and begin a familiar process of 'painting' a billboard poster on the brick wall... They weren't pasting up photographic sheets. They were literally painting a poster and doing it so well it 'looked' like a photograph. The same poster was in the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety on my desk. I was amazed by the artistry of these billboard painters. But how did they do it? I decided this would be my film.
The billboard (like thousands of others across America) had the name "Foster & Kleiser" underneath. I called them up and arranged to meet a Mr. Hank Seidel, one of their managers. He and his staff got totally on board our project. At F&K, billboard art is not only a business, it's a passion for a dying art form. They even started a school to train young artists how to paint these giant images that we see but for a fleeting moment as we pass them on the freeway. Considering the work involved, it is no wonder most billboards today are either photographic sheets or increasingly, LED digital video displays.
I needed something that I could show at every stage of the process without taking days to film. Turned out, the only multi-billboard campaign running through the shop was a Salem cigarette campaign. In deference to my mom who would never have approved what she would have seen as a 'glorification of smoking' (she never knew about my pipe smoking days in college!) I said, "Great, when can we start?!"
Visually, the campaign was a head and shoulders colorful painting of a good looking smiling guy. He wasn't even holding a cigarette. The artwork was beautiful. The first day's shoot began in the art department at F&K with an original portrait being painted from a photograph of the model's head. When I saw the artwork being created, I knew I had my title. I would call the film "Portrait". We ended the first night of shooting with the art director walking through the dark and cavernous paint barn where roadside versions of the billboard were being painted onto wood panels that would be hoisted along the freeway in a few days. We then filmed my little Volvo (supposedly with the art director driving it) as he passes one of these giant billboards on fashionable Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills late at night.
The next morning I turned our film into the USC film lab. When we got the footage back and screened it, I knew we were in big trouble! (There's probably stronger words to describe our reaction, but I have since dropped them from my vocabulary - something to do with being a dad, I think!)
Before proceeding you need to know how the USC film school controls film (at least in those days).
Each student was issued a precise amount of film stock for their 310 project (1,600 ft as I recall). To insure honesty, the film stock used could ONLY come from the USC lab and could only be processed by the USC lab. The stock was engraved with edge numbers which were registered and compared at each stage of the project - including an examination of the final film. The 400 ft roll of film we shot that first night amounted to 1/4th of our film stock.
So when we saw the film dailies with these weird halos around every light fixture in the frame, we complained to our faculty adviser. How could the lab have screwed this up so badly?! The workprint was inspected. The negative was checked. That's when the hard, cold, embarrassing truth came out. The film stock had been loaded into the magazine (in all fairness something that is done by FEELING inside a lightproof camera changing bag) with the base out. Simply put, 'base out' meant the film images had to pass through the plastic celluloid backing before being captured by the silver halide particles that make up the 'photographic emulsion'. The base functioned as an unwelcome light diffusion, slightly softening the focus of everything - but creating a halo around every light. I had just screwed up one fourth of our film stock - on the first day of filming! How much more stupid could I be?
Apparently, not much! The Cinema School faculty had a big meeting to discuss the "Ivy" problem. After much debate it was decided to take pity on this poor schmuk (my term, not theirs) of a filmmaker. Totally against the standing school policy, they issued me and my partner a replacement 400 ft. roll of film. To my surprise, they didn't make us return the 'defective' footage. What we did with our mess was up to us!
We finish the shoot. I start to edit. In those days, the USC School of Cinema was housed in a white clapboard building complex that had one time been the faculty horse stables and carriage barn (a few generations before I arrived on the scene!) When I was there film students still shot their projects using real film cameras and real film stock. Editing was done on workhorse Moviolas (the same way they'd been edited since the machines were invented in 1924 and Douglas Fairbanks bought the first one!) The 'editing room' at SC was a giant open-air space with about 30 of these noisome machines that clacked and clattered 24/7 in eight hour shifts as cigarette smoke wafted in through the open windows (no air conditioning - are you kidding?!!) from the now legendary courtyard and its single tree, the eventual demise of which was probably due to smoke inhalation all those years!
Parked next to each Moviola was a student's 'Trim Bin", another editing essential of a generation ago that thankfully went the way of the Moviolas. Trim Bins have been known to elicit streams of unmentionable expletives from the most pious of students, especially when a two frame "absolutely have to have" trim fell from its hook, landing somewhere among the hundreds of such clips that filled the bag below.
If you entered film making in the digital age, you don't know what you missed. I almost did. By the time my son went to USC, all this was gone. But when I was there, it was a crazy, wonderful time to be a film student at USC. I covet for today's students the kind of camaraderie and fun making movies in the middle of the nightly chaos that we all complained about yet thoroughly enjoyed. Great memories! While I appreciate the ease with which today I can edit a picture, change my mind and see the finished result instantly (and do that over and over again all day long then send it to London or Tel Aviv for instant screening!)...and despite the ton of other reasons why editing today is so much easier and better, nonetheless... I do miss the physicality, the smell of film stock, the sensoral 'touch' that you can only understand if you've actually held film negative or even workprint in your hands and physically cut it...If you know what a 'hot splicer' is or a 'sound block' or a "Nagra". All gone...and in some crazy ephemeral way, I do miss it all. (It's the same reason I sometimes to this day still write my first draft scripts with a pen on real paper, then transfer my scribbles to the computer to polish.) If you don't understand, that's okay!
So one night while I was editing "PORTRAIT", I pulled up a 'scene' from the Trim bin and ran it through the Moviola to check it and set edit marks before inserting it in the film. But as I started running the scene, I realized I had grabbed the 'wrong' film, the version of the scene that I had shot that first night with the 'base out'...the one with all those strange halos around the lights. Suddenly I realized how 'artistic' this looked, this 'defective' footage. I pulled more of the footage from that first night. "This is great stuff", I said to myself. When I showed Jimmy, he agreed. We decided to use it. The school didn't say we couldn't.
When the day came for screening our films for the entire Cinema school (the most brutal of audiences are film students), we waited for the inevitable. Almost every film screened before ours had been met with catcalls, hoots, and laughter (not the kind intended by the filmmakers). When our film ended and the credits began, we expected more of the same. Instead, the audience began to applaud and when the lights came up, they looked back at us and cheered! Jim and I both got an "A" for the class. His 310 film (I loaded the film magazine correctly for his project!) was a deeply moving drama about a young woman and her dying mother. Of course, part of what made it beautiful was the casting of my young wife Gloria as a star in the film. What can I say? Jimmy had a good eye for talent - and for good looks, too!
Unbeknown to us, a few weeks later the University submitted "PORTRAIT" to the national student film competition of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the same folks that give out the Oscars). "PORTRAIT" won second place in the national competition. Some felt that had we been allowed to shoot in color it would have placed first. But still, not bad! Perhaps more gratifying on another level, the folks at Foster & Kleiser liked it so much they ordered 30 prints to send to all their regional offices across the country.
My 'base-out' film loading mistake reminded me that everything we do - even the small things - have consequences. It also taught me that sometimes what seem to be disasters are actually a road to something beautiful. I'm told that J.C. Penny, the great entrepreneur who founded the company that bears his name, experienced 12 bankruptcies in assorted business ventures before he came up with the idea for his successful department store. Penny once observed that 'one cannot learn how to live with success until one has learned how to cope with failure'. Sometimes our failures provide the necessary ingredients of our success.
"PORTRAIT" may have been a fine short film without my stupid mistake. But the resulting mystical, almost ethereal quality those images achieved BECAUSE of my mistake, made it undoubtedly a greater artistic achievement.
So the next time you screw up big time (we all do sooner or later) take heart! It may be an indication of great things ahead. (But now that you know better, just don't ever load the base out, okay stupid?!!!)
