16 April 2008

Kubrick's Napoleon Test Reel?

These YouTube clips from Barry Lydon hint at what Stanley Kubrick might have had in mind for his Napoleon project.

9 April 2008

Kubrick's Most Autistic Movie


I could make a case that 2001 is Stanley Kubrick's most autistic movie. That would explain the behavior of the Discovery astronauts Bowman and Poole. Although, you could make the case that Dr. Strangelove has the most autistic character in General Ripper, but paranoia cannot be denied as a strong motivator. Artistic loners tend to be pegged as autistic so you could make the case that Humbert Humbert was a borderline case in Lolita.

You could also make the case that Kubrick's first feature, Fear and Desire, was his most autistic because it was the one he made closer to his teen years. Here it is, complete:


This article from Time magazine published in 1975 upon the release of Barry Lyndon may be making the case for that movie as Kubrick's most autistic.
FIRST PARADOX: Barry Lyndon, a story of an 18th century Irish gentleman-rogue, is the first novel of a great 19th century writer, William Makepeace Thackeray. It shows early signs of a genius that would nourish only after creative struggle and personal adversity. In time, this forgotten book becomes the basis for the tenth feature film by a well-established, well-rewarded 20th century artist—Director Stanley Kubrick. In it, he demonstrates the qualities that eluded Thackeray: singularity of vision, mature mastery of his medium, near-reckless courage in asserting through this work a claim not just to the distinction critics have already granted him but to greatness that time alone can — and probably will — confirm.

SECOND PARADOX: As he did in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick relies not on words —he is as sparing of them as Thackeray is profligate—but images to tell his story. Yet Barry Lyndon lacks the experimental, hallucinatory visual quality that made 2001 a cultural touchstone of the tripped-out '60s. Kubrick has shot and edited Barry Lyndon with the classic economy and elegance associated with the best works of the silent cinema. The frantic trompe l'oeil manner — all quick cuts and crazy angles — recently favored by ambitious film makers (and audiences) has been rigorously rejected.

This drive for cinematic purity has consumed three years of Kubrick's life and $11 million of Warner Bros.' money. The film is 3 hr., 4 min. and 4 sec. long, and it does not easily yield up its themes. "The essence of dramatic form," says Kubrick, "is to let an idea come over people without its being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it is simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves."

THIRD PARADOX: Barry Lyndon is obviously a costume drama but in a much more literal sense than any movie easily dismissed by that contemptuous phrase. Many of the clothes are not costumes at all but authentic antiques. The equally real interiors arid landscapes—every foot of the film was shot on location —are intended to function as something more than exotic delights for the eye. Close scrutiny of the settings reveals not only the character of the people who inhabit them but the spirit of the entire age as Kubrick understands it.

Though Barry Lyndon includes the duels, battles and romantic intrigues that we are conditioned to expect in movies about the past, it more often than not cuts away from this easy-to-savor material. This cool distancing suggests that the melodramatic passions normally sustaining our interest in films are petty matters. This vision of the past, like Kubrick's vision of the future in 2001, invites us to experience an alien world not through its characters but with them—sensorially, viscerally. Stanley Kubrick's idea of what constitutes historical spectacle does not coincide with many people's — least of all, those in Warner's sales department. Which brings us to the...

FOURTH PARADOX: Having made what amounts to an art-film spectacle — something few directors since Griffith and Eisenstein have brought off — Kubrick now requires that his backers go out and sell the damned thing. Because of distribution and promotion costs, the film must gross at least $30 million to make a profit. Kubrick has his own ideas about how to proceed: a tasteful ad campaign, a limited-release pattern permitting good word of mouth to build, saturation bookings timed to coincide with the Academy Award nominations that the director and studio believe are inevitable. Warner salesmen wish they had something simpler on then-hands—a great sloshy romance like Dr. Zhivago, for instance, or at least a rollicking rip-off of olden times, like Tom Jones. Now Kubrick will help sell his picture. Among other things, he employs a bookkeeper to chart how films have played in the first-run houses of key cities, so his films can be booked into those with the best records. But the fact remains that his work habits are anything but helpful to publicists.

Multimillion-dollar movies are usually open to the press as they are being made; their heavy tread can be heard clumping toward the theaters for a year prior to release. Kubrick's locations, however, were closed. Not a single publicity still emerged without the director's express approval, which was almost never granted. Thus the only word on Barry Lyndon came from actors and technicians, none of them privy to Kubrick's vision, and some wearied and literally sickened by his obsessive perfectionism.

At age 47, he is the creator of one of cinema's most varied and successful bodies of work; in addition to 2001, it includes Paths of Glory, Lolita, Doctor Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange. He enjoys the rare right to final cut of his film without studio advice or interference. Warner executives were not permitted to see more than a few bits of it until the completed version — take it or leave it — was screened for them just three weeks ago. To put it mildly, it is hard for them to get a proper buildup going for their expensive property on such short notice.

FIFTH PARADOX: Stanley Kubrick himself. Barry Lyndon may be an austere epic, but an epic it surely is. Such works pose complex logistical and technical problems that must be solved along with the aesthetic questions that arise every time a new camera setup is chosen. Kubrick's basic cast and crew of 170 — augmented by hundreds of extras and supporting specialists as needed — crawled from location to location across Ireland and England for 8 months. Normally, the commanders of cinematic operations on this scale are outgoing, not to say colorfully flamboyant characters.

That, however, is precisely what Kubrick is not. He is almost reclusively shy, "a demented perfectionist, according to the publicity mythology around me." This myth began building when he decided to stay on in England after shooting Lolita there in 1961. He found it "helpful not to be constantly exposed to the fear and anxiety that prevail in the film world." He lives and does all pre-and post-production work in a rambling manor house defended by two wooden walls and furnished in early nondescript. He rarely ventures forth even to London, less than an hour away. He prefers that the world—in controllable quantities—be brought to him via telex, telephone, television. All the books and movies this omnivorous reader-viewer requires are delivered to the retreat he shares with his third wife Christiane, his three daughters, three dogs and six cats. He is, says his friend, Film Critic Alexander Walker, "like a medieval artist living above his workshop." According to an actress who once worked for him, he is also "a mole." What has the mole wrought? Is the finished film worth the pains he has taken with it—and given to his associates over the long years of its creation? The answer is a resounding yes.

Kubrick does not know what drew him to this tale of a scoundrel's rise and fall. Beyond noting that he has always enjoyed Thackeray, he does not try to explain his choice: "It's like trying to say why you fell in love with your wife — it's meaningless."

Possibly, but Kubrick's curiosity was probably aroused by the chance to explore a character who is his antithesis. About his work Kubrick is the most self-conscious and rational of men. His eccentricities — secretiveness, a great need for privacy — are caused by his intense awareness of time's relentless passage. He wants to use time to "create a string of masterpieces," as an acquaintance puts it. Social status means nothing to him, money is simply a tool of his trade.

Barry, on the other hand, suffers a monstrous complacency. He betrays not the slightest moral or intellectual self-awareness. Born poor but with a modest claim to gentleman's rank, he never doubts his right to rise to the highest ranks of the nobility. Nor does he ever seem to question the various means by which he pursues his end: army desertion, card sharping, contracting a loveless marriage in order to acquire a fortune. As for time, it means nothing to him. He squanders it, as he does money, in pursuit of pleasure and the title he is desperate for.

In the novel, Thackeray used a torrent of words to demonstrate Barry's lack of self-knowledge. Narrating his own story, Barry so obviously exaggerates his claims to exemplary behavior that the reader perceives he is essentially a braggart and poltroon. Daringly, Kubrick uses silence to make the same point. "People like Barry are successful because they are not obvious—they don't announce themselves," says Kubrick. So it is mainly by the look in Ryan O'Neal's eyes —a sharp glint when he spies the main chance, a gaze of hurt befuddlement when things go awry — that we understand Barry's motives. And since he cannot see his own face, we can be certain he is not aware of these self-betrayals. According to Kubrick, Barry's silence also implies that "he is not very bright," he is an overreacher who "gets in over his head in situations he doesn't fully understand." Though a certain dimness makes him a less obviously comic figure than he is in the book, it also makes him a more believable one. And it permits Kubrick to demonstrate, without shattering the movie's tone, Barry's two nearly saving graces—physical gallantry and desperate love of his only child, whose death is the film's emotional high point and the tragedy that finally undoes Barry.

With the exception of Humbert Humbert in Lolita, this is the first time that Kubrick has moved beyond pop archetypes and taken the measure of a man with a novelist's sense of psychological nuance. Still, it is not as a study in character that Barry Lyndon will be ultimately remembered. The structure of the work is truly novel. In addition, Kubrick has assembled perhaps the most ravishing set of images ever printed on a single strip of celluloid. These virtues are related: the structure would not work without Kubrick's sustaining mastery of the camera, lighting and composition; the images would not be so powerful if the director had not devised a narrative structure spacious enough for them to pile up with overwhelming impressiveness.

As a design, Barry Lyndon is marvelously simple. The first half offers something like a documentary of 18th century manners and morals. To be sure, a lot happens to Barry in this segment — first love, first duel, first wanderings, first military combat — but he remains pretty much a figure in the foreground, rather like those little paper cutouts architects place on their models to give a sense of scale. What matters to the director is the world beyond, the world Barry is so anxious to conquer.

And it is a great world, especially to the modern eye, accustomed as it is to cluttered industrialized landscapes, and architecture and decor that stress the purely functional. The recurring visual motif of the film — especially obvious in the first portion — is a stately pullback. Typically, it starts on some detail, like a closeup of an actor, then moves slowly back to reveal the simple beauty of the countryside that is as indifferent to the player's petty pursuits as he is impervious to its innocent charm. The lighting in all the outdoor sequences appears to be completely natural and patiently—expensively—waited for. Frequently, most of the emotional information for a scene may be found in the light, before anyone says a word. A superb example of this occurs when Barry discovers his first love flirting in a garden with a man who is everything he is not—mature, wealthy, well born, English and an army officer to boot. The late afternoon sun, soft as the lyric of a love ballad, literally dies along with Barry's hopes of romance.

Indoors, there are similar revelations, thanks in part to space-age technology. Kubrick found a way to fit an incredibly fast (F 0.7) 50mm. still-camera lens, developed by Zeiss, onto a motion-picture camera. It permitted him to film night interiors using only the light available to inhabitants of the 18th century. Some scenes are illuminated by just a single candle; in others, hundreds gutter in the candelabra and chandeliers of great halls, bathing the screen in a gentle, wonderfully moody orange glow that almost no one now alive has ever experienced.

In the hands of another director, all this embellishment might seem an idle exercise, perhaps even proof of the old movie adage that when a director dies he becomes a cameraman. The first half of Barry Lyndon deliberately violates every rule of sound dramatic composition. Only a few of the scenes end in powerful emotion or conflict, and there is no strong arc to the overall design of the piece. And yet our attention never wanders: such is Kubrick's gift for lighting and composing a scene, such is the strength of his desire to prove that movies "haven't scratched the surface of how to tell stories in their own terms."

The thought is not new. Everyone who has worked in or thought seriously about the cinema knows that the angle of a shot or the rhythm of a scene's editing can impart information more economically than a long stretch of dialogue. What is novel is that Kubrick has acted so firmly on the basis of that nearly conventional wisdom in the film's first half — the half that must catch and hold the attention of a mass audience (The Towering Inferno crowd) if his picture is to succeed commercially.

It is a big risk, an act of the highest artistic confidence. Reassurance comes in the strong melodrama of the film's second half. From the moment Marisa Berenson, playing Lady Lyndon, appears and Barry's suit for her hand succeeds, the film, without seeming to change its style or gently enfolding pace, gathers tremendous dramatic force of a quite conventional sort. Barry's loveless use of her to further his ambitions has a raw, shocking edge. His conflict with her son by her first marriage, culminating in what is surely the most gripping duel ever filmed, is full of angry uncontrolled passion. Barry's innocent infatuation with his own child, "the hope of his family, the pride of his manhood," has a touching, redeeming warmth to it. His downfall, much more dramatically rendered by Kubrick than by Thackeray, has a tragic starkness and a moral correctness. In short, Kubrick has accomplished what amounts to a minor miracle — an uncompromised artistic vision that also puts all of Warner Bros, money "on the screen," as Kubrick says, borrowing an old trade term. He feels he has done right by himself and "done right by the people who gave me the money," presenting them with the best possible chance to make it back with a profit on their investment.

Kubrick turned to Barry Lyndon after a projected biography of Napoleon proved too complex and expensive even for him. He reread the novel several times, "looking for traps, making sure it was do-able." With typically elaborate caution, he got Warners' backing on the basis of an outline in which names, places and dates were changed so no one could filch from him a story in the public domain. He then settled down to work on script and research. The latter may be, for him, the more important undertaking. "Stanley is voracious for information. He wants glorious choice," says his associate producer, Bernard Williams. Adds Costume Designer Milena Canonero: "He wants to see everything. He wants at his fingertips the knowledge, the feeling of the period."

Kubrick is a self-taught man with an autodidact's passion for facts and the process of gathering them. Son of a Bronx physician, he was an indifferent high school student. He experimented endlessly with cameras and at 17 was hired by Look as a staff photographer. He learned something about people and a lot about photography, traveling the country shooting pictures for 4 years. At 21, he made his first short subject, three years later his first fictional feature — very low budget. He also audited Columbia University courses conducted by the likes of Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, and became a tireless reader with catholic tastes. "I can become interested in anything," he says. "Delving into a subject, discovering facts and details—I find that easy and pleasurable."

It is also essential to his work. For one thing, he finds it impossible to invent an entirely original story, something drawn out of his own experience or fantasy life. Indeed, the creation of fiction awes him. "It is one of the most phenomenal human achievements," he says. "And I have never done it." Instead, he must do "detective work — find out about the things about which I have no direct experience." These, of course, offer metaphors in which to cloak such observations — they are never direct messages — that he cares to share with the world.

Research aids him in another way. Movie sets — even the cool, orderly ones Kubrick is famous for running — seethe with logistical, technical and emotional problems. As Kubrick mildly puts it, "The atmosphere is inimical to making subtle aesthetic decisions." He is unable to determine how to shoot a scene until he sees a set fully dressed and lit. This is a mo ment of maximum risk. Says Ryan O'Neal, who plays Barry: "The toughest part of Stanley's day was finding the right first shot. Once he did that, other shots fell into place. But he agonized over that first one."

It is precisely then that Kubrick's memory bank, well stocked with odd details, comes into play. "Once, when he was really stymied, he began to search through a book of 18th century art reproductions," recalls O'Neal.

"He found a painting — I don't remem ber which one — and posed Marissa and me exactly as if we were in that painting."

Most of his performers seem to worship Kubrick. One reason is that he is always willing to give their suggestions a trial run Or two. He is also Intelligent about not overdirecting them. "Stanley is a great believer in the man," says Murray Melvin, who is superb in the role of a snaky spiritual adviser to Lady Lyndon. "You have to do it." Adds Patrick Magee, who plays a gambler: "The catchwords on the set are 'Do it faster, do it slower, do it again.' Mostly, 'Do it again.'"

Melvin did one scene 50 times. "I knew he had seen something I had done. But because he was a good director, he wouldn't tell me what it was. Because if someone tells you you've done a good bit, then you know it and put it in parentheses and kill it. The better actor you were, the more he drew out of you."

There is no sadism in Kubrick's insistence on huge numbers of retakes. He did not press Berenson or the children in his cast, only the established professionals he knew could stand up under his search for the best they had to offer. "Actors who have worked a lot in movies," Kubrick says mildly, "don't really get a sense of intense excitement into their performances until there is film running through the camera." Moreover, the "beady eye" that several insist was cast on them as they worked is merely a sign of the mesmerizing concentration he brings to his work.

Originally Kubrick, who likes to sleep in his own bed and likes even more to save the money it costs to house and feed a crew on location, had hoped to shoot the entire picture within a 90-minute range of home. He dispatched photographers to all the great houses within that circle, hoping to find the look he wanted. Impossible. He then decided to shoot in Ireland, where the early sections of the book are set anyway. After a couple of months there, however, the I.R.A. — or someone using its name — made telephone threats to the production. Kubrick decamped for rural England, where he used rooms in at least four different stately homes, artfully cut together to give Hackton Castle, Lady Lyndon's digs, spaciousness and richness. At Corsham Court, he was told that if he did not kill his lights within 30 minutes, irreparable harm would be done to the priceless paintings in the room where he was shooting. Similar incidents sent the budget soaring, giving an extra twist to the pressures Kubrick felt. Nerves produced a rash on his hands that did not disappear until the film was wrapped, and though he had quit smoking, he started cadging cigarettes.

Still, things could have been worse. Warner's production chief, John Calley, was always tolerant. "It would make no sense to tell Kubrick, 'O.K., fella, you've got one more week to finish the thing,'" he says. "What you would get then is a mediocre film that cost say, $8 million, instead of a masterpiece that cost $11 million. When somebody is spending a lot of your money, you are wise to give him time to do the job right."

Calley admits he has no idea whether masterpieces are going to sell this season. "The business is, at best, a crap shoot. The fact that Stanley thinks the picture will gross in nine figures is very reassuring. He is never far wrong about anything." If Kubrick is right, he will be rich. By the terms of his deal with Warner, he receives 40% of Barry Lyndon's profits. Only one picture in history — Jaws — has made "nine figures"; it passed the $100 million mark last week.

As for Kubrick, he is still working 18 hours a day, overseeing the final fine tuning of the sound track while keeping one compulsively attentive eye on the orchestration of the publicity buildup. It is something he feels he must do, just as he personally checked the first 17 prints of A Clockwork Orange before they went out to the theaters. "There is such a total sense of demoralization if you say you don't care. From start to finish on a film, the only limitations I observe are those imposed on me by the amount of money I have to spend and the amount of sleep I need. You either care or you don't, and I simply don't know where to draw the line between those two points."

He does not believe a single flop will cost him his ability to ere, act independently, though he may occasionally think of a line in The Killing, his first major studio release in 1956. A thief muses that people romanticize gangsters and artists, but they are also eager to see them brought low.

Much more often, however, Stanley Kubrick is armored in the serene belief that whatever judgment the public passes on his new movie when it opens next week, he has fulfilled the director's basic ideal, which is to shoot "economically and with as much beauty and gracefulness as possible." Beyond that, he adds, "All you can do is either pose questions or make truthful observations about human behavior. The only morality is not to be dishonest." Barry Lyndon fulfills that ideal as well.

Here is an Asperger filmography from an online source:
Molly which is dreadful, Mozart and the Whale is okay, in Anthony Mingella's Breaking and Entering Jude Law's character has a mildly autistic daughter obsessed with gymnastics, in a new UK film, Sparkle, Bob Hoskins plays a man with AS. According to conjecture Stanley Kubrick had Asperger's syndrome so you could watch some movies he directed because they may show from the inside how his AS mind works.
That comments makes you look at Kubrick's film work in a different light, doesn't it?

More on Kubrick and Asperger

Stanley Kubrick was sixteen years old when Asperger was first identified as a form of autism and died before Asperger was officially recognized by the medical community in 1994. Here's a snip from a New Yorker piece written by an artistic aspie last year:

In the fall of 2000, in the course of what had become a protracted effort to identify—and, if possible, alleviate—my lifelong unease, I was told that I had Asperger’s syndrome. I had never heard of the condition, which had been recognized by the American Psychiatric Association only six years earlier. Nevertheless, the diagnosis was one of those rare clinical confirmations which are met mostly with relief. Here, finally, was an objective explanation for some of my strengths and weaknesses, the simultaneous capacity for unbroken work and all-encompassing recall, linked inextricably to a driven, uncomfortable personality. And I learned that there were others like me—people who yearned for steady routines, repeated patterns, and a few cherished subjects, the driftwood that keeps us afloat.

The syndrome was identified, in 1944, by Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatrician, who wrote, “For success in science or art, a dash ofautism is essential.” Yet Oliver Sacks makes a clear distinction between full-fledged autism and Asperger’s syndrome. In The New Yorker some years ago, Sacks wrote that “people with Asperger’s syndrome can tell us of their experiences, their inner feelings and states, whereas those with classicalautism cannot. With classical autism there is no ‘window,’ and we can only infer. With Asperger’s syndrome there is self-consciousness and at least some power to introspect and report.”

In his 1998 book “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals,” Tony Attwood observed, “The person with Asperger’s syndrome has no distinguishing physical features but is primarily viewed by other people as different because of their unusual quality of social behavior and conversation skills. For example, a woman with Asperger’s Syndrome described how as a child she saw people moving into the house up the street, ran up to one of the new kids and, instead of the conventional greeting and request of ‘Hi, you want to play?,’ proclaimed, ‘Nine times nine is equal to 81.’ ”

David Mamet, in his recent book “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” discerned redeeming qualities in the condition. Considering filmmakers past and present, he stated that “it is not impossible that Asperger’s syndrome helped make the movies. The symptoms of this developmental disorder include early precocity, a great ability to maintain masses of information, a lack of ability to mix with groups in age-appropriate ways, ignorance of or indifference to social norms, high intelligence, and difficulty with transitions, married to a preternatural ability to concentrate on the minutia of the task at hand.”

Sounds like a thumbnail sketch of Stanley Kubrick. Asperger can be applied widely, probably due to its being such a recently characterized phenomenon.
The Asperger’s spectrum ranges from people barely more abstracted than a stereotypical “absent-minded professor” to the full-blown, albeit highly functioning, autistic. Symptoms of Asperger’s have been attributed ex post facto to successful figures, but these are the fortunate ones—persons able to invent outlets for their ever-welling monomanias. Many are not so lucky, and some end up institutionalized or homeless. (In the late nineteen-seventies, I saw a ragged, haunted man who spent urgent hours dodging the New York transit police to trace the dates and lineage of the Hapsburg nobility on the walls of subway stations.) For some—record collectors with every catalogue number at hand, theatre buffs with first-night casts memorized, children who draw precise architectural blueprints of nineteenth-century silk mills—a cluster of facts can be both luminous and lyric, something around which to construct a life.

We are informally referred to as “Aspies,” and if we are not very, very good at something we tend to do it very poorly. Little in life comes naturally—except for our random, inexplicable, and often uncontrollable gifts—and, even more than most children, we assemble our personalities unevenly, piece by piece, almost robotically, from models we admire. (I remember the deliberate decision to appropriate one teacher’s mischievous grin and darting eyes, which I found so charming that I thought they might work for me, too.)

So preoccupied are we with our inner imperatives that the outer world may overwhelm and confuse. What anguished pity I used to feel for piñatas at birthday parties, those papier-mâché donkeys with their amiable smiles about to be shattered by little brutes with bats. On at least one occasion, I begged for a stay of execution and eventually had to be taken home, weeping, convinced that I had just witnessed the braining of a new and sympathetic acquaintance.

Caring for inanimate objects came easily. Learning to make genuine connections with people—much as I desperately wanted them—was a bewildering process. I felt like an alien, always about to be exposed. Or, to adapt another hoary but useful analogy, not only did I not see the forest for the trees; I was so intensely distracted that I missed the trees for the species of lichen on their bark.

My first and most powerful obsession was music—the same records played again and again while I watched them spin, astonished at their evocation of aural worlds that I not only instinctively understood even as a toddler but in which I actually felt comfortable. I was both terrified of and tantalized by death (which was absolutely real to me from earliest childhood), and by the way recordings restored Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba to life for a few minutes, ghostly visitors who had returned to sing for me at 78 r.p.m., through a hiss of shellac and antiquity.

When I was ten, I became fascinated by silent films, the visual complement to my old records. I spent hours at the library of the University of Connecticut, a few minutes’ walk from home, researching the lives of actors and actresses on microfilm, and recall the genuine sense of mourning that came over me when I saw Barbara La Marr’s sad, youthful face on an obituary page from 1926. Not surprisingly, “Sunset Boulevard” was my favorite “talkie” (I actually called them that—in 1965!), and I’d regularly set the alarm and wake in the middle of the night to watch Chester Conklin or Louise Dresser take on minor roles in some B movie that the Worcester, Massachusetts, UHF station put on when nobody else was watching.
Kubrick totally immersed himself in film, as he had with chess and photography, when he was living as a bohemian bachelor in New York in the early 1950s. Kubrick eventually drew in his girlfriend to help him make his first feature and had been married twice by the time he made his first mainstream picture, The Killing, in partnership with James B. Harris. Here's the trailer:

4 April 2008

Napoleon Script Resurfaces on Interwebs


The Stanley Kubrick estate asked the web to keep the Napoleon script off the grid while it sought to publish the screenplay in book form. Looks like there has been a breach of the embargo. Or else it could be a guerrilla plan to promote the upcoming book. Either way, get it while it lasts. I will be blogging on excerpts of the script in the coming days. I look forward to commenting on the military aspects of the screenplay and its portrayal of Josephine and Napoleon's sexual appetites.

Picture of the day. I have liked blogging on the Stanley Kubrick Napoleon project so much I decided to blog about another upcoming La Boca Production: a Hollywood style bio-pic of the baseball hall of famer Roberto Clemente. Isn't it about time my friends for sports to return to the myth of the self less hero. There is too much made in the media of the darker side of sports which has only reflected the coarsening of the societies supporting professional teams. Be it an orgy with harlots or performance enhancing drugs or even gunplay, many more of the heroes of today are considerably tarnished when you think back to the way players lived during last century's middle period. Particularly in the United States. Roberto Clemente was born dirt poor during the Depression; as an adult he never missed a chance to extend a helping hand or to speak out against oppression. He was an inspiration to his teammates and seemed to defy the effects of age by playing better as he got older. Clemente was on a plane loaded with supplies bound for earthquake survivors in Nicaragua. The plane crashed moments after take off and was never recovered. The mercy flight went down at the very tip of the Bermuda Triangle.

2 April 2008

Kubrick for Dummies podcast


Everything you need to know about Stanley Kubrick is her in this ninety minute podchat from three hippie movie geeks. These old school bohos cover Kubrick's entire career. They even go back to when Kubrick was junior camera nut and got his first paying gig as a boy photographer in New York City working for a feisty editor. I will be dissecting the podchat to prune away inaccuracies. For instance, Kubrick was married three times, not twice. Look for video from Malcolm McDowell telling the real story about playing ping-pong with Stanley Kubrick during post-production of ACO.



Picture of the day. Sin comentario.

28 March 2008

Documentary Cookbook Manifesto


Below is the final part of the UC Berkeley Documentary Cookbook. This is the heart of the manifesto, dealing with the nuts and bolts of making a movie for less than one hundred thousand dollars. Part of the challenge in making this documentary about Stanley Kubrick's life long obsession with Napoleon will be finding a way to make it economically without sacrificing quality or story.

BASIC APPROACH

"Make films, not proposals:"

If you have lots of money, don't do this.

As expected, most of the lessons learned so far are bone head obvious, and boil down to very disciplined, simple "preventive production." To really be serious about finding projects on which you can lower cost without lowering quality, here's what you need to do, in order of cost efficiency:

  • Choose the right story. Find stories that naturally lend themselves to low cost, not stories which will be compromised with short funding. Thin Blue Line, Gimme Shelter, , Mark Twain, The Cockettes, and Long Night's Journey Into Day will always cost at least a half million dollars.
  • Back into it. Reverse the idea/funding process. Find stories and techniques that can be done with the money readily available, not with money which might someday be available.
  • Exercise Discipline. Be extremely careful and consistent at every stage of planning and production. Make the project all muscle, no fat. Obviously, this favors pre-conceptualized projects and handicaps discovery.
  • Use small format digital video. Use DV/DVCam as starting point to reduce cost from ground up. Small format digital video is to us as 16mm was to cinema verite or 4-track recorders were to rock and roll.
  • Exercise consistent technical protocol. Get video and audio close to right in the field, and do not plan to fix anything in the mix or on-line. Small format video demands more technical care than large format.
  • Pay professionals their going rates. Control personnel costs by adjusting time, not rates. Reconfigure what you do, not how much you pay for it.
  • Use experienced craftspeople at all levels, especially in audio and assistant editing.
  • Avoid air travel. Is there no good film to be made within 100 miles of home? .
  • Make the film quickly. Production and editorial schedules that minimize person-days are big levers for cost reduction. Set rough cut and lock picture deadlines, and meet them no matter what. This favors experienced filmmakers working with strong fallback narrative structures.
  • Maintain a clear decision flow. The producer/director is in charge. The production unit must be a community, but not a democracy. Fine-tune the filtering of ideas to flow from community to director to editor in orderly fashion. Delays in executive signoff (if there is an executive) can be catastrophic.
  • "FIDO" "Fuck it and drive on." Choose a story in which a few missing pieces or clunky moments will go unnoticed, so that you can always maintain forward motion. Never bog down, and never miss a deadline, no matter what.
  • Avoid on-line assembly, out of house, by working on an editing system which directly outputs high-resolution video. Do not color correct the show yourself.
  • Use high-end facilities for sound finishing and color correction after extremely careful field origination and editorial prep.
  • Do not use outside archive material, only home movies, personal photos, documents for which you own all rights in perpetuity, and fair use material for which you can make a clearly and obviously defensible case for fair use.
  • Do not use outside music, only music internally produced, for which you own rights in perpetuity; music rights may be non-exclusive.
  • Avoid hidden administrative cost, of music, archive footage, and stills. The admin time, paperwork, research, provenance search, and E&O costs can match license fees.
  • Avoid live performance under trade union jurisdiction, where fees and hidden administrative costs may be excessive.
  • Avoid fundraising, beyond the bare minimum necessary to get the project done. The fundraising process itself mounts its own enormous costs---sample reels, office expense, producer time, spun budgets, spun proposals.

These suggested methods clearly apply only to a small number of documentaries and a small number of filmmakers. And finally:

  • Make a high quality film, and then sell it to the highest bidder. "HBO is not going to broadcast a show simply because it cost $100,000. Nobility is not part of the mix," says Pete Nicks.

STORY ATTRIBUTES

"The message is the message"

Story is everything. Conventional wisdom holds that choosing small format digital production is the best way to reduce documentary cost. On the contrary, story choice appears to be the single most determining factor, followed closely by organization of story chosen. (It may come as a surprise to learn that Startup.Com---shot almost entirely on a PD100---cost $750,000.) In setting up this project, we have deliberately avoided calling for content-specific proposals. We have for the moment kept our invitations to filmmakers content-neutral, because it is the method and evolving production template which matter, and these depend first on what stories the producers choose to tackle.

  • Can this story be told with the funds readily within reach?
  • Can this story be clearly and naturally told for low cost with little compromise?
  • Can this story easily withstand moments of inelegant storytelling?
  • Can this story easily withstand losing an episode or character?
  • Can this story be done without travel?
  • Can this story be made into a documentary by a few people in a few days?
  • Can this story be done without archive materials?
  • Can the timeline or narrative arc of this story be quickly and efficiently organized.
  • Does this story require cumbersome administrative access. Getting into Disneyland, Sing Sing, or the San Diego County District Attorney's office will burn up months or even years of work.

Obviously, many stories---most in fact---cannot be done inexpensively under these restrictions. Eyes On The Prize, The Civil War, Africans In American, Crumb, The Farmer's Wife, Endurance, Lalee's Kin, and similar projects will always cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, and must be supported at that level. We are not talking about those.

PRODUCTION

"Preventive Production"

Talk is cheap. This year we invited three producers to make films of various lengths, with the stipulation that, on average, the projects not cost more than $100,000 per hour, and that they be for a television audience. The documentaries are all very different, and the filmmakers bring a good range of style, method, perspective, experience and age.

Peter Nicks is the young producer of The Wolf, a one-hour personal documentary about how cocaine nearly destroyed his life at the peak of America's war against drugs. The Wolf explores America's hesitant romance with illegal drugs by examining Peter's addiction, imprisonment, his unlikely recovery, and the struggles of his family. Before directing the project, Nicks worked at Nightline. And he is currently a producer at PBS's Life 360.

Lourdes Portillo, a widely known and respected mid-career producer (The Devil Never Sleeps, Seniorita Extraviata) is now shooting with Kyle Kibbe on "McQueen." This 20 minute documentary looks back over three decades to the legendary car chase in the 1968 film "Bullit" as a device for exploring sweeping changes in class, demographics, ethnicity, and popular culture in California.

Albert Maysles, whose career spans 45 years (Salesman, Gimme Shelter), and who was an early champion of small format video, will produce and direct the third project. He will begin shooting late this fall on a film about the personal dramas of passengers on long-distance trains.

Jon Else's film Open Outcry, while not made directly under the umbrella of the Center for New Documentary, was produced for ITVS during the center's first year. It was an instructive and not entirely successful attempt to do programming for $100,000 per hour. The project, which experiments with near-real-time shooting, was photographed at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 8 days, and edited in 11 days.

(All this discussion of cost reduction unfolds as a departure from the industry standard protocol of one-hour TV documentaries, films which require about $500,000 parsed and budgeted to:

  • 15 to 25 shooting days
  • 4 to 6 travel days
  • 5 to 30% administrative overhead
  • 3 to 5 person field unit, plus executive producer
  • 12 to 18-week full time Avid edit by 2-person edit team
  • 2 to 3 week sound finishing
  • 2 to 3 day on-line & color correction)

Personnel & staffing

"No cheap labor"

Work with experienced people at all levels. To our surprise, the more seasoned the personnel, the cheaper the production, even though individual daily or weekly rates may be higher. The hidden administrative cost of ramping up interns and apprentices on The Wolf was significant, and we have yet to invent a way of using entry level people efficiently. "Cattle calls" for interns are probably a mistake. The fact of the matter is that a journeyman videographer, director, editor, or assistant with solid experience can accomplish an enormous amount in a day. Also, experienced people can quickly spot inefficiencies, wrong turns, and blind alleys long before the problems eat into a budget.

This model depends in large measure on everyone doing a couple of jobs well---director/recordists (like Fred Wiseman), director/editors (like Deborah Hoffmann) or director/shooters (like -Al Maysles). We try to do stories in which it makes sense for the sound recordist to work as AP, or the AP to record sound, or the assistant editor to production manage. The aesthetic advantages are obvious, as are the logistic advantages, and clearly it assumes that anyone brought on to the project is already skilled -- not semi-skilled -- in two job categories. (It does not mean that a good sound recordist should barely squeak by managing the production, or that a good AP should squeak by doing marginal sound. All the savings are eaten up later, when it comes time to repair the damage.) This double-skill multi-tasking can backfire horrifically in situations where the producer/director really needs to devote full attention to directing, unencumbered by technical craftwork.

We work with crews of at least two people, preferably three. In general, the one-man band approach may help access, but it can severely restrict quality. A producer/director/videographer/soundman may be appropriate for getting on the ground fast in Sierra Leone or Uzbekistan, but craft suffers tremendously, especially in severely compromised or unusable audio.

Collegiality and professionalism are critical, and it appears that the production runs more smoothly and efficiently if everyone involved is a moderately experienced producer/director in his or her own right. But at the end of the day it is not a democracy, and everyone involved has to understand that the producer / director's word is law. We discuss, the producer decides, we move on.

Writing

The jury is still out. Clearly a documentary which takes place mostly in the past can be written as a concept paper, treatment, or even sequence outline. The Wolf was done with a treatment, and everyone on the production signed on the deal breaker understanding that if all else failed, the film would follow the treatment. Lourdes Portillo's McQueen was carefully preconceived, and shot nearly in the style of a narrative feature.

Cinema verite voyages of discovery, which are by their very nature unpredictable and un-writeable, may be problematic (as Leacock says, "Great voyage; sorry, no whales.") Unless the producer is ready, without question, to pull the plug when shooting and editing deadlines arrive, trouble is at hand. We'll see, as Al Maysles sets out on his journey. At the very least, it seems reasonable that any low cost production must have some sort of bombproof default plan before anyone shoots a frame. It may be that obsessive planning, so counter to cinema verite, is what allows cinema verite moments to emerge.

Pre-Production

We are working on this. At the very least, if you cannot devise a plan which guarantees completion of at least some reasonable version of the film, then don't start production.

DV and DVCam Origination Camerawork

"Camera stylo"

By the time we began in the summer of 2000, the DV technical explosion had, on its own, lifted documentary to a relatively high plateau of digital production. Behind this lay a deep history of near misses.

A great flurry of hope surrounded the arrival of Sony's Porta-Pak technology in the 1970s, but documentary activists soon learned that the 1/2" tape system was simply too primitive and unreliable for professional use. Hi8 video rode in on a bubble of excitement in the 'eighties, but it too came up wanting. Now, after 30 years of false alarms, superb small cameras with 500+ lines of resolution, and genuinely cheap broadcast-quality digital video editing systems are at last widely available. DV is explosively broadening the playing field, even beyond the degree to which 16mm equipment liberated documentary in the 'sixties. DVCam gear costs a tiny fraction of what a cinema verite crew's Eclair NPR, Nagra & Steenbeck would have cost, even in 1967 dollars. For television DV makes better pictures faster, and ready-to-edit synced up rushes are on the screen for about $40 per hour (including digitizing cost), rather than $200 per hour for 24pHD or $1400 per hour for synced up 16mm dailies.

Starting with the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, exquisite big screen projection of productions originated on DVCam burst onto the scene. These were either blown up to excellent 35mm release prints at costs between $10,000 and $100,000 per hour, or up-converted to HD digital tape at roughly $2000 (and falling) per hour. Though we have no experience yet with big screen projection, other DVCam films (Down From The Mountain, Startup.Com) have been blown to 35mm and look extremely good. Parts of both films could be mistaken for 16mm on the big screen.

(Except for specific scenes requiring painterly high production value--- some landscape and cityscape work---virtually all documentary work for television can now be done on digital video. Faced with the array of image making possible in DV, DVCam, Digibeta and 24p HD, there now appears little compelling reason to produce documentaries on film.)

Our entire camera/audio/editing set up, including all hardware & software, purchased new from the ground up, cost about $15,000, which we expect to amortize over at least four films. We are hearing it said that a full system can be put together for under $5000, but that figure is simply too low, since it rules out the better small cameras, support equipment, good mics, a mixer, cases, and the hefty computer necessary for long form. We've had good luck working with a Sony PD150, though low cost shooting can certainly be done on any of the DV and DVCam cameras available in the $2000 - $5000 price range.

The PD150 makes excellent pictures (500 lines of resolution, compared to 470 for a PD100, 510 for a DSR130, and 540 for a DSR500/570). List is $4000, but you can find one new for $3200. You get a 1/3' CCD, a good mid- range zoom lens with wide angle converter, 2 balanced XLR inputs with 48v phantom power, adjustable zebras and master black, programmable time code, maximum 40 minute recording time, an excellent "steady shot" electronic image stabilizer, Firewire in and out, and a flip-out LCD screen. Like most of the little cameras around, this one is loaded with silly consumer features, has a maddening servo-controlled focus ring, and a brainless placement of the viewfinder at the rear of the camera. We use an after-market lens shade, and, for set-up situations, we use a Sony PVM-8045Q field monitor.

The PD150 and others like it can generate astonishing images (especially the PAL version), and in extremely low light (2 foot candles or less); on television, they can approach if not surpass Super 16mm. Here is Al Maysles' list of why DVCam trumps 16mm.

Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 11:50:57 -0500
Subject: no subject
From: Albert Maysles amaysles@mayslesfilms.com
To: Jon Else

For me the greatest technical innovation is the Sony D150, it

1. focuses down to inches.
2. has a magnificent manual zoom.
3. is supersensitive to light.
4. an excellent zoom range especially with the addition of the Century
wide-angle adapter.
5. only 5-10 dollars per tape.
6. extremely useful automatic focus.
7. automatic exposure control.
8. single system picture and sound.
9. as you shoot, you control exposure simultaneously while
observing recorded images.
10. steady device in the lens makes for a steadier picture.
11. unlike the 10minutes 16mm film camera magazine,
each tape runs 40 or 60 minutes, virtually no run outs.
12. camera can be held in many positions with viewer still visible.
13. holding camera below chin, a camera person can see much more
than is in the eyepiece.
14. holding camera below chin, camera person's gaze is available to subjects to assure rapport.
15. camera much lighter (only 3 or 4 pounds vs.20).
16. can vary shutter speed.
17. camera costs only around $3500; a 16mm film camera with lenses and magazines around $100,000.
18. the zoom lens is so good you need no other lenses.
19. easy to film in tight quarters, for example, in cars.
20. totally silent.
21. less intrusive.
22. batteries are tiny (3"x 1 1/2"x 1") weigh little, run for as much as 8 hours.
23. quality satisfactory for TV and can be blown up to 35mm.
24. all you need to shoot goes into a normal camera bag.
25. when necessary can shoot all alone.
26. no waiting a day for rushes. Results are immediately available.
27. is a near perfect one-up on the 16mm.film camera.

(Note also that on DVCams (even on 24p) the depth of field will be greater than what we expect at equivalent focal lengths in 16mm film. This can work for you or against you.)

We used a Century Precision 16X9 optical converter on The Wolf, which is extremely sharp, though it does not work at the telephoto end of the zoom range. Optek has introduced a 16 X 9 converter, but we have not had a chance to test it. The camera's built in, switchable 16 X 9 function simply crops the picture; do not use it. The hidden costs of switching aspect ratios during production will come back to haunt you; do all the origination in either 4X3 or 16X9, not both.

Any of the $1200 - $2000 mini DV tripods will serve well; we use a Sachtler DV2 Batteries, cases, and miscellaneous do-dads add another $1000.

These little cameras can bite; they are not as user friendly as they seem. They bristle with tiny sabotage buttons and menu items, like on-screen date & time. It takes many hours to understand them, and many days to master them. For anyone who grew up on betacam, the $3,200 PD150 is more difficult to operate properly than a $120,000 HDW F900 24p. Low cost production with small format gear requires more, not less, technical expertise than traditional production, because there is little or no financial padding to fix mistakes after the fact. Extreme care in exposure consistency and color balance throughout the project, especially in interviews, can reap significant cost savings in the final color correction session. Likewise, ragged inconsistency suddenly comes home to roost in thousands of dollars of editor and/or suite time at the end. Since the DVCam format is less forgiving after the fact than digibeta or HD, you must know exactly where your zebras are set and pay close attention to them. For those new to the little cameras, it is time well spent to study and ruminate on how the image looks in the b/w viewfinder, then on the flip-out LCD screen, and then on a properly set up field monitor; they are all slightly different.

Though we don't have definitive experience, it appears that postcard cityscapes and landscapes can be problematic in DVCam, as are extremes of contrast. On the other hand, there are no doubt all sorts of new things that can be done with the little cameras, things we haven't thought of. While shooting Lourdes Portillo's film, Kyle Kibbe was surprised at the trivial ease of covering a scene with two or three cameras simultaneously (Spike Lee covered some scenes in "Bamboozled" with as many as 12 PD100s). We haven't yet explored time lapse, arrays of cameras, or new ways of rigging the small cameras.

Origination Audio

Here lies the trap door of low cost production. Small format digital video is notorious for lousy audio, almost always because audio is not taken seriously. Always work with a sound recordist. Do not plan to fix it in the mix; you may not have a mix. As with camera work, controlling audio costs requires in fact more care than in traditional production. Exercise the standard due diligence---microphone choice and placement, proper modulation, levels, track management, ambience management, consistency in field recording and good digitizing management.

Our sound package (which pretty much came off the shelf at the graduate school) is a Shure FP33 mixer, Sennheiser K6/ME66 Combo mic, K-Tek boom, Countryman lav, a snake and a few XLR cables. Al Maysles and many other camera people work with a radio velcroed to the camera and a good small shotgun mic on the camera. Spencer Nakasako uses radios on roving crew members as "stealth lavs". We prefer to use a boom, through a mixer with a snake to the camera. In addition to the standard due diligence, you need to,

  • Avoid the on-camera mic supplied by the manufacturer. If you must use a mic on the camera, have the sound person rig a good one---Schoeps or Sennheiser.
  • Boom the scene whenever possible.
  • Use a good radio on the main subject. We rent radios when needed. (Caution: a radio mic on a particular person can unreasonably drive the process of deciding who or what is important as a scene unfolds.)
  • Establish consistent protocol for field recording. If multiple sound recordists work on the show, there must be an audio standard --- mics, internal mixer settings, sampling rate, levels, noise, track management --- set by the lead sound recordist from the git-go.
  • Go easy on room tone.
  • Go easy on double system recording; stories which require separate DAT recording (except as a backup for camera recording) may be problematic, simply because of the postproduction cost.
  • Establish consistant protocol for digitizing audio---levels, track assignment, etc.
  • Do pick-up audio interviews by telephone, the way radio producers have done them for years. Rather than fly people around the country for pick-up voice over, we have had very good experience doing it over the phone, with the interviewee in a studio in his/her home city, recorded on DAT (according to the show's audio protocol). These can also be done over an ISDN life if it's available, though it generally costs more.

Lighting

"Darkness is cheap." Dickens

Good DVCam and DV cameras can usually record astonishingly elegant images in any setting where human beings routinely live or work. A few foot-candles of nearly any color will let you squeak by. Flourescents look great. Those of us who came of age fighting to control both the quantity and quality of light now only need worry about quality. We are shooting virtually all observational scenes in available light, often wide open, often at night, often with medium gain. We haven't seen how these might look in big screen theatrical projection, but they look fine on TV, which is where we have chosen to work. For interviews, we have broken no new ground; so far we stick to the standard Chimera/showcard setup. Lowell donated a basic omni/tota/rifa kit, and it has been more than sufficient for everything on "Wolf."

If a little fill light is needed, more and more videographers are using small flashlights. AA Mag Lights or AA Duracell rectangular lights taped to the camera or to walls work well, and for a real punch, use Scorpion or Streamlight 6v lithium flashlights. We sandpaper the lenses for diffusion, and of course you can attach any gel you would put on a 10K. But in general, digital video seems well suited to finding good light rather that making good light.

Production management

Technical advances have begun to plateau, in apparent violation of Moore's Law. It appears we can no longer rely on exponential reduction in hardware and software expense to reduce overall cost, and we're more interested in using the technical advances as a springboard for other sorts of cost reduction. The need to rely more on non-technical "evergreen" ways of keeping cost down seems more in line with where we are, now that the cost of the entire broadcast quality hardware/software set has fallen below the threshold of an adult's credit card limit.

The job is to develop a template that is financially practical and attractive to journeyman filmmakers. We budget all personnel, equipment, facilities and administration at documentary rates prevailing in California (slightly higher in New York, lower in the Midwest). To keep some real world discipline about the enterprise, we have avoided folding in the myriad in-kind scroungings often available at this and other universities.

We are still sorting things out, but it appears that sharing core management on several projects, absolute avoidance of OT, absolute deadlines, and the "slinky" edit schedule described below make the biggest cost difference. And run it like a business; this is not for the chicken-hearted.

Edit Prep

You must have everything in the system before you begin editing. This is a deal breaker. Before the editor(s) begin, it is critical to have enough footage in house and digitized to finish the film, if necessary without pickups. This allows the editor and director to approach the structure with a full deck, to "throw and axe at it" on the first cut in full knowledge of what would be available in a worst case scenario. Naturally, we set aside a small portion of the production budget for pickups, but do not let the structure depend on pickups.

Time can be saved by screening all the rushes and digitizing at the same time, in the same pass.

A single, dedicated assistant editor, thoroughly conversant with the editing system, is indispensable.

If you anticipate using home movies, graphics, stills, headlines, or audio recordings, have them all in house and digitized before editing begins. Delaying their arrival costs money in re-dos and false starts; no way around it.

Before starting, have an "editorial standards" meeting with everyone who will lay a hand on the material---standardize video and audio digitizing, track assignment, and track management. The hidden costs of later redigitizing video or audio or shuffling audio from one track to another can be enormous.

We have not found a way around transcripts, which appear to be indispensable if the film includes interviews. As always, make simultaneous audiocassette recordings on location. We had hoped to experiment with speech recognition software, but so far have not been able to. Use a highly experienced transcription service, and if necessary be selective in what gets transcribed.

Editing

Many PC and Mac desktop and laptop systems are now available, and they all appear to work well. However, we discovered when beginning Wolf that very few producers had actually completed hour-long documentaries on them. This territory is actually quite mysterious. We use Final Cut Pro on a desktop G4 with a 450 MHz dual processor, 256 RAM, 30 Gig internal hard drive, and 45 Gig external drive, two 19"View Sonic monitors, and a Sony DSR-20 DVCam deck, external speakers, and miscellaneous cables. We had the vendor set it up for us, so that it would be his problem, not ours. The whole thing cost $10,000 We have not tried the Avid Xpress DV. (See DV Magazine for consistently excellent and up to date information on all DV hardware and software.)

We broke no new ground in the order of editorial steps. Wolf, like 10,000 documentaries before it, went through assembly (1st cut), rough cut, fine cut, locked picture, and sound finishing. Since the Final Cut Pro system can handle an enormous volume of material digitized at full resolution, we did not need an out-of-house on-line. FCP handles the DVCam format end-to-end with the same compression ratio, 4:2:2, as a DVCam camera. As with field audio recording, we did all the standard due diligence common to documentary editorial practice, but kept costs down in other ways.

  • "Slinky" editing. This may be the single best way to save money on any given project. We budgeted 30 days of editing, appropriate for the story, which had been pre-organized to within an inch of its life. But rather than set an editor for work full time for 30 days over 6 weeks, we brought the editor(s) on 2 or 3 days a week over 11 weeks. Obviously, this works only with editors splitting time between two jobs. The great efficiency comes from each week allowing the producer/director and assistant editor to consolidate ideas and material, to catch up and get ahead of the editor. Non linear editing has now become so fast that writers, APs, and directors often find themselves unable to keep up with the editor. We usually find no time to ruminate, to digest ideas, screen cuts, write, or brainstorm, because the big editorial taxi meter is humming.
  • Agree on an organizational principle after screening the rushes. On Wolf the editors asked producer Peter Nicks to provide a monologue of his story, which then became the practical vehicle for the ideas and events described in the treatment. Clearly and unfortunately, this works against pretzelplots and against projects in which you must unearth a structure while editing is underway. If you are serious about making an inexpensive film, do not go down the rabbit hole of "finding the film" late in the editorial process.
  • Maintain orderly forward motion at all costs. Orderly scheduled progress toward lock picture is essential. Do not inflate the film late in the game---on Wolf we made the mistake of adding six minutes to the documentary two days before locking picture, and had a terrible time getting those six minutes out. Fine tune the filtering of everyone's ideas to make them flow to director, and then to editor in an orderly way. Clearly, this can stifle the exchange of ideas, but it is expensive for the editor to receive conflicting suggestions and instructions from more than one voice.
  • Hire an assistant editor with solid experience on the system you are using. Ideally, this should be a dedicated assistant, not burdened by other jobs.
  • Never change software versions during editing. Don't even think about it. We experienced a near disastrous loss of lists and media while upgrading from FCP system 1.5 to 2.0.
  • Do not conform mixed formats on FCP Do not attempt to render a long 16 X 9 film on Final Cut Pro, since the chances of freezing or crashing are high. Do it in a high-end suite when you do your final color correction; there it is trivial.
  • Get a color-coded keyboard
While it probably is not a way to keep costs down, we used two editors on Wolf, Jeffery Friedman (Common Threads, Paragraph 175) and Kim Roberts (Long Night's Journey Into Day, Danang Daughter). Peter Nicks also edited some sequences (never without close coordination with Kim and Jeffery). If you choose to do this, be sure that two editors overlap their shifts for at least a couple hours each week, so that they can screen the entire film each week and agree on a plan for dividing labor. Rather than re-work each other's sections, Kim and Jeffery agreed with Peter to divide editing responsibilities between the two halves of the film.

In-progress screenings

Screenings will uncover surprises and add clarity. But do not talk the film to death when you should be making the film; get feedback and input and move forward.
  • Two or three well-placed screenings are invaluable for maintaining forward motion. Schedule one rough cut and one fine cut screening with a small group of outsiders. Use questionnaires, discuss the show, and move on. Schedule more frequent editor/director screenings.
  • Always watch the whole show.

Archive material

There appear few ways to inexpensively produce documentaries which rely on archive material other than home movies, photos and audio recordings which the producer owns. The obvious first problem is the obscene license fees charged by commercial archive houses, particularly music archives. But just as important may be the astonishing hidden administrative costs of research, provenance search, dubbing, releases, and the added headaches when it comes time to purchase E & O insurance. Use of any archive material is, at best, more cumbersome than using origination footage.

Rights-free footage can, of course, be had from the National Archives and other government sources. Rick Prelinger and others are experimenting with libraries of public access archive material on the internet, but even these come with the same administrative problems as commercial footage. More work needs to be done on optimizing use of archive footage from both commercial houses and government archives.

Music

Low cost production weighs heavily against commissioning a composer, but there may be cases in which the score is inseparably bound to the film's concept. If you must score, back into it just as you back into the film as a whole. The simple but very effective original score for The Wolf began with a discussion in which we asked Mary Watkins (Ethnic Notions, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter), "what can you reasonably do for this amount of money?"

If music is critical, decide first, before production begins, what you can afford, then work with a composer to sort out what can be done. Like archive music, original music comes with hidden administrative costs. Does you composer have pre-existing work that can be acquired or adapted? Consider non-exclusive use of an original score, since neither you nor the composer has much to gain by taking the music completely out of circulation. If you do hire a composer, be sure to contract a package deal, under which the composer hires and pays the players and studio.

On-line & video finishing

We have found that maximizing forward motion for a very limited time at an expensive commercial post house may be more cost-effective than doing longer sessions at an inexpensive house. Facilities geared toward television commercials have very fast and efficient hardware/software, are accustomed to working intensely against the clock, and are often very eager to apply their expertise (hard-earned on hundreds of McDonalds commercials) to social documentaries for a good price.

  • Set up protocols with finishing facilities before beginning production
  • Do your own on-line assembly edit (but not your color correction, sizing, or aspect ratio correction) in house. On Final Cut Pro, this is a non-issue, since the system easily stores and outputs DVCam video at full resolution. In practical terms, you skip traditional on-line, and your locked picture is you on-line.
  • Do your titles, text and credits in-house FCP, coming from design- savvy Apple, has a good array of fonts. PhotoShop and After Affects help.
  • Do color correction at a high end facility, making very clear before starting that you have an absolutely fixed amount of suite time, and that you are willing---eager---to triage the show in order to get the maximum value added in the minimum time. Arrive with a triage list of problem scenes. On Wolf we worked with Loren Sorenson at Varitel in San Francisco, doing four hours of color correction and four hours of re-sizing and extra titling. The show was enormously improved. At a good facility, you should be able in a few hours to do 80% of what you can do in a full day, since the curve of value added drops off fairly quickly. Set the interviews first, if there are any, then work through the show.
  • Expect trouble in file transfer We have yet to see any long form documentary successfully move all its video and audio files to an outside system on the first try. OMS file transfer, file compatibility, software compatibility, and version differences are the bane of getting stuff out of FCP into Avid or Pro Tools, or even from Avid into Pro Tools. Some of this may have been solved by the incorporation of Pro Tools into FCP 2.0. We'll see.
  • Resize and correct aspect ratio at the post house, where they have fast, efficient engines for this, not on the FCP, where it is cumbersome, unpredictable and extremely slow on a long documentary. Also, in the high-end suite you can customize the exact aspect ratio (on Wolf we did a half way vertical expansion on 4X3 home movies to put them in the show's 16 X 9 letterboxed format, thereby losing 6% top and bottom.) Note also that in a good on-line suite you can quickly generate mattes to clean up headlines, stills, and other flat art.

Sound finishing

It all begins with very consistent sound standards and protocols in the field and in editing, as noted above. On "The Wolf" we ran into unexpected cost in sound finishing because we had allowed tracks to multiply unreasonably during editing. Make it a game to imagine not having a mix. Some of it is simple stuff like using exactly the same microphone & location for audio pick-ups as you used for first origination. Some of it, like controlling background noise, is not so simple.

  • Meet with your outside audio facility early, at the start of editing, to sort out what they can/should do, and to establish clear track assignment and separation standards from the start. Re-sorting tracks to suit the mix facility at the lock picture stage costs money.
  • Do a pre-mix in FCP (after locking picture---before that much of it will be time wasted.)
  • During editing, the editor should listen carefully and decide which track to use for a given shot if there are two choices (boom & lav, for instance). Do not defer this decision for later.
  • Use a high-end audio house.
  • Expect and plan a defense against file transfer problems

Broadcast, festivals, & distribution

Many, documentary makers have grown up thinking of PBS as the first, if not the only serious television venue. This come partly from years of expensive production which was made possible only with seed and lead money from CPB, or from foundations and endowments which contractually required offering the finished show to public television. As soon as a non-profit funder gets its paws on a documentary, even for a few thousand dollars, the producer is almost always locked into a track toward PBS. Forget that; assume that the entire spectrum is fair game --- HBO, Cinemax, MTV, Bravo, A&E, History, Tech TV, PBS, LifeTime. All of these work with independents, as do myriad foreign broadcasters and even some venues, such as Nightline within the major commercial networks. Our goal is to make some shows so inexpensive that they do not require seed funding from anyone, shows which when they are finished can be shopped around to all broadcasters.

Because of its low cost, The Wolf did not require outside funding from any broadcast entity. Hence, the film remained independent throughout production, and we were able to present it around to a number of broadcasters, including MTV, HBO, ABC, and various venues within PBS. We have not yet heard from PBS, but reaction was quick and positive from the others. ABC Nightline acquired the show, and placed it in the schedule pipeline for early October, but the events of September 11 intervened, and broadcast is postponed Spring.

As for festival screenings, film projection is history. The last 16mm print has packed its bags, its scratches, and its wretched optical sound track, and gone to the old prints home. Sundance has established the solid performance of good video projection from digibeta and HD. The cost differential is a no-brainer -- $10,000/hr for the cheapest, marginal quality 35mm print v. $1000/hr for an HD up-conversion.

We have not experimented with DVD self-distribution, but a DVD disk burner can now be had for about $900.

Case study, "The Wolf"

Much of what we've learned on The Wolf is described above. A few more points deserve mention.

Both the producer and associate producer found their time and attention stretched to the limit. Especially during editing and post production, the AP was simply handling too many jobs at once. At times the producer/director became so preoccupied with other duties that he couldn't pay adequate attention to style and elegant story telling, and couldn't optimize his time with the editors. As production neared completion, a series of rolling delays turned into a cascade of extra costs, almost all in additional staff time. Choice of a story which was centered in Washington D.C. took its toll in travel costs, time and attention. We are still sorting it all out, with the suspicion that at least some of the trouble came with job of making the first film in a new way at a new production center, with a relatively green core production crew.

Nonetheless, this story of and by a young unknown African American producer is finished and will be seen by several million viewers. We feel that the film represents a success in meeting the goals we had set for ourselves; it is a documentary which:

  • was produced in nine months for $100,000
  • remained truly independent from start to finish
  • is journalistically sound
  • was managed so that all professional personnel were paid their customary rates.
  • was ambitious in its reach but carefully contained in particulars
  • would have taken years to fund and produce with the traditional methods
  • was appropriate for low cost production because it tells an extremely robust story, it could be produced with a small multi-tasking crew, involved no commercial archive footage (but several fair use clips), it was not burdened by cumbersome executive sign-off, and it lent itself well to a flexible editing schedule.
  • has been acquired for nationwide broadcast, where it will reach an audience of about 2,000,000 on it's first showing, and at least as many additional viewers during its useful life, which we expect to be at least 10 years.

"The Wolf" Personnel

Peter Nicks, Producer/director
Craig Delaval Associate Producer / Videographer
Jeffery Friedman, Editor
Kim Roberts, Editor
Victoria Mauleon, Production Associate
Kelly Whelan, Marci Aroy, assistant editors
Mary Watkins, original music
Dave Nelson, Outpost Sound, sound design & mix
Loren Sorensen, Varitel Video, color correction
Jon Else, Executive producer

"The Wolf" Budget Summary

Production staff salaries and 10.5% fringes (producer, assoc prod, prod asst) $53,300
Talent Fees 0
Contract personnel (advisors, transcription) 1,948
Acquisition and rights (original music, flat fee for non-exclusive rights) 4,000
Pre- Production 0
Production (videographer, recordist, video/audio/lighting equip, permits, DVCam & DAT tape, expendables) 9,542
Post-production (editors' & asst editor's salaries, 10.5% fringes, all FCP hardware and software, color correction, sound finishing, dubbing & master tapes) 24,055
Travel (air fare SFO - Wash DC, auto rental, hotel) 5,082
Website and cookbook 0
Promotion (still photographer) 750
Professional Services (insurance and legal services) 1,222
Office facilities and materials 0
Total $101,983


Pictures of the day. Steven Spielberg collaborated posthumously with Stanley Kubrick and that begat AI. Hopefully Spielberg's collaboration with Peter Jackson on a series of movies based on the Belgian comic book character Tintin will be less sleep enducing. From a news story posted today on the InterWebs announcing the casting of Tintin:
Spielberg has been working with The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson on how to bring Tintin, instantly recognisable by his blonde quiff and faithful side-kick Snowy the dog, to life. But it is not yet known which of the 23 Tintin stories will be filmed. And while Spielberg will direct one and Jackson one, it is still not known who will direct the third. They will be filmed back to back in the US and New Zealand, using the latest 3D technology. Spielberg said: “We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live action film and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live action format would simply not honour the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. The idea is that the films will look neither like cartoons nor like computer-generated animation. We’re making them look photo-realistic, the fibres of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people - but real Hergé people.”
Herge people? Sounds spooky, huh? Herge was the pen name of Tintin's creator Georges Prosper Remi. Here's a clip promoting a Tintin stage play, with actual, not virtual, actors running in London's West End.

27 March 2008

Newly Released Kubrick Documentaries on DVD

Here's a snip from a review of the reissue earlier this month of a box set of special editions of five Stanley Kubrick movies on DVD:

It’s been a long, typically Kubrickian wait, but finally a worthy DVD boxset gathers five of his greatest films in scrubbed-up Special Editions (also available separately). And boy, has it been worth it. Each movie comes with its own commentary and (bar Full Metal Jacket) a second disc of gripping, intimate docs and featurettes.

The biggest of the bunch is 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film in which Kubrick went to infinity and beyond – a year before man set foot on the moon. Hours of Making Of material and legacy assessment begin with lengthy new doc The Making Of A Myth, presented by James Cameron, no less. There’s vintage footage of Kubrick on set and past and present interviews with Arthur C Clarke. There’s also fresh chinwags with Kubrick’s producer, tech crew and, well, seemingly everyone else, from William Friedkin and Spider-Man FX guru John Dykstra to Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon and doughy US critic Roger Ebert. Effects maestro Douglas Trumbull and Kubrick’s wife Christiane recall the cosmic scale of the director’s demands (“Stanley would walk around saying, ‘Please draw me an image that doesn’t remind me of anything in a colour that doesn’t exist’”). Trumbull spills yet more info on the commentary, although cardboard star Keir Dullea fills the dead air with empty babble.

No danger of that from Malcolm McDowell. The bulging-eyed Brit is a tremendous presence on A Clockwork Orange’s chat-track (he’s joined by doc-maker Nick Redman) and on the terrific 86-minute doc O Lucky Malcolm!, where he rattles off fantastic stories from his entire career and gets saluted by a who’s who of the Brit film industry. Two more smashing docs complete the disc: Still Tickin’ wades through the shit-storm surrounding the film’s release, withdrawal and return, while Great Bolshy Yarblockos! sees another galaxy of filmmakers (hello, Mr Spielberg!), collaborators and critics unload a massively informed, anecdote-rich Making Of.

Nine years after Kubrick’s mesmerising horrorshow of stylised swagger and surgical intellect became the most controversial film in Brit cinema history, the director returned with The Shining. Kubrick’s stay at the Overlook gets the same quality treatment across a superb commentary by steadicam inventor Garrett Brown and biographer John Baxter, plus two utterly comprehensive Making Of docs.

Each runs to less than 30 minutes, but not a second is wasted: the weight of first-hand accounts, insight and pure affection on show here is phenomenal. Vivian Kubrick’s precious mini-doc, shot hand-held during filming, survives from the previous DVD release and there’s a further bonus in an interview with Kubrick’s longtime composer Wendy Carlos.

It was another seven years before Full Metal Jacket’s double-barrelled assault on ‘Nam and a further 12 before Eyes Wide Shut proved that even the world’s biggest movie stars would bow to Kubrick’s might. Gangs Of New York screenwriter Jay Cocks and stars Vincent D’Onofrio, R Lee Ermey and Adam Baldwin lay on Jacket’s cut’n’paste commentary, sharply edited for minimum waffle.

The disc’s Making Of doc doesn’t disappoint either, with much marvel directed at Ermey’s “endless resource for obscenities”, the fact that East London doubled for Vietnam and how Kubrick coaxes a performance (says D’Onofrio: “‘Do it again, do it better.’ He’ll say it right to you”). Just a single-discer mind, but in a boxset packed with great stories, Ermey gets to tell what might be the best…

“We’re driving in Stanley’s wife’s brand new SUV,” explains Full Metal Jacket’s iconic drill sergeant. “We’re looking for a place to do a scene. Stanley’s driving and pointing and talking. And I’m sitting there watching us driving towards a 6ft deep ditch. Stanley, as he talked, drove off into this ditch and the car went over on its side. Stanley reached up, pushed the door open, climbed up... and he’s still talking. ‘We’ll put up the tent over here...’ Then he climbs down from the car and starts walking back to the camp. Can you believe this shit?”

Kubrick’s fin de siècle sign-off Eyes Wide Shut – another masterwerk, not about sex, but about capitalism – gets the smart discussion it deserves in the commentary by Sydney Pollack and historian Peter Loewenberg, while the second disc devotes itself to the method and madness of the legendary shoot (listed as The Guinness Book of World Records’ ‘Longest Constant Movie Shoot’). There’s also a look at Kubrick’s numerous unrealised dream projects in two more stellar docs.
I guess this is material you won't be seeing in our upcoming documentary look at Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon.