How Much Are We Worth?

How Much Are We Worth?

by John Leezer, A.S.C.

In these days of specializing, human endeavor tends toward many vocations, but for convenience let us consider only four general divisions: professional men, mechanics, merchants, and artists. A man is a mechanic because he seems best fitted for that kind of work. If he paints beautiful pictures, makes wonderful photographs, or has won fame because of his work in marble, we call him an artist. The motion picture photographer belongs to this class of workers.

He knows considerable about other lines of work, but he spends the most time at the thing he likes best and is so classified. He is not only classified as an artist, but he must be one in every sense of the word-- first, last and all the time. The bigger the man, inside, I mean, the greater artist will he be, but an artist is not an artist unless he can express himself. A man says he is a farmer. How do we know? Another may say he is an architect. How shall we know? If a man be an artist, he as already, by some such medium as the brush, lens or chisel, proven it. Those who can afford to give expression to their artistic sense, solely for the pleasure they derive, are few. Compensation is a wonderful incentive to artistic expression. So the question naturally arises, what are the efforts of an artist worth?

Values are supposed to be determined by supply and demand. If you have talent to sell or real estate or a goat, it is worth what you can get for it. The man with brains offers them for sale in the open market and they are sold to the highest bidder. No one is going to pay a portrait photographer fifty dollars for a dozen 8x10s unless he thinks they are worth it-- at least, not many. If the portrait artist is satisfied that the photographs are worth fifty-dollars, but is unable to get it, is he justified in reducing the price? Before we decide, whether he is or not let us go a little farther into the matter.

We must not forget that we are discussing the class of human beings called artists. The artist does not sit or stand at a machine all day long, turning out a part of a shoe, a hat or a watch. Such an operator puts no part of himself into what he produces. The machine does it; he is a machine man, but what you see on the canvas, one the photo mount, or in the marble, is a part of the man or woman whose work it is.

The Indian believes that something has gone from him into his photograph, otherwise it would not look like him, so we recognize the artist in his work, because of the personality stamped upon it. We know it is a Remington without seeing the name. This comparison between the mechanic and the artist has been made to demonstrate how little they have in common that would indicate what their labor is worth. The wages of the mechanic are determined by comparison. His wage is standard at so much per hour. The compensation of the artist on the other hand is not arrived at by comparison. Even the work of the modern painters varies in price. Some portrait photographers get ten, fifteen, and twenty dollars per print. But is the artist justified in taking less than he thinks his product is worth? There is, to our mind, but one answer. He is not.

It may be well to consider at this time one or two conclusions we have arrived at concerning the producer. The pictures he exhibits give us a good idea of what he demands in photography, and it varies considerably. Most producers get what they want in stories, directors, actors and photographers so, if a producer employs an artist to photograph his productions, it must be because he wants that kind of photography. What other conclusion can we come to? The producers represent the open market in which the artist-photographer offers his services. There are not so many producers as there were at one time, but that is no reason why the photographer should take less for his labor than he thinks it is worth.

Loyalty is a good word so far as words go, but there must be some difference of opinion as to what the word means, in the motion picture industry in any event. To my way of thinking loyalty begets loyalty, or should, but try as hard as I may I am unable to recall even one instance when loyalty ever got the best of a dollar. You may know of cases where it has. I hope you do, but I don't. Loyalty for loyalty's sake is a wonderful virtue, but extremely rare.

Reports indicate that the industry as grown wonderfully in the past ten years. What caused it? Stories, acting, and directing? It would be very discouraging indeed to think that there had been no improvement in these three important departments, but the quiet, unassuming, conscientious artist-photographer is in the main most responsible for the high plane of usefulness the motion picture has reached. But have you heard him making any noise about it? You could not, even with the most sensitive receiving apparatus the wireless expert has yet devised.

What is the most important thing about any structure? The foundation, of course. What is the foundation of this business? Photography! On the whole, I should say that the photographer bears a rather important relation to the industry, but what compensation has he had? Usually the more important or responsible position the greater the compensation. The following ratio is a fair example of real conditions. Directors' salary, 600; Star, 1,000; Photographer 250. No matter what conditions, the ratio remains the same.

The motion picture photographer, as well as any other artist, must decide what he will ask for his labor. If he can not get it or, in other words, if the law of supply and demand does not operate to his advantage, he can take up something else until such a time as he may conscientiously work as an artist again. So far as we know there may be rag pickers who cannot afford to paint pictures. 

- John Leezer, A.S.C. 

... March 1st, 1922

His words ring very true over 90 years later. Loyalty rarely gets the best of a dollar, the soul of the artist is in the picture as much as the subject, and the cameraman is a true artist.

 

Wide Exterior Night Lighting in 1923

From American Cinematographer, Startling Electrical Comparisons in 'Hunchback' 1923 and 1939 by Earl Miller (February 1940)

No Inkies in 1923

In 1923, incandescent lights were not used for motion pictures. The street set was a few feet longer and wider than the one used in the 1939 production. There were only fifty-six 24-inch sun arcs in the entire industry in Hollywood.

We needed every one for our night shots, and Universal arranged to rent all but one. Every night for seven long weeks all the sets in other studios were stripped of 24-inch sun arcs. They were loaded on trucks and hauled to Universal. We used them until 5am, but had to return them to the proper studio and have them set and ready to burn by 8am.

Whenever possible, we left the lights on the trucks all night instead of building parallels. This accounts for the number of trucks showing in the panoramic picture accompanying this story.

Every light used in the 1923 production was an arc. Some of the 24 inch had automatic feed, but in addition to these there were more than 450 other arcs, all of which were hand fed. All lights had to be trimmed at least twice every night and some three times.

Yes, we actually shot every night, all night, for forty-nine straight nights. At one time (and it would be the time it rained the hardest) my crew and I worked five days and six nights straight, rigged all day and shot all night; never took our shoes off; cat-napped between shots.

Six Months' Work

Finally on June 3, 1923, the last reel was in the can, and in spite of all the work and worry everyone who worked on or in that picture will tell you that we had lots of fun making it.

Here are a few of the electrical statistics:
(8) portable generators
(2) 300kw stationary generators
(6) 150kw transformers

The peak load was approximately 37,500 amperes.

John Mathieson: Film Destruction Techniques

From American Cinematographer, Brush With the Gutter by Holly Willis (Sept. 1998)

Mathieson tried to toy with his equipment and lights in order to alter or distort the images he was getting much in the manner that Bacon warped and stretched his own imagery. His description of techniques is a tour through the don’ts of filmmaking, and yet the results are extraordinary.

Mathieson shot some scenes using a 5x4 Sinar plate camera, which he would place in front of the Arri without its plate. Where the plate would normally go, he positioned a piece of tracing paper. "The image would be soft, sort of blurred," he attests, and this effect not only framed the subject like a still camera would, but made images that approximated the blurriness of many of Bacon’s paintings. Another technique involved removing the shutter from the Arri 435.

"We disconnected the shutter, keeping it open. Then we’d use a domestic drill with a handmade shutter in front of the camera. It would run asynchronously, and we’d rev it at different speeds to make the image flutter. If you moved it away from the camera, you’d get these great flash-frames that would stretch and tear from top to bottom, creating images that jumped at you. We did our own fogging in the camera as well, using the Arri VariCon, which enables one to fog the film using different colors. We also tried putting red gel on the side of the camera, then opening up while we were shooting to make a more ’brutal’ fogging effect."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Mathieson also did a lot of double exposures in the camera. One of the film’s final scenes shows Bacon in a bathroom, where Dyer appears as a ghostlike presence. Similar images abound throughout the film, and while budget may have been one of the reasons for doing this and many of the other effects in the camera, Mathieson and Maybury felt that the old-fashioned technique lent the film a certain ambiance.

"When you double-expose [a shot], there’s something about the way it sits on the negative, with the light passing through and hitting the emulsion it just sits better than if you mix it or do CGI to it. It’s also a lot more fun, and you can relight things for different exposures or use different colors. Anyway, John would get so excited about the rushes you’d see the shot right away."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Yet another approach utilized to distort images was to shoot through large chunks of glass. "I’ve been dragging bits of glass around for years," concedes the cameraman. "Alan [Macdonald] would find these lovely pieces of glass to shoot through." Some of the glass pieces were old, heavy ashtrays, but all were simply held in front of the camera for the shot. Mathieson also used an assortment of old lenses.

"We had this odd collection. We had an old Angenieux, for example, which we did terrible things to with Vaseline. We also took the elements out of some of the lenses, and we also used a Frazier lens once. With the Frazier you have to use the Panavision camera, but the lens system has its own peculiar kind of optics. It does extreme close-ups."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Mathieson also used a boroscope lens for close-ups.

"The optical quality of a boroscope is terrible, really. But what you can do with them is amazing. They are very good for doing close-ups of things like white mice building nests they’re used by natural history people for studying nature. But we used them for snooping around and looking at bad skin or stained fingers."

- John Mathieson, BSC

The boroscope is unusual in that it can both do close-ups and wide-angle shots; the image is distorted at either setting, and Mathieson used this warping effect to lend a repulsive quality to the faces of the people who hung around Bacon, making them appear as they would have had they been rendered by the artist on canvas.

The cinematographer also employed an array of gels to augment his subjects’ more hideous qualities.

"We got that Bacon dead-flesh look using old gels. They were strange correction gels for lamps that people don’t use anymore. They have very weird colors, and most have been discontinued. We also used a lot of cosmetic gels, but in a very uncosmetic way. There’s an LCT Yellow, for example, which is a weird, horrible color that makes everyone look ill or dead. Usually when you put a gel in front of a light, it looks very intense and strong, and we didn’t want that. We wanted something more subtle, something dirty, and we found that these old gels really gave us the desired waxy, dead-meat look."

- John Mathieson, BSC