American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1963)

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AND LISA’-A CHALLENGE The problem was to put the story on film as inexpensively and yet as sensitively as possible, says Leonard Hirschfield who photographed it. documentary. It is a theatrical and dramatic story, and it demanded all the techniques that are used in the best Hollywood-type films. It was my hope to involve the cam¬ era in the story. I think that to a certain degree we achieved this, thanks to Frank Perry’s understanding of my particular problems and his adapting to them. For example, the last sequence of the story takes place on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum. In the ini¬ tial script, the sequence was begun at night. Lisa has run away from school and is trying to enter the Museum to LEONARD HIRSCHFIELD of VPI Productions, New York, who directed the photography of “David and Lisa," low-budget black-and-white production. PREPARING A NEW camera set-up for scene in “David and Lisa" under direction of cinematog¬ rapher Leonard Hirschfield. Looking on are Frank Perry (white shirt, on right) Director of the film, and actors Howard Da Silva and Keir Dullea. make contact again with the familygroup statue which stands in the lobby. She fails to get in, because it is night time and the Museum is closed. Now, if we had a Hollywood-type budget, we could have very well lit the whole Mu¬ seum front with Brutes, using perhaps forty electricians. We didn’t have that kind of money. So it was my sugges¬ tion that we make the scene a sunrise or dawn scene by simply adding to the script a time transition line in the scene immediately preceding the Mu¬ seum sequence. By making it dawn, we probably saved four days of shooting, and speaking realistically it would have been impossible for our small unit to light up the entire front of the Museum at night. Yet, interestingly enough, the mood that the available light gave us at dawn greatly en¬ hanced the ending of the film. The school itself presented unusual problems in photography. It was not a very handsome school, and was fur¬ nished mostly with furniture from the Board of Education of Philadelphia. It was actually an abandoned building which we took over, and it had very little available electricity. Those of you who are independent film makers will invariably face this same problem of having to make do with the facilities at hand when working in remote loca¬ tions. We had available about 250 amperes, which is about the amount of power required to light a single Brute arc lamp. We used small Colortrans, Mole-Richardson spot lights, and other lightweight equipment to photograph the school interiors. The problem in the school was to give each of the rooms a different feel¬ ing. We spent two weeks out of a total of five shooting interiors in the office of the school analyst, showing his sessions with David. This was a very small room, and would have been very dull and uninteresting if we had just photographed it under one mood of lighting. Frank Perry therefore adapted the story so that we could shoot some of these office scenes at night, which gave us the chance to do low-key mood lighting. Some of these scenes were staged against the windows so that we could use the exterior as a back¬ ground. The important thing to remember about making low-budget films and photographing them is to make full use of what you have at hand. Don’t think of grandiose ideas! There are no so-called “production shots” in David Arid Lisa. The photography tries to enhance the story and is a star in itself. Actually, it is difficult to talk about photography as a separate entity because you cannot really separate it from the direction, the story or the acting. Continued on Page 426 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER, JULY, 1963 405