1/28/23
Newsletter 233
The Crack of Dawn
My buddies and I learned filmmaking by doing it. There’s no better teacher in filmmaking than shooting something the wrong way, then finding yourself in the editing room trying to put together and it won’t go. The most standard “coverage” (meaning how many shots) to shoot a dialogue scene between two people is: a two-shot, which is a shot with both people facing each other and talking; and either close-ups of each of the actors, or over-the-shoulder shots. The secret trick of over-the-shoulder shots is that one of them is over the actor’s right shoulder, and the other is over the other actor’s left shoulder. If you don’t switch it up, when you try to cut it together both actors will be facing the same way and it doesn’t look like they’re talking to each other. The same rule goes for close-ups: one actor must be looking camera right, the other camera left. These directions are called “eyelines,” and if you’re not careful it becomes a running topic on the set all day long. “What direction were they looking in?”
There is a crew member called a script supervisor (formerly, “script girl”) whose entire job is note which way the actors are looking, as well as continuity, like in which hand was she holding the gun? Because movies are not shot in order, continuity is a constant issue. Therefore, when continuity errors are pointed out as “flubs,” which they are, except that they’re in every movie ever made, so it seems pointless to me.
And it’s amazing what you can get away with if the audience is paying attention to the characters and dialogue. One of my very favorite scenes in motion pictures is the scene between Jake LaMotta (Robert DeNiro) and his brother, Joey (Joe Pesci), at the kitchen table where Jake confesses that because he’s a middleweight he’ll never be able to fight the heavyweight champ. This makes no sense to Joey. To make his point, Jake tells Joey, “Punch me in the face.” A brilliant scene ensues – “Am I not your older brother, and did I not just tell you to punch me in the face? Now punch me in the face.” However, the continuity in that scene is terrible. The blood on his shirt and the bruise on his eye keep changing back and forth between the different takes they used, and you know what? It doesn’t matter. Therefore, continuity is only so important.
Me and my friends, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, did not attend film school. We started shooting and cutting Super-8 film when we were 12 years old, and by the time we were 18 we sort of knew what we were doing. Hell, we made Evil Dead when we were 21. And finally, here’s the point: we picked up an enormous amount of film technique from the Three Stooges as young kids. Sam’s Evil Dead movies have been likened to the Three Stooges in tone, which is true, but that’s not what I’m talking about. And when I’m referring to the Three Stooges’ film technique, I mean their producer, sometime director, sometime writer, Jules White (real name, Julius Weiss), a Hungarian Jew, who got to Hollywood very early and plays a Confederate soldier in Birth of a Nation (1915).
Jules White knew every practical cinematic trick, and this is where we picked them up. The specific one I was thinking about was reverse motion. This is when you shoot the scene backward, then play it forward. In a Stooges’ episode, Shemp gets punched in the face, it cuts, and we see him do a somersault and end up standing on his head in a corner. First of all, it’s a stuntman and not Shemp; second, the guy started by standing on his head in the corner, then just rolled down and forward out of frame. However, in reverse, Shemp gets punched, he rolls into frame and ends up standing on his head.
We all experimented with reverse motion in our early comedies, and I used it successfully a bunch of times. But Sam certainly put it to its most memorable use in Evil Dead, when the girl is attacked by vines that wrap around her arms, legs and breasts. The vines were simply wrapped around her, then we pulled them off. In reverse they wind onto her.
So that I may end on my own ingenuity (with Bruce), as opposed to Sam’s, there is a shot we pulled off in our Super-8 extravaganza, Stryker’s War (1981), that nobody else even tried.
Like everything else, I didn’t think of it, I saw it in the Japanese movie, Shogun Assassin (1980), a movie I love and have watched many times. Bandits spinning thin chains with weights on the ends throw them at our hero, Lone Wolf. The weights wind around the handles his two sheathed swords and yank them away. In between throwing the chains and them winding around the swords, is a shot of the weights and chains in mid-air flying by.
As this was pre-CGI, and I could see that it wasn’t an optical effect, I just kept wondering how the hell they did that shot. And then it struck me: it was sideways motion. They were simply dangling and lowering the chains and weights straight down, but photographing them sideways so it looked like they were flying horizontally through the air. Bruce and I did the same shot with a knife. I had the camera sideways, Bruce dropped the knife point down, and I panned with it as quick as I could. And it works great – you’re tracking with a knife flying through the air. However, since nobody threw a knife at anybody else in the feature version, I didn’t use the effect again. But I really do love in-camera effects, and I don’t think anybody does them anymore. C’est la vie.
The days are growing longer, and Leon is getting larger.