American Cinematographer - March 2016 - 40

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It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

Franco made bold use of red gels for the re-creation of a performance by Alice Cooper (Dustin Ingram),
staged in a Red Hook warehouse.

Prieto had an idea that was
inspired by a film that Scorsese had
shown him during an unrelated discussion. "Marty showed me some clips
from a Lauren Bacall movie," he says, in
which a jilted lover imagines Bacall
appearing in his apartment, theatrically
lit. "I thought, 'Why don't we do that for
the musical interludes? Let's light it
with color, like a stage, but see the location.' So that's how that came about."
Bold theatrical lighting and the
creative adaptation of locations became
the name of the game. In one instance,
Prieto knew he had to shoot Bo
Diddley near Richie's pool at night,
since the interlude followed a birthday
40

March 2016

party in that setting. And he knew it
should play largely in silhouette, to help
disguise the actor. They happened to
have a Rosco X24 X-Effects projector
lighting the house and characters in the
party scene, with its moving blue-green
filter emulating water effects from the
pool, and gaffer Bill O'Leary suggested
pumping out additional smoke and
using that projector to create a rippling
backlight on Diddley. "It's super-weird,"
says Prieto, "and it was just this projector. We had to shoot that one real fast;
others were more thought-out."
Prep was especially important
when an interstitial segued into the next
scene without cuts. Episode four begins
American Cinematographer

this way: In a long oner, a Steadicam
moves down an aisle, following R&B
singer Otis Blackwell, who is lit by a
strong, white backlight. Just as the
camera catches up and comes around,
the theatrical light dims and sunlight
enters through a wall of hexagonalpaned colored glass, revealing a funeral
service underway for a music-industry
heavyweight. "In keeping with
Rodrigo's interstitials in the pilot, we
wanted it to feel very theatrical when
[Blackwell is] singing, then essentially
go back to reality when we'd come
around and reveal the pews," says
Morano.
The scene was one of her biggest
setups, and when they finally found the
right location - a synagogue on Long
Island - she knew it would work.
Behind the podium rose a wall that
stopped short of the ceiling, which gave
her a platform on which to place lights
"almost like a theatrical formation,"
Morano says. "I could have 10 Source
Fours backlighting this singer and flaring the lens as he came down the aisle."
To push light through the synagogue's
wall of colored glass, gaffer John Oates
positioned three 18Ks on the ground
outside, to be manually panned. Then
key grip Charlie Sherron constructed a
truss that spanned two scissor lifts and
carried three 12Ks mounted in motorized Arri MaxMover stirrups, enabling
remote pan and tilt. On Oates' cue, the
Source Fours would sequentially dim,
and the 12Ks and 18Ks would pan. "It
was a very fun oner," says Morano.
For musical performances that
are part of the main drama, the cinematographers had occasion to light
everything from a solo blues musician in
a dive bar, to clubs like CBGB, to huge,
"funkadelic" concerts. When Franco
had need to hunt down references for
Alice Cooper circa 1972, he could find
only black-and-white photographs, so
imagination was required. For the
shock-rock group's rehearsal space,
filmed in a Red Hook warehouse,
Franco went all-out with the red gels,
"just to make it as bloody as possible!"
he says. Franco erected a lighting truss

American Cinematographer - March 2016

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