Working on my own projects again lifted my spirits and reminded me why I was so interested in filmmaking to begin with. I took a lady friend to lunch one afternoon at Skywalker Ranch’s main house dining room. Afterwards we walked through the living room and the library with its huge stained glass ceiling. She commented that the artwork displayed was all about the human form—the hands, the human body, the face. Over the mantle there was a large Norman Rockwell painting, Peach Crop (1935), portraying a beautiful young girl lying in a barn of some type. She is surrounded by ranch hands. Perhaps she has fainted, as the boys look on with a wonderful mixture of passion and concern on their faces and in their body language. A good art piece tells a story and evokes emotion. This was a movie scene.
One of the things you really have to get right in a movie is how people look: the human form, especially the face, because we are all so familiar with it. The eyes, the mouth, skin tone—we have hundreds of thousands of years of evolution in detecting the meaning of the slightest change in expression in the human face. Motion picture cameras catch all of this, and exceptional actors’ faces are capable of expressing the subtlest of emotions whatever the requirements of the scene. It is really true that the camera loves some people and not others.
While we were shooting scenes for Cocoon 2, we were also working on the ill-fated Howard the Duck starring Lea Thompson. While I was heading to dailies for both films one day, I stopped by the second-floor kitchen, where there were usually some bagels or pastries, and an actress from Cocoon 2 was the only other person in the room. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in person. She had a movie star’s face, with jet black hair and vividly blue eyes.
When I got to dailies, both Lea and the other actress were in the room. Lea had her hair up in curlers and may have just come from makeup. The dark-haired beauty was the one making waves in the room—that is until the projector started to roll. I watched both their scenes and Lea just jumped off the screen—you couldn’t take your eyes off her, she was so attractive. The other actress just faded into the background of the scenes she was in. This is why they do screen tests. Mysterious things happen when you get people up there on the big screen.
The other actress? It was Courteney Cox, who went on to great entertainment success, largely in television. The big screen tests you, and it was testing me with all the changes that were coming to our production methods.
There is a term in motion picture making called the “China Girl.” In earlier days when movies were still shot in black-and-white, every batch of film negative that was sent to the lab for printing had a reference frame or two attached of a white porcelain figure that resembled a lady’s head. It was called a China Girl not because she was Chinese, but because the sculpted head was made out of a kind of china and it was in the form of a girl. The China Girl usually lay on a piece of black velvet, the two together displaying both pure white and absolute black, allowing cinematographers to easily judge the contrast quality of their prints. This image always represented for me the craft that was at the base of what we were doing. Later, it was a few frames of a female model’s face shot in color that was called a “Girl Head.” If the laboratory screwed up the color in printing from the negatives, it would be easy to see because cameramen had the control Girl Head back at the studio to compare it with.
This sort of Norman Rockwell view of filmmaking as a craft had been evident in the artwork I had seen at the Ranch. Now the world of model makers building rocket ships and “powder men” blowing them up was dying. The craft world itself was blowing up. By about 1987, movie production had changed with the advent of digital. The first sign of this was when it became possible to scan a film into a digital format, manipulate it in a computer, and scan it out again to film for theatrical projection. This simple technical feat would revolutionize filmmaking. The China Girl and Girl Head were replaced with the image of a gray square that could be read by a densitometer.
It took five to seven years to complete, but by the release of Jurassic Park in 1993, the transition was well on its way, and a film-based industry that was about a hundred years old started to collapse. Even the venerable Kodak itself would soon collapse.
Nothing quite like this had ever happened before, but the audience didn’t notice and Hollywood didn’t yet see the implications. They didn’t realize that the creatures in Jurassic Park were essentially ones and zeros and that the movie business had changed forever.
Even the introduction of sound back in 1929 cannot compare with what would eventually happen to the world of motion pictures. It was painful and it turned employees’ lives upside down, even forcing Oscar-winning workers into an early retirement. Yet, in my view, it was all positive.
Film to me has always been a business, a craft, and an art, in that order. While it aspires to produce art and often does, it is a business at its core. It takes a lot of investment capital to make a Hollywood film. I recently read an interview with a studio head who said, “There are not a lot of entities in the world that can throw $200 million into a movie project, but we can. That is our competitive advantage.”
Hollywood has always sought a competitive advantage. When television threatened it, the movies went to wide screen, or 3-D, or even R-rated. I remember when Francis Coppola invested in something called Smell-O-Vision!
As the technology of the movie craft changes, so do the movies we make. The two are intimately bound together. Cinema follows a developmental path that straddles commerce and technology. It always has. When sound came in, it changed movies––their art was now a completely different art. The high art reached in the great silent films was gone. No one wanted to make or see new silent films anymore, no matter how great. So much for the art. Changing technology has always ruled this art form.
The invention of the typewriter didn’t fundamentally change writing from the days of the pencil, but the introduction of sound did change movies. I would argue that the introduction of digital changed movies again like never before.
Digital cinema makes possible nonexistent, but realistic-looking, worlds. This is opposed to the film camera, which records the real world. The camera simply captures data that can be read back in a controlled way. The images are sequenced on a strip of celluloid, controlled by a sprocket drive and a motor. It is essentially a storage medium with a display, yet it is nonlinear. Images can be rearranged at any point in the time sequence of the stored data of film. We called this “film editing,” and for years that was how I made my living.
Historically, the very first projected images were lantern slides painted by artists. Now we are returning to the artists’ controlling the images with their hands. They are once again painting in movies, except this time it is from a digital paint box. How ironic that this technology should return us to our beginnings with moving images. Yet, “those wonderful people out there in the dark,” as Norma Desmond referred to them, they haven’t changed. They still want the emotional stories that I saw depicted above the fireplace at the Ranch in Peach Crop.