So many wonderfully photographed films have been released over the years, it’s easy to forget that they sometimes have their flaws, too. Perhaps the most common example, especially among movies made prior to the 1970’s, is the mixing within the same scene of shots done on location and poorly-matched ones captured on a soundstage.
You know exactly the type I mean. You’re watching a perfectly normal-looking day\exterior placed at some real-world spot, when suddenly you’re thrown for a loop as the director cuts to a medium shot or close-up that – having been executed indoors – appears radically different from what you’ve seen thus far. The effect is somewhat more jarring in color than in black-and- white, but both violate the cardinal rule of cinematography. Of course, the reasons why this might occasionally happen are obvious: After-the-fact writing, performance or budget changes, primarily. But I can’t for the life of me understand why this practice remained so widely acceptable for so long. Some might say the average viewer never notices the anomalies. Nonsense! I know plenty of average viewers and they’ve been commenting to me about this gaffe for years.
That it was especially prevalent during the studio era makes it all the more an impenetrable mystery. Does anyone mean to tell me that after hauling the entire operation out to Monument Valley for one of his westerns, John Ford couldn’t bring himself to shoot the close-ups at the same time he did his wide shots? And, if he so elected, that he couldn’t use the Fox backlot to recreate the same conditions at another time? Or that Hitchcock couldn’t do the same for the New York City portions of North by Northwest? Take a look at the early sequence in Goldfinger that occurs by the pool at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. The mis-matches between location and studio shots are egregious, yet they couldn’t have been about penny-pinching. The movie was the fourth in an enormously successful series and went on to earn nearly $600M in today’s dollars. In terms of live-action indulgences, they could’ve done anything they wanted!
I’m not knocking any of these filmmakers; they had lots of co-conspirators, so the prevalence of this scourge seems to prove a conspiracy at a much higher level. But having done countless remedial and post-production pick-up shots of my own, I know how easy it can be to preserve the original look. I guess it’s just my cinematographer’s nature doing the talking here…the part of me that wants to make the visuals as precisely correct as possible.
And when you get down to it, supporting the story rather than calling attention to it is a big part of what we’re paid to do, isn’t it?
MERRY CHRISTMAS, everyone…!
It particularly annoys me in “The Quiet Man”, which has so much wonderful photography in Ireland, and many scenes are covered on location, both wide and close… and then you have sequences like the horse race with a lot of rear-projection backgrounds, and I’m not talking about close shots of the riders. Keep in mind that the first production-friendly field sound recorder, the Nagra III, came out in 1958 and the industry itself gradually switched to magnetic tape in the mid-1950s, so recording sound on a film production before that involved a large truck. Between that and union rules about location rates (even if shooting in the studio ranches, workers had to report to the studio lot and get on a bus, and were on the clock from that moment), directors were encouraged to shoot whatever they could back on the lot. (but I also think there was some laziness involved, many directors preferred the comfort of a soundstage working 9 to 5.) David Lean’s landscape movies certainly benefitted from being all shot on location!
As you say, the mismatches in lighting make the process shots even more annoying. Many of the rear-projection shots in “The Quiet Man” are too dark in the background, too lit in the foreground. Perhaps to some degree, the budget for lighting a rear-projection stage was limiting with too many rules in order to keep stray light off of the screen if it were too small and close to the foreground actors. And the push to glamorize actors even if it meant not matching the location light was also a factor.
It seemed very common in Westerns, when when after riding
on the dusty trails, through the sage brush, and past the distant mountains,
the cowboys settle down and take camp for the night.
They are suddenly delivered to a sound stage and while sitting
around a campfire, there arises on a screen, the painted on sky, saquaro
cactus, and distant mountains that never match the actual
mountains. My excitement for the movie I’m watching usually
disappears at this point.
Merry Christmas Richard!
Thank you, Ken. And a very Merry Christmas to you and yours, as well…!