American Cinematographer - October 2014 - 76

Persistence of Vision
That was sort of the point of the picture.
Beatty knew this was his moment.
He was a renowned perfectionist (our
production manager had retired the slate
from an earlier scene: "Warren stirs soup,
take 100"). And Pakula had, as Gordon
put it, an iron ass. He liked to say "film is
cheap." Pakula pushed him, and Beatty
pushed himself, again and again. In those
days, there was no video playback. You
couldn't see the scene until it came back
as dailies. But they both knew when
they'd finally got it right. That was, I'd say,
the creative high point for both of them.
The scene took place in Beatty's
seedy doss house, lit by a single overhead
bulb. He is hunched over, muttering his
confessional, face in shadow. Gordon
used his whisper of fill light. Dailies came
back the next day with Beatty's face solid
black. Nothing there. But we had moved
on. That was it.
Gordon told me that he'd done it
on purpose, to protect Pakula and Beatty,
because he didn't think Beatty could pull
off the moment. I wasn't present when
the three of them held their very private
meeting. I remember a shaken Gordon
afterwards. Later I'd learn that was as
close as Gordon ever came to being fired.
Also, that he'd admitted he'd blown it,
and felt terrible about it.
So Gordon finished the picture.
And even with its best moment taking
place in the dark, The Parallax View is
considered a classic among paranoid
thrillers. Gordon Willis won the Best
Cinematography award that year from
the National Society of Film Critics.
Gordon was dead right in his interpretation of Pakula's "comic book." More than
that, the shoe leather's been stripped out,
and the jump cuts hold the movie
together.
And I learned that even if you're
brilliant, taking real risks is really dangerous. But without risks, there's no picture.
Jon Boorstin was associate producer on All
the President's Men. He wrote, and with
Alan Pakula produced, the thriller Dream
Lover. He has just published Mabel and
Me, a novel about the very early days of
picturemaking.

October 2014

Willis poses with former crewmember (and current ASC president) Richard Crudo
after receiving his honorary Oscar.

Dispatches From a
Grenade Factory
By Richard Crudo, ASC
*|*
We've been told throughout our
lives that nothing is certain but death
and taxes. I agree, but propose the addition of one amendment: There will
never be another Gordon Willis.
Allow me to flash back to 1982, a
time when film was supreme and its
mystery and beauty revealed not
through a bank of electronic monitors
but through the eye of a gifted artist.
"Good thing you don't work in a
grenade factory."
These were the first words
spoken to me by the big man himself,
without doubt the greatest cinematographer ever to cross a soundstage. On
the surface it's an unremarkable phrase,
a halfhearted attempt at humor of the
type that flies past the ear without much
notice. If you happened to be caught in
American Cinematographer

its crosshairs, though - as I was at the
time - you would have had a different
reaction. For me, this dry bon mot,
delivered by an imposing middle-aged
New Yorker with a freshly lit cigarette
in one hand and a Spectra Professional
in the other, came screaming down like
a rocket fired from an Air Force drone
over the Afghan desert.
Woody Allen's production of
Zelig represented my maiden voyage
into the world of big-league filmmaking after several years toiling as an assistant cameraman on documentaries and
half-baked independent features. I
wasn't even an official part of the crew
yet; I was generously invited to come
along and lug cases by Gordon's focus
puller, a wonderful guy named Doug
Hart. At the pivotal moment in which I

Photo courtesy of Richard Crudo.

◗

American Cinematographer - October 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - October 2014