American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1963)

backs. Most had to be achieved from scratch by putting Bill Rose’s impos¬ sible ideas on a drawing board and then building the gimmicks, gizmos and machinery to execute them. Such as these items: Explode 6,000 pieces of percussion and moving fireworks around Caesar and Miss Adams in the hardware store cellar; construct a working service sta¬ tion that would come apart, piece by piece, as actor Winters battled with actors Kaplan and Stang; devise a fire escape on the side of an 80-foot build¬ ing that would gradually break away from its moorings while all the stars were clambering on it; run the auto¬ mobile, presumably containing Dur¬ ante, one mile down a mountain high¬ way and crash it over a 500-foot cliff; design and huild a fire-engine ladder that would flip actors one-by-one from the top of its 100-foot length. In all there were 217 such items on the fdm’s special effects lists. The tools of Lee’s trade are a con¬ glomeration of unworldly devices such as pemberthy siphons, gun powders, squibs and squib hooks, dynamite caps, pulleys, cranes, compressors, popping matches, air rams, hydraulic rams, smoke pots, smoke blowers, cables and wires and opaque paint. The pemberthy siphon he used when Kramer wanted a speeding automobile, driven by Mickey Rooney, to kick up an outrag¬ eous cloud of dust. Buckets of Fuller’s earth were placed out of sight on the framework of the car and the siphon, energized by air, created a monu¬ mental sandstorm. Squibs are minute but powerful explosive charges formu¬ lated of diazo powder and fulminate of mercury which are fired electrically to release a squib hook. Just right for blowing limbs off trees while actors are hanging on them. A popping match is a sort of fuse which emits a spray of sparks at regular intervals as it burns. Just the thing for the slow blasting, apart of an airport tower’s radio pan¬ els. Opaque paint is one of the most precious of assets; people and things which the camera catches floating through the air have to be on wires and cables. The illusion would be destroyed if the appurtenances could be seen. But coated with the special paint they are invisible. Of all the challenges to their ingen¬ uity Lee and his crew are proudest of the Rube Goldberg they contrived to run Durante’s car off the cliff. It was a radio-controlled automatic pilot put to¬ gether with bits and pieces of elec¬ tronic equipment they acquired from the laboratories of the California In¬ stitute of Technology and nearby aero¬ space plants. When the time came for shooting the sequence Lee stood on a hillside a mile away from the car, started it, steered it, slowed it for curves, then sped it at 80 miles an hour off the highway. Recording it all was cinematographer Ernest La-szlo behind the Super Panavision camera mounted on a Chapman crane extended out over a steep desert cliff. “To photograph ‘Mad World,’ ” said Laszlo, “required 166 shooting days, during a period of seven-and-a-half months, during which time we exposed 636,000 feet of Eastman Color nega¬ tive from which the picture’s final Cin¬ erama print was produced by Techni¬ color.” ■ “MAD WORLD” TITLES Continued From Page 707 ment in the 5251 color negative, how¬ ever. The color balance has also been vastly improved. There is now a greater response in the red-orange-yellow range of the spectrum and less emphasis on the blue range. This improved over¬ all color balance results in more real¬ istic flesh tones and brighter greens and reds. Wide-screen productions present many new problems dealing directly with animation. By definition, anima¬ tion is illusion. An artist creates sep¬ arate phases of movement which give the illusion of continuing action when projected in sequence on a screen. In creating this illusion of life and movement, the animator normally uses a work (or drawing) sheet measuring 8%" by 12" or variations of this pro¬ portion. Thus, the characters created and the resulting situations must be held to this specified proportion. However, working with wide-screen projection, the proportions of this work sheet obviously are increased in agree¬ ment with the end product. The work sheet in wide-screen animating is 6%" by 183/4". How does this affect the animator? “He loses the illusion the drawings are supposed to create because of the definite changes in perspective,” ex¬ plains Bill Melendez. “After working with a prescribed field of proportion, you find that, when projected on a wide screen, the movement of life is mmimimimiimiimiiiim . mum . . . mmimmmmimmmmmmmmimmmii FLASHBACK TO YESTERYEAR 1916 — The place: Paragon Studio, Ft. Lee, New Jersey. The picture: | “Poor Little Rich Girl,” starring Mary Pickford (at right, in photo). Others | are, from left: Director Maurice Tourneur, cinematographer Lucien An 1 driot, ASC, cranking a Pathe camera and who co-photographed the picture 1 with John Van den Brook (now deceased), shown here recording the scene 1 with an Eclair camera. (Photo courtesy Lucien Andriot, ASC.) iiimmimiiittUUUiitmimiiiMiimimmnniY p.vjwh* £ 728 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER, DECEMBER, 1963