EAST vs. WEST

While roaming the streaming-verse over the holidays, I came upon a couple of TV shows I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.  Watching them now was certainly a different experience, but what really struck me was how representative they were of the time and place in which they were shot.

            Have a gander at the clips below.  I can’t think of two more divergent approaches in look and texture to the same subject.  N.Y.P.D. – originated on 16mm film – is like the city in which it’s set: Dark, edgy and filled with implied threats.  The streets are dirty, the locations cheap and shoddy.  The immediacy created by these choices is bolstered by characters who look like they just crawled from under a rock – or out of a bottle.  Hitting the air in 1968, it lasted only two seasons.  Even with the state of the world back then, it was probably too grim and realistic for most people.

            The seven-season run of Adam 12, on the other hand, is very much like Los Angeles – slick, sunny and airy.  The police cars are always clean, the crisply tailored cops tanned and fit.  While N.Y.P.D. is raucously documentary in form, its 35mm cousin is stodgy, studio-bound and over-lit.  I’ll have more to say about differing East and West Coast shooting styles in a later post.  For this case however, they’re so pronounced you could almost imagine someone running up Amsterdam Avenue with an Arri S while the grips in Hollywood were getting hernias moving Mitchell BNC’s around. 

            Both series made lasting impressions upon my ten-year-old mind.  Now, after spending nearly half of my life in each city, I’ve found that neither one was far off the mark.

            Credit must be given to the cinematographers who turned what was on the page into physical reality.  For N.Y.P.D., there was George Silano, Harvey Genkins and J. Burgi Contner, ASC.  Adam 12 was photographed by F. Bud Mautino, Duke Callaghan, Brick Marquard, ASC, Jerry Sims, Lloyd Ahearn, Sr., ASC, Alric Edens, ASC, Walter Strenge, ASC, Emil Oster, ASC and Enzo Martinelli, ASC.  It’s interesting that such a wide array of cameramen were able to maintain such a consistent look over time.  But hey, that’s just part of what we do, isn’t it?

            A little inside cinematography trivia, la familia-style:

            J. Burgi Contner, ASC is the father of director James A. Contner, who several years ago graciously donated Gregg Toland’s Mitchell camera to the ASC Museum.  It’s the exact one Toland used to shoot Citizen Kane, among many other studio-era classics.

            And Alan Crosland, Jr., who directed the Adam 12 episode that follows the clip below, was the son of the man who directed the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927; Hal Mohr, ASC).