LM: When you worked in 3-strip, you had a lot of latitude with color control, didn’t you, depending on how dark the black and white image was, and whether you took it from the red or the green?
MOHR: That’s right . . . if you were doing a night scene, for example, it could all be handled by the color control in the laboratory. It was actually a lithographing process, and they’d make the matrix off the original negative, and then print these dye surfaces on—they could intensify the amount of the matrix in any color that they wanted to, or intensify the black and white image. They had infinitely more control, but it was subject to a lot of error, too. And it was a very expensive process; a good matrix was only good for possibly fifteen or twenty prints.
LM: Going back again. . . what are your memories of BROADWAY?
MOHR: That was directed by Doc Fejos, Paul Fejos, who was quite a character. He was actually a doctor of biology, married to a woman who was a doctor too. He came into the industry on the strength of one film. He wanted to get into the motion picture business, so he got money together and made a picture called THE LAST MOMENT. Its premise was a good one; he took a person who was drowning, and during that moment just before his death he reviewed this person’s entire life. On the strength of this he did get a deal with Laemmle at Universal, and I think Carl, Jr., who was just a kid, was a great fan of Fejos, and he was responsible for it. I did several pictures with Paul. The final thing Paul did at Universal, that we started, was LA MARSEILLAISE. I think what really happened, and this is pure conjecture on my part, was that the picture got out of hand—it got too big for him. So we went to lunch one day; we’d been set up on top of the HUNCHBACK set, and I think he wanted to get out of it. I surmise that—I don’t make it as a statement. Anyway, we went to lunch, and he was the last one to leave the set, and they found him lying at the foot of these stairs. He had seemingly fallen all the way down these stairs and was lying there in a semiconscious condition. They called an ambulance and carted him off to the hospital. His recovery was very slow. The reason I say “seemingly” is that a hell of a lot could be simulated. I think he wanted to bow out of the picture, and this was his way of bowing out. I forget who took it over for him. But getting back to BROADWAY, the premise of the original story never lent itself to the motion picture. The premise was that this little guy working in a honky-tonk basement cabaret had one ambition, to get a better job so he could get out of that place. Well, that was the day of the big musicals, you know, so Doc’s premise was that in order to make a successful picture, you couldn’t play in a depressing little honky-tonk area, it had to be a spectacular picture. So we designed this set—it was like Grand Central Station—it was the biggest interior set that had ever been built. It was so big that it was almost impossible. So that led to a chain of events. He also wanted to build a crane, a camera crane, and we built the so-called BROADWAY crane for that picture. Doc and I designed it, and it was built by the Llewellyn Iron Works. I’ll tell you a follow-up story on that. We used to go down there two or three times a week to watch the construction of this thing going on. It was really a great piece of engineering equipment. It was the first really great motion picture crane. And when we got this thing finished, they didn’t have a stage at Universal that could accommodate this crane, it was such a huge thing. The stages were only thirty or forty feet high, and just the arm of this thing was forty or fifty feet long—I’m not sure exactly how long. So they built the BROADWAY stage, Stage 12, to accommodate this crane. We went all out and had the BROADWAY set fill the whole goddamned stage, so that this little honky-tonk that Tryon was trying to work his way out of turned out to be something like you’ve never known in your entire life. It wasn’t a bad picture, as I recall it, but the premise was really idiotic. Here he wanted to get to play the Palace—well that nightclub could have taken the Palace, the Winter Garden, and the Hippodrome all in one! But that boom was some piece of equipment; we used that subsequently on everything we made. We used it on KING OF JAZZ, every picture that I made there. Incidentally, I’d lost all contact with that crane; I knew that they’d been using it as a rigging device, to haul equipment up to the roof of the stages, and so on, and it had not been taken care of, which I think is a sin. When I was doing TOPAZ, I had occasion to go to the back lot on location, and I saw this familiar-looking steel structure standing over in a junkyard behind some sheds. I drove over there and here was this BROADWAY crane. It was one of the most tragic things I’ve ever experienced. I damn near wept when I saw that thing standing there; a lot of my hard blood went into that thing, and a lot of Doc Fejos’.
LM: I read that it cost $40,000 to build.
MOUR: It cost $50,000, and we knew it was going to cost a lot of money when we went to build it, but that thing could do everything but bake beans. It had a trailer that could hook onto the thing that was its own generator, to generate the electricity that operated the thing. It could drive itself—you could steer it; you could swing the arm in any direction. And on the camera platform, which was a circular platform, there were controls, like a motorman’s controls on an old electric streetcar, and the crane operator rode on that platform with the cameraman. We’d set up either on a high-hat, or a tripod on the platform, which had a little rail around it. This platform could revolve 360 degrees continuously in either direction. The crane could go from the ground and do a complete turnover to the ground over there; it could do 360-degree turns, stopping any place you want to. You had absolutely complete control—more so than you have on the traveling booms today. The traveling boom has its limitations, because it can only go to certain places in relation to the chassis. With this thing you could swing around a full 360 degrees, in any position, and rotate the camera platform at the same time. The result was, we made shots in BROADWAY where it was an exposé of the abilities of this crane; it was pretty exciting.
LM: It was very well directed, too; all the people in the scenes are doing interesting things.
MOHR: That’s right—well, Doc was not a bad director.
LM: KING OF JAZZ is one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen.
MOHR: KING OF JAZZ was a hell of a picture. That was such a big thing that we broke that up into several areas. I had Ray Rennahan working with me on that; he was the Technicolor cameraman. I was the director of photography, of course, but Ray did a hell of a lot of the work. I was away doing a lot of trick stuff while Ray would be on the set, so I was in and out of the set, all over the place. Some of the things we did in that I don’t think have ever been equalled by anybody, even the Busby Berkeley miracle films.
LM: How much were you involved in the color?
MOHR: Of course, I was greatly involved. Ray Rennahan was my consultant, naturally, and we had an army of Technicolor consultants, Natalie Kalmus and all of her concubines, constantly on the set, advising us as to what colors we could use and couldn’t use. Rennahan knew the light requirements for the process, and Jesus, we even warped the top of some of the pianos from the amount of heat coming out of those lights. These were incandescent lights. You had to use more light on two-strip than on three-strip; we used as high as 1,200- to 1,400-foot candles, I think up to 2,000-foot candles on some of the shots.
LM: You’ve said that you were specially proud of your work on OUTWARD BOUND.
MOHR: Yes, that was made by Robert Milton. You know the story, of course. Bob Milton had directed the play on the stage, and he came out to Warner Brothers to make the film. I enjoyed so much working with people who knew their stage techniques and didn’t know a damn thing about making pictures, and would say, “Hal, what do I do here?” On WATCH ON THE RHINE I had the same thing with Herman Shumlin; he had never made a picture. Let me just jump ahead for a moment. Herman came out here to make WATCH ON THE RHINE for Warner Brothers, and he got into a lot of trouble because he wasn’t getting the kind of help he should have had. The creative film people were each trying to do something for their own glory, and so he got into a lot of trouble. He was going to quit the film
and go back to New York, and Wallis and Bill Koenig prevailed on me to come out and take the picture over. I don’t like to take another cameraman’s picture over—I just don’t like to do that. If I can help pull him out of the mud, I’ll do it, and I’ve done that on many occasions, but it’s happened where I’ve had to take the other man’s picture over—THE FRONT PAGE was the same thing with Tony Gaudio. So Herman would rehearse the scene as though it were on the stage. Then he’d go up to his office, I’d take the stand-ins and plot out the mechanics of how we’d shoot this sequence—how I would suggest we’d shoot it. The script girl would take notes on the thing, and it would take three quarters of an hour. Then we’d call him back down, and I’d show him with the stand-ins, and if he didn’t like what we had done, he’d make suggestions, he’d make changes, and so on. But I laid it out according to the ramifications of the camera. And that’s how we made WATCH ON THE RHINE, and I think it was a pretty good picture. Shumlin was very appreciative. I was having a feud with Warner Brothers at this time; the only time they’d call me in to do a picture was if they were in so much trouble they couldn’t get out of it. It happened on several pictures I did for them. Getting back to OUTWARD BOUND, I had the same production situation on that. We were out of the iceboxes by this time; we were using celluloid blimps on the cameras, and we had a little more mobility. So Bob Milton would rehearse the scenes, and I’d lay them out for them. But I conceived a method of handling the thing photographically that he went for immediately, and I think it helped the picture a lot. The play was in three acts; in the first act it’s all material, realistic; in the second act this boat is a doubtful entity; and in the third act it is a nothing, it’s out beyond. So physically I got the idea of treating it in just that matter. I had the boat set built all realistically, and then for the second act—although it was not done in acts, per se—I had the whole set fogged with a kind of an umber, and even the high detail points of the furniture were umbered over to a degree. So it became a kind of half-unrealistic thing. And then for the third act, I had everything on the set sprayed a light gray, so all the detail of the set was lost almost completely. And on top of that I used heavy gauze to photograph through, and used the fog machines on the set. So by the time they’re reaching the point of death it was really something—and then when they’re brought back to reality it was like snap! I was very proud of that, but the picture was never a success.
LM: You mentioned a picture I didn’t know you’d done, THE FRONT PAGE.
MOHR: Yes, I did THE FRONT PAGE, I took that over, did that with Lewis Milestone for Howard Hughes; that was how I met Howard Hughes.
LM: Milestone’s films always had a lot of camera movement.
MOHR: Lewis is a strange guy; I’ve never been a fan of his, but he’s a nice guy. He had a lot of good ideas—you recall in the press room, where the camera went around the inside of the press table, following all the faces of the guys—we hung it from an overhead thing. That was his idea. THE FRONT PAGE I took over from poor Tony Gaudio; Tony and Lewis just didn’t get along. A lot of these things where cameramen get fired off of pictures is lack of compatibility with the director.
LM: One striking thing about the 1933 STATE FAIR was that it seemed to me that the cast never set foot outside the studio to film it.
MOHR: Oh, we did a little outside; we went out to what is now Mandeville Canyon, and the main entrance of Bel Air was then just the top of a glen—it was all done in the local area. There was a hell of a lot of process in that. That was a problem, because old Henry King—another guy who I love—doesn’t know a thing about photography, or what a camera can do, but he thinks he knows everything about it. I don’t say that disparagingly, because I think Henry is one of our great directors, but on pre-production he went back to Kansas, to the state fair, and did all of his process plates while he was back there. Now there are certain things you do and don’t do for process plates, and there are damn good reasons. Your foreground perspective is married to the perspective that you have on your plate; if you’re going to have a set built in front of a plate, the set has to be photographed with the same focal-length lens that you shot the plate with—otherwise your vanishing points vary. So Henry went back there, and he would always say, “You know, someday I’m going to build a camera, and I’m going to have two lenses: a twenty-five, and a four-inch.” He had this phobia, and anything more than a close-up he shot with a 25mm lens, which was the widest lens that we had at this time. He shot all of these plates back there: livestock halls, and livestock, and everything, with a 25mm lens, in order to get scope. When it came to building the interiors that had to go against those plates, I had to resort to building them in false perspective. In other words, a hog pen tapered back incredibly, in order to meet the perspective of the 25mm lens. That was a hell of a problem on a lot of that film, for that reason.
LM: Wouldn’t it have been easier to just shoot it on location?
MOHR: Oh yes. But as I remember it turned out to be a pretty good picture.
LM: So then you were with Fox for a while.
MOHR: I was with Fox for several years, before it became 20th Century Fox, when Bill Fox had it and Wini Sheehan was the head of production.
LM: I presume DAVID HARUM was where you met your wife.
MOHR: That’s where I met Evelyn. I did that picture with Jimmy Cruze, one of my favorite human beings. And old Will Rogers, he was wonderful. He autographed a picture to me as Cupid—he thought he was the matchmaker with us.
LM: In the mid-1930s you moved from Fox to Warner Brothers. It seems sometimes that you can see a definite style at each studio; did you find this to be true?
MOHR: Well, the different studios would specialize. For instance, the Warner Brothers would specialize in the Buzz Berkeley, the Humphrey Bogart type of thing. 20th Century was hipped on the newspaper headline; that was Zanuck’s pet idea of making pictures, from today’s headlines. But I think that the style of the various studios was dictated almost entirely by the personnel that made their pictures. If you keep it down to the basics of photography, I carried my style to whatever studio I came to, and I gravitated among most of them. So I think the studio policy could set the type of picture, but I don’t think the style of the picture could be set by the studio. Which brings us to one of the most important things, I think, about photography. I think that the photography of a motion picture is most brilliant in its inconspicuousness—taking all in all, I mean MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is something else—but I think the photography of a picture should contribute to the telling of the picture by its mood and its style just as much as the story. I don’t think there’s any such thing as documentary photography or beautiful photography. I think photography is beautiful only insofar as it is absorbed within the production, and I think that a cameraman should be versatile enough to conform to whatever the story would be.
LM: Now we come to the big picture, MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.
MOHR: Now there again is a picture that I took over. There was another case where Warner Brothers called me because they had to have me, or thought they had to have me. There they had all these creative people all around them: Reinhardt, Dieterle . . . But they got so filled with what Reinhardt was going to do with Shakespeare, their perspective in their thinking got beyond the realm of motion pictures. For example, in an exterior scene, with great expanses of pastoral land, you don’t do that within studio stages to any great degree, but there they had to do it because it had to be controlled. When the art director built the sets, they were going to make the damnedest forest you’d ever seen. He built a forest set that covered two full stages; it was so realistic you couldn’t photograph it. When I say you couldn’t photograph it, I mean specifically that there was such beauty, and the trees were so natural and so dense and so huge, that there was no place to get any light through the damn things. Fortunately, MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM didn’t lend itself to reality, so it didn’t have to be photographed in that way and therefore didn’t have to be th
at realistic. So this cameraman was a very good cameraman, but he didn’t have the guts to say, “You can’t photograph it, you’ve got to do it this way.” He tried to conform to what the art director had created; I’m not taking away from the art director, because I think he did a tremendous job, but you couldn’t photograph it. So they’d been on this thing for about eight weeks, and they were really in a lot of trouble, and the rushes were not the way they wanted them—nothing was coming through the way they wanted it. It was supposed to be an ephemeral kind of thing. So Bill Koenig, who was a very dear friend of mine, and Hal Wallis hit this impasse, and Koenig told Wallis that there was only one thing to do, get somebody to photograph the picture who could control it, take it over and do what was necessary. So Bill called me to come out there, and I said, “Bill, I’ll come out and look at some of the film, but I won’t talk about doing the picture until I’ve seen the film and seen what it’s all about.” So I looked at the film, and said, “Bill, I’m very reluctant to take the picture over, because I can see that they’re trying to do something that can’t be done, but I’ll be happy to work with this man for a few days and try to aim him in the right direction—I won’t even charge any salary.” He said, “No, it’s gone beyond that; we’re closing down the picture as of tonight. I want you to take it over.” So I said, “Well, under those circumstances I guess the only thing I can do is take it over. But I’ll take it over under one condition, that I have absolute control. I can do whatever I want to do as far as photography is concerned. I will conform with the effects that the story calls for, as Mr. Reinhardt and Dieterle and Wallis see it, but my method of doing it is my method of doing it. I don’t want any interference from anybody. If I want to change things—for example, I’m going to do a lot of work on these sets—whatever I want to do has to be considered OK. Otherwise I’m not going to make the picture.” He called Hal Wallis, and Bill put it to him plain, and he said OK. That night I got a gang of painters on the set—every painter they could get, with spray guns and pumps, and I had special effects there with cobweb machines. The gaffer was an old friend of mine, and he had worked with me several times before. So I had George [Hilliard] light all the lights down one side of the stage, and the light would filter down through the trees in places, and leave shadows in places. I wanted it to carry the effect of sunlight coming from one side. I told the painters, “Where the light is hitting, spray everything with aluminum paint.” Well, he nearly dropped dead, and the art director wanted to commit suicide, because I was spraying all the trees, the foliage, the grass, the shrubs—everything where the light was hitting—with aluminum paint. I said, “Where the light is not hitting, use orange and brown shellac—spray everything on the shadow side with that shellac. So we’ll have two tones on the set, bright aluminum where the light is supposed to be, and the deep orange where there is no light.” Then I had the special effects men go in with their spray guns and cover the trees, bushes, and everything with this cobwebby material. I sent out and had them bring in several hundred pounds of what you call casket flitters—they are little particles of round, shiny material. They used to scatter this on greeting cards so they would sparkle. I had follow-up men going around after the men with the spray guns, and while the rubber cement was still wet, they’d blow these casket flitters onto the cobwebs, so they would stick to them. The result was that by the time I got done spraying this set with color, and cobwebs, and glitters, it looked almost like a Christmas card. It was like a fairyland. I stayed up the whole night working with these guys, and nobody from the production stayed there at all. And the next morning, when they walked in and saw what I’d done with their set, they almost dropped dead, because nobody had thought what was going to happen. I figured one of two things would happen: either they’d throw up their hands, walk out, and that would be the end of it, or it was going to be a very successful thing. So they went for it, and the result of course was MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. And I even went so far as to take in front of the camera, to carry on this sparkle effect in the fairy-type stuff, I had frames made, and I had very fine steel wires, making a kind of net, and I had this cobweb material sprayed on that, and blew some flitters on. If I kept all the light off of this, it was invisible, you never saw it. But I’d put around the camera little tiny light bulbs that I could control individually, and as they would come on, these flitters would pick up and sparkle, very close to the camera. And on top of that, I photographed through a disk, a piece of glass with an interlaced pattern, which gave an overall diffusion, which I wanted, but these sparklers would hit the lens, bounce back to the surface of this disk, and then come through and photograph, taking on starlike quality. So you had these radiating stars sparkling on and off all over the screen, and where the actors were going to be I’d just clear out the cobwebs in that little area, but they’d be surrounded by these sparkling things. There is a follow-up to this that I have to tell, although I’ll be hated for it. This picture was made shortly after the very tragic 1933 strike, and I had been considered quite a heavy in it, although I worked for the best interests of all the people who had been on strike, and for the best interests of the industry, because I had the strike terminated. So I was a sonofabitch to many people because of that. At that time, the Academy Award nominations were set up by committees, and the pictures to be nominated for cinematography award were to be nominated by a committee of cameramen. This nominating committee refused to consider my picture, because of the personal antipathy they had toward me. So my picture wasn’t nominated that year. But there had been a practice in the past that had never been used, whereby you could put a write-in vote on a ballot, in place of voting for any other picture. That had been the practice, but nobody had ever done it. Whether it was due to a campaign on the part of the Warner Brothers studio, or whether it was due to a campaign on the part of the people who saw the picture—I’m pleased to think that that was the reason—it was, let’s face it, a spectacular and beautifully photographed picture for its time, and as it turned out it was the only thing in the picture worth looking at. Evelyn and I had been out to Jimmy Cruze’s home in Flintridge the night of the Academy Awards; I was unshaved, and in my work clothes, and Evelyn was in slacks. The phone rang, and it was Eddie Blackburn, who was with the Brulatour Company; he was at the Academy Awards at the Biltmore Bowl. He said, “Hal, I can’t tell you how I know this, but you have won the Oscar for MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. It’s going to be presented within an hour.” As it is today, nobody knows until they open the envelope—it’s the best-kept secret in the world. I don’t know how the hell Eddie knew it, but he had gotten in on some previous information that I had had a write-in. I said, “Eddie, you’re kidding; it can’t be so. There wouldn’t be that many people to write in a vote. Forget about it, I don’t give a damn about the Academy Award.” But he kept working on me and working on me, and finally I said, “Call me back in ten minutes; I want to talk it over with someone.” So I talked to Jimmy about it, and I talked to Evelyn about it. I said, “It means that we’ve got to go on home, we’ve got to get into dinner clothes, be down at the Biltmore in time for the award, and I don’t think I’m going to get it.” So Jimmy, who was very proud of me, and loved me about as much as I loved him, said, “Hal, if you never do anything else for me, do this. It will be the best thing that ever happened to you.” So we jumped into my car, we raced up to Hollywood, I shaved and threw on a tux, Evelyn put on a face and threw on an evening gown, and raced down to the Biltmore Bowl. If you’ve been down there, you park your car in a garage next to the Biltmore Hotel, then you go through the lobby and there’s this long corridor that goes back to where the ballroom is, the Biltmore Bowl. This was around eleven o’clock in the evening, and Evelyn and I were walking quickly. I could hear Frank Capra, who was the toastmaster, saying, “Now the next award is for cinematography,” and we’ve got a couple of hundred yards to walk yet. He said, “Such-and-such pictures were nominated, but the way it has worked out, none of these pictures has been voted b
est-photographed picture of the year. The man who has won the award is not here, because he was not nominated, but it is Hal Mohr for MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM,” and just then we stepped on the floor of the place—you’d think it had been rehearsed—and I walked up and Frank handed me the Oscar, and I got a hell of a lot of applause. I’m terribly proud of that. And of course the next thing they did was to immediately cancel the write-in vote; there was never a write-in vote again. I’m the only one who ever got a write-in vote. So that’s the story of MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM: what else have you got?
The Art of the Cinematographer Page 15
