THE GHOST GOES WEST—UA 1936—René Clair
THE DEVIL IS A SISSY—MGM 1936—W. S. Van Dyke
THE GARDEN OF ALLAH—UA 1936—Richard Boleslavsky—Color—Won Rosson and W. Howard Greene a special Academy Award
As YOU LIKE rr—20th Century Fox 1937—Paul Czinner—Collaboration with Jack Cardiff
THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES—UA-Korda 1937—Lothar Mendes
CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS—MGM 1937—Victor Fleming
THEY GAVE HIM A GUN—MGM 1937—W. S. Van Dyke
THE EMPEROR’S CANDLESTICKS—MGM 1937—George Fitzmaurice
Too HOT TO HANDLE—MGM 1938—Jack Conway
THE WIZARD OF oz—MGM 1939—Victor Fleming—Color
I TAKE THIS WOMAN—MGM 1940—W. S. Van Dyke
EDISON THE MAN—MGM 1940—Clarence Brown
DR. KILDARE GOES HOME—MGM 1940—Harold S. Bucquet
FLIGHT COMMAND—MGM 1940—Frank Borzage
THE PENALTY—MGM 1941—Harold S. Bucquet
MEN OF BOYS TOWN—MGM 1941—Norman Taurog
WASHINGTON MELODRAMA—MGM 1941—S. Sylvan Simon
HONKY-TONK—MGM 1941—Jack Conway
JOHNNY EAGER—MGM 1941-Mervyn LeRoy
SOMEWHERE I’LL FIND YOU—MGM 1942—Wesley Ruggles
TENNESSEE JOHNSON—MGM 1942—William Dieterle
SLIGHTLY DANGEROUS—MGM 1943—Wesley Ruggles
MARRIAGE IS A PRIVATE AFFAIR—MGM 1944—Robert Z. Leonard
AN AMERICAN ROMANCE—MGM 1944—King Vidor —Color
30 SECONDS OVER TOKYO—MGM 1944—Mervyn LeRoy
BETWEEN TWO WOMEN—MGM 1944—Willis Goldbeck
THREE WISE FOOLS—MGM 1946—Edward Buzzell
NO LEAVE, NO LOVE—MGM 1946—Charles Martin
MY BROTHER TALKS TO HORSES—MGM 1946—Fred Zinnemann
DUEL IN THE SUN—Selznick 1946—King Vidor—Color—Rosson worked on this film along with Lee Garmes and Ray Rennahan.
LIVING IN A BIG WAY—MGM 1947—Gregory LaCava
THE HUCKSTERS—MGM 1947—Jack Conway
HOMECOMING—MGM 1948—Mervyn LeRoy
COMMAND DECISION—MGM 1948—Sam Wood
THE STRATTON STORY—MGM 1949—Sam Wood
ANY NUMBER CAN PLAY—MGM 1949—Mervyn LeRoy
ON THE TOWN—MGM 1949—Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen—Color
KEY TO THE CITY—MGM 1950—George Sidney
THE ASPHALT JUNGLE—MGM 1950—John Huston
TO PLEASE A LADY—MGM 1950—Clarence Brown
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE—MGM 1951—John Huston
SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN—MGM 1952—Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen—Color
LONE STAR—MGM 1952—Vincent Sherman
LOVE IS BETTER THAN EVER—MGM 1952—Stanley Donen
I LOVE MELVYN—MGM 1953—Don Weis—Color
THE STORY OF THREE LOVES—MGM 1953—Vincente Minnelli and Gottfried Reinhardt—Color—Collab-oration with Charles Rosher
DANGEROUS WHEN WET—MGM 1953—Charles Walters—Color
THE ACTRESS—MGM 1953—George Cukor—Color
STRANGE LADY IN TOWN—Warner Brothers 1955—Mervyn LeRoy—Color, CinemaScope
MAMBO—Paramount 1955—Robert Rossen
ULYSSES—Paramount 1955—Mario Camenni—Color—Mario Parapetti billed as “cameraman,” Rosson as “cinematographer” on this Italian production
PETE KELLY’S BLUES—Warner Brothers 1955—Jack Webb—Color, CinemaScope
THE BAD SEED—Warner Brothers 1956—Mervyn LeRoy
TOWARD THE UNKNOWN—Warner Brothers 1956—Mervyn LeRoy
THE ENEMY BELOW—20th Century Fox 1957—Dick Powell—Color, CinemaScope
NO TIME FOR SERGEANTS—Warner Brothers 1958—Mervyn LeRoy
ONIONHEAD—Warner Brothers 1958—Norman Taurog
EL DORADO—Paramount 1967—Howard Hawks—Color
Lucien Ballard keeps a straight face while director Charley Chase goes over a scene with The Three Stooges (ca. 1938).
Interview with LUCIEN BALLARD
Lucien Ballard’s recent popularity, through his collaborations with Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher, obscures the fact that he has been in the movie business since 1930. Trained with an artist (von Sternberg), he went on to operate under less than ideal conditions at Columbia, shooting a host of forgettable B pictures. In the 1940s, his fortunes improved, as Ballard received some better assignments at 20th Century Fox, and then moved into the realm of glamour photography while shooting starring vehicles for his then-wife, Merle Oberon. But Ballard is most highly regarded for the films he has done since the mid-1950s, with such directors as Stanley Kubrick, Boetticher, Henry Hathaway, and Peckinpah. His belated fame is well-deserved, as Ballard takes his place among the finest cinematographers of our time.
A vigorous man who likes to be in control of a situation, Ballard pulls no punches in discussing his career, and like most of his colleagues, has the utmost respect for a quality that is becoming increasingly rare: professionalism.
LM: How did you get into cinematography in the first place?
BALLARD: Well, I was doing a little bit of everything at the time. I’d been kicked out of three or four universities in the Midwest, and I ended up in China. Then I came back and started working in sawmills, out in the woods, surveying. I was in L.A. in 1929, and a girl I knew was a script girl at Paramount. They’d had a fire which destroyed their sound stages, so they were working at night a lot. I went over to see her, and I would be on the lot while they were shooting; someone asked me to give him a hand, and I started helping out some of the cameramen, loading cameras onto trucks and things. Pretty soon they asked me to work there, but they were only paying $18 to $22 a week, and that didn’t appeal to me. Finally they offered me a job working at night for $35 a week, which enabled me to still work for the lumber company if I wanted to during the day. I applied to the union, and by the time they got done with it I was making $75 a week, which was more than most of the others were getting. They told me I could work myself up from being a helper to eventually being first cameraman, over a period of a couple of years. I remember the first picture I was on was a circus picture with Clara Bow, and after we finished, Clara Bow invited me to a party at her home; I came home three days later, and I said, “Boy, this is the business for me!”
LM: So you stayed on doing what?
BALLARD: I was an assistant cameraman mainly; I worked in a lot of pictures at Paramount, the Lubitsch films with Jeanette MacDonald . . .
LM: And then you were on MOROCCO with Josef von Sternberg.
BALLARD: Yes . . . the first time that Sternberg noticed me was on that picture.
LM: How did you learn, mainly by doing?
BALLARD: By watching others, doing what the director told me to do. I remember I used to work with a cameraman named Victor Milner quite a bit, and I’d be his camera operator. He’d have a light set up so that it was burning my arm—it was set up right next to the camera, but I couldn’t do anything about it. Then I worked on a picture with Charlie Rosher, and he did the same thing. I said, “Mr. Rosher, this light is too hot for me,” and he said, “Well, push it ahead and put a silk over it.” Now, I could never say such a thing to Milner, but Rosher said, “Go on, push it ahead.” So then I noticed that by pushing it forward and using a silk, you got the same intensity as when it was sitting back by the camera. You learn this kind of thing as you go along. And one thing you find out is that everything has been done already. Everything that’s been done in pictures Billy Bitzer probably did long before I was in pictures. You always try to invent something new—I remember I was trying to light a set with just a candle, and things like that—but then you find out it’s already been done. Of course, you can refine a technique. Another thing you learn is that a cameraman cannot do a picture the way he wants to, because he’s not the boss. It’s a collaboration of the director, the art director, and the cameraman.
LM: Sternberg was known as a director with a great visual sense.<
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BALLARD: He liked to try for certain things, like in THE DEVIL is A WOMAN he had one set where everything was painted white. And we saw the rushes, went back to the set the next day and everything was painted black. Other people were frightened of him, but I wasn’t, and that’s why we got along. I could never sit on a fence, I was always honest and would speak my piece, and he appreciated that. I remember that during a lot of shots, he would want to look through the camera himself, and you just can’t do that, because the camera operator has to see what’s going on all the time. So we set up a range-finder that gave him the exact same results, and he would look through that on every shot. There was one scene where we had a 180-degree pan, and it was very awkward, so during the shot I pulled him by the seat of the pants and swung him around with the camera. Afterward I just sort of disappeared, and when he came over to me I said, “You can’t fire me, I quit.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I knew you’d be angry about pulling you by the seat of the pants,” and he said, “What do you mean, we got the shot, didn’t we?”
LM: Dietrich was very aware of lighting, wasn’t she?
BALLARD: Well, he’d taught her a lot, and she got to know that there was supposed to be a shadow coming over her nose, and things like that. It got so she could lick her finger and feel the intensity of the heat, and she’d know whether it was right or not.
LM: So Sternberg liked you, and had you on all of his films?
BALLARD: Yes, he’d always try to get me, and in fact, after a while, he’d be working with me and circumventing the actual first cameraman. I remember we did that with Bert Glennon, who was director of photography on one film; he was bewildered, because Sternberg and I would be working everything out—and then Glennon went to Fox on the strength of that film!
LM: Sternberg took you with him to Columbia, didn’t he?
BALLARD: That’s right, and then we had a falling out, and I stayed there.
LM: Was there any difference shooting a film with him at Paramount and doing it at Columbia?
BALLARD: No; when you’re a professional, you know what you’re doing, and it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s at Paramount or Fox or Warners. But after Sternberg left, I was under contract to Columbia, and you know, the biggest pictures there were eighteen-day pictures!
LM: You did CRAIG’S WIFE, though, which was excellent and a beautifully lit film.
BALLARD: Yes, that was with Dorothy Arzner. But you know, Columbia didn’t have many lights when I was there; they assigned just so many to each picture, and then if you needed more you had to go through all sorts of permissions. So on CRAIG’S WIFE I bought some baby spots myself, and got the producer to OK them. Oddly enough, even though they didn’t have many lights, I was assigned a standby painter, who was always on the set for last-minute jobs and touch-ups. After a while I realized the value of this and I had it in my contract that I would always have a standby painter—even on Saturdays, when the rest of the department was closed. Pretty soon the word got around, and people were always calling to borrow this guy—I let him go out for a while, but they would keep him too long, so I had to cut it down and just say yes when it would be for ten or fifteen minutes.
LM: Doing quickies at Columbia, did you have time to be creative, and work out special ideas?
BALLARD: Oh yes. In black and white, I always liked to use low-key effects, and have the film very contrasty, so I used Agfa film, which at that time had no halftones, so everything was either black or white. Of course, the photography has to suit the individual picture you’re doing. If you had perfection in every shot, you’d lose the story, and besides, the photography wouldn’t mean anything—but if you had one or two great shots, say one at the beginning, a highpoint in the middle, and one at the end, those shots would stay in people’s minds. But the photography always has to be appropriate for the story.
LM: You don’t mean that it should be invisible . . .
BALLARD: Oh no, but for instance, I remember I always used to love French pictures, early French pictures. Did you ever see Sacha Guitry’s THE STORY OF THE CHEAT? It’s a great film, about this family that’s planning a picnic; there are 13 kids, and one of them misbehaves before they go, so his punishment is that he can’t go along. The family goes on the picnic, but they eat poisoned mushrooms and they all die. Then at the funeral you have all these coffins, from the biggest ranging down to the smallest, with a priest running behind them to catch up with the procession. Now, in those days, the French pictures we got here were dupes off of dupes, so the photographic quality was terrible. But you didn’t care, because these films had substance instead of photography. I’d sacrifice photography anytime for the sake of the story.
LM: Were you able to do anything with any of the pictures you made at Columbia?
BALLARD: I remember one called SUBMARINE. Columbia had had a great hit in the early days with a picture called DIRIGIBLE, so every year they remade it with a different setting. This one was SUBMARINE, and there was a scene where the ship is sinking, and you see this inside the cabin. The lights go out, and of course there’s one guy who’s frightened, before they can get the emergency lights on again. So when the lights went out, I just had one broad on with about a dozen silks, and out of this blackness you heard the one frightened sailor—I remember it was played by John Gallaudet—screaming, and I thought it was a great effect, very frightening to hear a scream come out of the darkness. Then I counted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, before I put the lights back on again, and when they came on, the sailor was praying, and there was a shadow of a crucifix over him. So that night, Harry Cohn saw the rushes, and he called me on the phone to fire me. Fortunately, I was out that night and couldn’t be reached, but I saw him the next day and he told me that if he’d gotten through to me I would have been fired. “I pay all those actors,” he said. “What’s the idea of having them in total blackness for ten minutes?” I said, “It was only for the count of five.” He said, “I want to see my actors at all times!” I remember once I wanted to do some special camerawork on one film, and we went a little over schedule. Cohn said to me, “This picture was supposed to cost $50,000 (let’s say) and I’m going to sell it for $100,000. You cost $2,000 overbudget. That means I’m only going to make $48,000 on this film!” That was the way he thought—that was the way they all thought. You know, everybody talks about how little EASY RIDER cost, and how much money it made. They should be upset that it cost as much as it did. I could have made it in five days, and done it twice as good. You had amateurs doing it, and that’s why it took four or five weeks. Anybody who’d schedule a film like that for more than five days ought to have his head examined. But that’s what determines a professional. I know right after I’d made NEVADA SMITH, they wanted me for this little picture AN EYE FOR AN EYE; Joseph E. Levine was producing it, but Henry Hathaway had put up half the money for it. They didn’t want to pay my salary at first, but I said, “Look, if I can’t save you my salary, then you shouldn’t hire me.” It was scheduled as an eighteen-day picture, and we did it in sixteen days. And that was despite it snowing and raining, because I knew how to compensate for such things. When the picture was over, one of Joseph E. Levine’s executives said to Hathaway—they’d had some casting problems with the picture—“You know, the best casting job we did was hiring Lucien Ballard.”
Ballard and Hayley Mills relax on the set of THE PARENT TRAP ( 1961 ).
LM: How did it happen that you left Columbia?
BALLARD: I’d been there for three years. I had a yearly contract which was renewable for another year with a raise in salary. So after three years they wanted to renew it again, only without the raise. So I said no, and I left and immediately found work elsewhere for more money. I did THE VILLAIN STILL PURSUED HER, which was a fun picture, with Eddie Cline, who was a very good comedy director.
LM: You’d done a number of two-reel comedies at Columbia, hadn’t you?
BALLARD: Yes. You see, I had a forty-week contract, with a twelve-week la
yoff, so as soon as my forty weeks were up, I’d go across the street and shoot comedies with the short-subject unit. And it was great experience. I worked with Del Lord, Charley Chase—who was the greatest of all, I thought—and the Three Stooges.
LM: The shorts often had camera trickery in them, didn’t they?
BALLARD: Yes, but everything was done on the set. Like, if you wanted to show the Stooges driving a car into a garage, and then the car exploding, you’d put a trough filled with flash powder underneath the camera, and then set it off. You’d cut and your next shot would show the car with the fenders blown off, and the Stooges would be blown to various parts of the room. Charley Chase did a more sophisticated kind of comedy—he would direct some of them, and produce too.
LM: What other films did you work on after the Columbia period?
BALLARD: Well, I worked with Howard Hawks shooting tests for THE OUTLAW for Howard Hughes. We filmed these tests on 16mm in Hughes’ basement. They were testing a hundred boys and a hundred girls for the leads, as a publicity stunt—of course, Hughes had already picked the two he wanted, but we went ahead anyway. So after a while I told Howard I wanted to do some tests of my own, and I took Jane Russell, because she’d been hanging around me for a while, always asking why I did that and why I did this—she was just a kid at the time. So Howard said OK, and asked me to use Jack Buetel, who he liked quite a bit for the role. Anyway, I made these tests in the haystack, used cross-lights so her tits show big, and Hughes went wild for it. I didn’t know it then, but he had a thing for tits; he had the scene made into a loop, and he’d run it over and over again. So anyway, he cancelled the two people he’d signed for the leads, and decided to use Jane Russell and Jack Buetel. Then Howard and I went out looking for locations, and finally we started filming in Flagstaff, in and around that area of Arizona. But every night Hawks would be on the phone with Hughes, and they started fighting. Finally one day we were told that we were to pack up and leave—very suddenly. So Howard and I were taken off the picture, Hughes started to direct it himself, and he hired Gregg Toland to shoot it. So Gregg came to me—I thought he was one of the best in the business—and he said, “I’ve seen the footage you did, and there’s not a thing in this film that I could do as well as you did.” Gregg wanted me to stay on the film and get him started, so I did, and I stayed on shooting the second unit. And Hughes, I found out, was very interested in effects. Every day he’d call up and say, “How did you do so-and-so?” So from then on I used a lot of filters and things to keep him happy.
The Art of the Cinematographer Page 20
