2/16/23
Newsletter #249
The Crack of Dawn
On New Year’s Eve 1995-96 I was sitting in my apartment in Santa Monica thinking, “What’s a good idea?” I thought, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) is a terrific visual idea – theoretically all in one shot, and therefore in real time – so why don’t I like the movie? It struck me that if you’re going to go to the trouble of shooting in real time, then time has to be the issue, and in Rope it isn’t. Rope is a one-room play about two young men (based on Leopold and Loeb) who thrill-kill another young man, put his body in a trunk in the living room, then throw a party. Unless the trunk is automatically going to pop open at some point and reveal their crime, there’s no time element. Also, Hitchcock misconceived how to shoot a film with long, gigantic takes that have to fit seamlessly together with a hidden cuts because a roll of film was only ten minutes long. He decided to just run the whole roll of film and let the cuts fall where they may, causing many of his cuts to end up in awkward places, and that’s simply too haphazard of an approach. The hidden cuts have to be taken into consideration in advance and placed in logical places where they fit. And on a purely financial note, if I kept the takes to five minutes, as opposed to ten, I could get two takes per roll.
I wrote a script where time keeps reestablishing itself as the issue: they have an hour to get where they’re going; our character gets a hooker, and she charges by the hour; they go on a heist where they only have fifteen minutes to get in and out. I keep resetting the clock throughout the story, and since we’re in real time and a minute equals a minute, the point is to create suspense. I did what the great Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, had failed to do – even if he was the guy who conceived the whole idea in the first place. As an historical aside: Hitchcock had a lot on his mind when he made this picture. It was also his first color movie, which was a very big deal in 1948. Plus, when he began to rehearse his long shots with big camera moves he found to his consternation that the studio camera dollies were too big to go through doorways. So, Hitchcock being Hitchcock, had new dollies made, called Doorway Dollies, and those are still the model that we use.
I didn’t have a dolly; I had a Steadicam. I hired a young whippersnapper, 25-year-old Steadicam owner/operator named Bill Gierhart who had no credits, but a perfect attitude – I am the greatest Steadicam operator in the world, I just need to prove it. OK, I thought, we’ll see about that. I am proud to say that I kicked the shit out of that eager young man. My longest shot is several blocks long, emerges from an alley, goes up a street, crosses another street, syncs out perfectly with a passing police car, then goes around an apartment building and up several flights of steps to a specific apartment. Given the size and complexity of the shot, I was surprised that the first take came off pretty well, although it certainly could get better. I called for a second take and there was Bill wearing the Steadicam and camera, wheezing like he was about to die, taking some sort of medication. “What’s that?” I asked. “Glucose. Sugar. I need energy,” gasped Bill. I said, “Good. Let’s go again.” It took three or four takes, but we got it.
So, here’s a quick little morality tale within a tale. The script called for an alley with a dead end and a door into a building near the dead end. My co-producer Jane and I drove up and down damn near every alley in and around Los Angeles, and friends, that’s a lot of alleys. But we found it; exactly what was called for. Jane and I went around to the front of the building and found that it was a furniture factory. We made a reasonable deal with the white, middle-aged owner to shoot there and our final, problematic location was secured.
Comes the day of production in the dead end alley, and following the rules of properly shooting movies in L.A., we had a real, L.A. Fire Marshall on the set because we were firing blanks with real weapons and using explosive blood squibs. The Fire Marshall was a 70-year-old, gray-haired, white man in uniform who was being paid top dollar to basically stay out of our way. It was a great gig and he was amused to be there.
As the morning proceeded, Jane and I both felt pretty good about how the production was shaping up. We crossed the factory with the owner and the Fire Marshall, stepped up to the back door leading out to the alley, and for the very first time tried to open the door, and found that it was locked, with a really old rusty lock that clearly hadn’t been opened in years. Jane and I turned expectantly to the owner, who quickly realized that he didn’t have the key. Jane and I blanched – how could we have not foreseen this possibility? We had rented an alley with a door, but hadn’t even thought of opening the door. What kind of fucking idiots were we?
The owner shrugged, meaning, “Oh well, I guess you poor slobs don’t get to shoot here today.” Except the universe was looking out for Jane and I that day. We happened to have an L.A. Fire Marshall who said to the owner, “Are you insane? Your running a business with multiple employees using flammable materials and you can’t get out the back door? Would you like me to shut this whole place down now?” It was now the owner’s turn to blanch. “No. What do I do?” The Fire Marshall said, “Get a locksmith in here right now and replace that lock, to code, in front of me.”
And thus we were able to get through the door. The door we hadn’t checked.
Today, I’m having new siding put up. Today, my house will go from the ugliest house in the neighborhood to the coolest.