LM: Then you went into your first picture, as cameraman, cold?
HALL: No, no, I had been a cameraman from the time I was at USC. All students are; I was always a cameraman, I was never an assistant cameraman or anything else. I had a camera, I bought a camera. I used to be associated with another present cameraman named Dick Moore. Dick Moore had been in Europe when the war closed, and had gone to Arnold and Richter in Germany, and asked for the Western Hemisphere distribution rights to the German combat camera, called the Arriflex. Arnold and Richter gave it to him; Dick didn’t have any money, and I had $900, which paid for the demonstrator, and we set up a company called Arriflex Imports. Well, everybody here at MGM, Columbia, and people like that, said, “What is this Mickey Mouse camera?” when we brought it around. “It’s a German camera—we’ve got our own. It’s terrific; it’s called a Bell and Howell.” And I said, “Yeah, but it’s not reflex. This is reflex—you can see right through it, and it’s got a lot of advantages that the American cameras don’t have.” Nobody would even talk to us about it. And after a year we didn’t sell any cameras. Arnold and Richter wrote us a letter and said, “Hey, boys, enough’s enough, you’ve been in business a year and haven’t sold any cameras, so we have taken away your franchise . . .” The only reason I’d gotten into this was that I wanted to own a camera. Because when you’re not in the union, it’s easier to have your own equipment, and go out as a package. A producer who needs some pickup shots to finish a feature, and doesn’t have to pay the union rates, he wants to contract for five or six shots. You make him a contract price.
LM: What about the art of cinematography; how do you think this developed in you—when you were a student, or from the experience you got subsequently?
HALL: That’s a very difficult question. I mean, pick some other area—how does Picasso develop what he developed? It just happens.
LM: But there are so many technical things you have to know . . .
HALL: I disagree with you. I personally think—everybody is in great awe of the technical aspects of cinematography; I, on the contrary, am not in awe of it at all. I think it’s much more difficult to be a mechanic than it is to be a cinematographer, as far as technical things are concerned. When I look at an engine taken apart, or an automatic transmission, I’m in great awe of the man who knows how to take it apart, and put it together again, and make it work. A camera is nothing. First off, you don’t have to take it apart and put it back together again; all you have to do is to be able to use it. There’s a thing called a lens, a little thing called an f. stop, and a couple of minor kinds of laws that govern what happens on the film, and I learned all these things from a guy named Slavko Vorkapich. I knew how to make a camera work like a mechanic knows how to make a motor work. I knew what happens when you take the film and turn it upside down, and backwards, and inside out; when you stop it down, and open it up. I learned it in two years, and I didn’t need that long to learn it—I could have learned it in six months easily, or less time, for that matter. The rest of it, there’s no way to explain; how the artistry comes out of you is part of you, part of your experience in life, the way you see things.
LM: One of the first films I have credited for you is one of the Disney true-life films.
HALL: That’s right. One of my partners was a naturalist, his name was Jack Couffer; he’s a director now. He deals with animals, mostly; he did RING OF BRIGHT WATER, that sort of thing. A very talented man. At that time Disney was going into their program of animal films, and Jack said, “What the hell, why don’t we do that? We’ve got some ideas; let’s approach him. So Jack had some ideas, and he approached Disney, and Disney said, “Why not?” Jack came back and said, ”We’ve got a contract to do this and that,“ and we started to work making pieces of his animal films. Then Jack and I had a chance to go to the Galapagos in 1954, for eight months, to do a film down there for Disney, and we did work for him, on and off, for quite a number of years.
LM: You were not making entire films, then, only sections?
HALL: The Galapagos film was an entire film, although there was other people’s work in it, but the lump of it was ours. It was called ISLANDS OF THE SEA. We did quite a bit of work for Disney over the years, in 16mm color.
LM: It was blown up to 35mm?
HALL: Yes.
LM: You’d never know it; the optical work must have been outstanding.
HALL: Well, I’ll tell you, the eye accustoms itself to what is offered it, very quickly. If you were to intercut 35mm with 16mm blowup, you would immediately think something was wrong. You would see the difference. If you dissolved it, you might not see it at all. But if you juxtapose it quickly, then you’re going to see that there’s a different quality. But if you start right out on 16, you might say at the beginning, “Isn’t it a little bit fuzzy?” and then forget about it.
LM: How long were you doing that type of work?
HALL: We made the feature in 1956—I’d graduated in 1949, and we were a company from that moment on, until we dissolved in 1957, after making this one feature. Then I formed my own company, and I did commercials, which I’d been doing all along anyway. We were film bums to begin with; we had been doing anything to make a living at cinema. We edited, photographed, directed, did educational films, industrial films, commercials, TV things, pieces of features—lots of feature work with producers who would run out of money and not want to use a union crew. They’d come to us, and we’d moonlight for them.
LM: Any interesting films?
HALL: I don’t remember. Things like MAN CRAZY, a lot of Benedict Bogeaus films.
LM: How did you get away with that?
HALL: Well, first of all, the producers felt they were getting away with it by contracting with you, instead of paying you a wage. They would be saying, “We don’t want to know how you do this, but we’re contracting for you to deliver this.” Well, then you’d go out with the director and work just like you would normally. Legally, I guess that’s the way they did it. We didn’t care. I wanted to join the union; the fact that they wouldn’t let me wasn’t my fault. I was perfectly willing to join the union. I believe in unions that anybody can get into, providing he passes whatever requirements of excellence the union requires. I was willing to take tests, if there were something like that, but there wasn’t, and I was refused entry into the union. So when we became harassed by the union on our independent work, a bunch of us got together and formed our own union. Four or five of us started a union called the Association of Film Craftsmen . . . and we were still harassed by the IATSE. So we started thinking of how to get some power, and we analyzed that the way they controlled the industry was to control the projectionists. They could say, “We won’t show your picture unless it’s union made.” We said, “Is there anybody else that we can affiliate with?” and we found out that in television there was a union called NABET, and they were basically projectionists for television. We made overtures to NABET, and asked them if they would be interested; so we affiliated with them. We had a little more leverage then; we could say, “If you won’t project our films, we won’t project your films.” Slowly, the legitimacy of the union developed, and now it is quite a legitimate working union, and certainly a thorn in the side of the IATSE.
LM: Are there jurisdictional disputes between the two?
HALL: I don’t know any more. Either you fight those battles all your life, or you fight them when you need them. I needed to work, I wanted to be allowed to work, and people were preventing me from it. I took whatever measures I had to in order to be able to work. Once having done that, I’m not going to do that for the next guy—that’s his problem. He has to do it for himself. I did it, it helped a lot of people in the future, but I’m not a union man—I want to make films. I just got into it long enough for myself to be able to work in the industry. I subsequently had a falling out with NABET, and tried to get into the IA again, as a result of my feature film, and forced the Taft-Hartley law on them: the owner of a company is allo
wed to do any one thing in that company that he chooses. And they said, “Yeah, but you can’t. If you try to photograph your own picture, we’ll pull the crew.” I said, “If you pull the crew, you’ll cause me to lose money, and I’ll take you to court and sue you.” He hung up the phone—this was my friend Herb Aller. I talked to my lawyer, and my lawyer said, “You’re right; you could probably win, but you neither have the inclination nor the funds to do it, and it might take ten years.” And I didn’t want to do that. About that time Herb called again and said, “What do you want to make trouble for?” I said, “I don’t want to make trouble, I just want to photograph my own film.” He said, “Do you always want to just photograph your own film, or do you want to become a cameraman?” I said, “No, I’d like to be a cameraman.” He said, “OK, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you’ll hire somebody to photograph your picture, he can sit in the bus, he doesn’t have to actually do it, if you give him credit for doing it. And when you get back from location I’ll see what I can do about getting you into the union.” I was very young at the time, and I said, “Ahh, I might as well join them,” so I joined them. I worked my way up; I was an assistant cameraman for a year, an operator for a year, and then became a first cameraman—again. I worked with a lot of the top cameramen in the industry like Ted McCord, Ernie Haller, Robert Surtees, Hal Mohr, Burnie Guffey, lots of them. At one time or another I must have worked with twenty-five or thirty really top cameramen. I paid a lot of attention.
LM: Does the camera operator have a chance to be creative on his own?
HALL: Yes, absolutely. I believe in creative focus, and creative operating, and there’s a difference between a mechanical focus and a creative focus. I mean, how do you tell somebody when to change focus? That’s what he feels. He’s telling the story when he’s changing focus; he’s in charge of telling that story, because he’s shifting the story from over there to over here, and it’s a good feeling when you’re doing it—very creative.
LM: Does anything stand out in your mind from that period when you were assisting other cameramen?
HALL: Working with Ted McCord was such an inspirational thing for me, because here was a man who started when the industry started. He started when he was nineteen, and had been a cameraman for many many years. I saw that this man was not set in his ways; he was as open as any young man that I’ve ever known in my life—ready to experiment, ready to change his ideas. Working with somebody like that was very inspirational, to see that you could grow, and not just stay in one place, being good at one thing in your whole life, and age really has nothing to do with it.
LM: You had a lopsided progression, being first cameraman twice, as you say, but do you feel it was helpful to work your way up, so to speak, in the business?
HALL: No. I consider it an honor to have been part of a continuity of films from the beginning to now, because I worked with all the guys who began it. Jimmy Wong Howe was in it at the beginning, here in Los Angeles. I liked that, I liked picking their brains. I liked having that connection with the beginning very much.
LM: Your first solo credits then were two TV series, STONEY BURKE and THE OUTER LIMITS.
HALL: Yes; when I finally became a cameraman again, Leslie Stevens hired me. He is a writer-producer-director, a very talented man that I had worked for as an operator with Ted McCord on a picture called PRIVATE PROPERTY. Leslie Stevens and I formed a friendship and admiration for each other that made him make me a cameraman when he started a series called STONEY BURKE. In PRIVATE PROPERTY his wife played the lead; we shot it at his home, and it was fun, really fun. One of those things, cost $60,000. It was much before its time, and a very interesting film. Anyway, I did STONEY BURKE, and then OUTER LIMITS, then I left after a year of OUTER LIMITS.
LM: Having worked on features, it must have been a challenge to work under the restrictions of TV shooting.
HALL: Yes it was. You keep fighting the feeling that you’re in a sausage factory. And when somebody doesn’t appreciate something, there’s not much sense in doing it, although I never took that attitude, really. It always counted, it always mattered to me whether I did good work or not, and I never ever threw it in. That meant that I was always sort of a bad guy, because it took a little more time, budgets would go over slightly, that sort of thing.
LM: So often, people who do TV just don’t care.
HALL: But enough people cared to make it worthwhile for me; the producer cared, the directors cared, the people I was photographing cared, and some of the audience cared. There were people who would say, “Gee, that’s a well-photographed show.” There were other shows that were done by other cameramen that were really good too. I remember HONG KONG being a very good one, and the one that Phil Lathrop did was beautiful—PETER GUNN. PETER GUNN was exquisitely done. There were quite a number where the people cared about what they did.
LM: THE OUTER LIMITS was a show that lent itself to imaginative photography.
HALL: Yes, you had a lot of opportunities in that show to be gimmicky, and I’m glad I had it, because I sort of got it out of my system there, rather than on a big screen. I hate gimmicks now.
LM: How did you progress to your first feature film?
HALL: After a year I had an opportunity to photograph a feature at Universal called THE WILD SEED, with Michael Parks, directed by Brian Hutton and produced by Al Ruddy. We made a feature for $285,000, with twenty-four shooting days, black and white, a film I like very much—a very good film, much ahead of its time. Univer sal didn’t know what to do with it, they just slipped it on the lower half of double bills. It had some good things in it. I’ve made maybe four or five great shots in my life—I mean really great—and one of them is in that picture. What I mean by a great shot is one that tells the story so perfectly that you want to cry, because it does its job so well. It’s not noticed, nobody pays attention to it, but it is so right, with what has been said, with what has been going on. Everything has to be right for a shot to be great—the acting, the whole thing. And this is a shot in which the girl is reading a letter from her father, left her by her mother—which turned out not to be from him at all, but one she had written to make it seem like she had a father. She starts to read that, and the camera starts to pan off of her, but it moves so slowly that you don’t notice it; it’s just moving and pretty soon she’s on the edge of the frame, but you don’t think about it. Soon she’s in half, and then she’s out of the frame, and there’s some sort of out-of-focus pepper trees in the background; the voice is still going on. This shot has got the power of the San Andreas fault; it moves that slowly. But when it breaks apart, it’s really something. What happens is all of a sudden you come onto him, and when you come onto him the focus changes, so he will be in focus just at the right time, and an eye comes on quite big. Because the story is really happening in him; her reading doesn’t make any difference at all. He’s trying to get involved in her. It comes into a close-up of him, she finishes reading the letter, and then they cut to something else. But it’s one of the most cinematic shots I’ve ever seen in my life, because it tells the story so well.
LM: It must be difficult to reach a happy medium as cameraman; I mean, you want to tell the story in a pictorial way, in a beautiful way, perhaps, and yet you don’t want people to start watching your camerawork instead of the story. It must be frustrating at times for you . . .
HALL: It is frustrating not being involved in the whole picture; it’s having a concept about how something is done, then going to see the picture, and the film that had a different concept at one time is now used to tell a different story entirely—because of what has happened in editing, the decisions that one goes through in the editing process that cause you to change your mind. And you’re not benefit of those changes. So you can’t ever enjoy your own pictures, unless you forget about it completely, and just be an audience.
LM: What about the compromise between storytelling and photography?
HALL: There’s tons of ways of doing things, a
nd what I try to do is what the director wants to do. When you work for somebody like Richard Brooks, he tells you just exactly where to put the camera; that’s the way he wants it, it’s his picture, if you don’t want to do it that way, you can work for somebody else. The first thing he said to me when I stepped on THE PROFESSIONALS was, “Look, kid, do you want to be a director?” I said, “No, not really.” He said, “Well, you probably will, you’ll probably want to be a director someday. I’m all for it. I’m all for everybody being a director, for directing one picture anyway, because they might not like it—they might find it’s too hard work, and they might like doing something else. But direct your own picture, don’t direct mine.” That’s the way he wants it, and that’s the way I do it. I do what any director wants to do, but a lot of directors don’t know what they want to do, and they say to you, “What’ll we do?” and then you naturally have to come ahead and tell them what you feel. I always tell anybody what I feel anyway. But if you’re a good cameraman, you do what the director wants to do, because he’s the one who’s telling the story. If you’re fighting the director, you’re hurting the picture. Because then you should be directing it. If a director wants me to help him direct it, I’ll help him direct it; if he doesn’t want me to help him direct it, I don’t help him direct it.
The Art of the Cinematographer Page 23
