British Cinematographer
Rocky
Balboa ascending the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in
Rocky,
Danny Torrance riding his tricycle through the cavernous halls of the
Overlook Hotel in The Shining,
Imperial storm troopers rocketing between trees on the forest moon of
Endor in Star Wars: Episode VI –
Return of the Jedi.
What
do these movie moments have in common? They were all filmed on the
Steadicam® and all shot by the Steadicam’s inventor, Garrett
Brown.
The
Steadicam introduced a brand new vocabulary of camera movement into
motion pictures and won Brown his first Academy Award in 1978. In
1985, the Washington Post,
with only a slight hint of hyperbole, described the Steadicam as “the
biggest thing since Technicolor”.
Yet
the Steadicam was only the beginning of Brown’s innovations in
camera-control technology. DiveCam put the viewer beside Olympic
divers from their leap off the springboard to their plunge into the
pool. And the MobyCam moved the audience underneath the water in sync
with the athletes in competitive swimming events. In 2006, Brown
received another Academy Award for Scientific and Technical
Achievement for SkyCam, the aerial camera system which has become a
staple of sports stadium broadcasts.
Looking
at Brown’s early career, you would hardly imagine that he would
revolutionise cinematography. He left college to pursue a calling in
folk singing, even recording for MGM, but quit when The Beatles came
along, he quips. With no job skills he ended up despairingly selling
VWs. “I'd always loved movies and my wife agreed to keep working
while I learned moviemaking by reading all the outdated film books in
the Philly library,” he says.
Fast
forward through bit-part employment as agency copywriter, commercial
director and production start-up, complete with an 800lb ‘Fearless
Panoram’ dolly to move his Bolex.
The
Eureka moment has passed into legend. Fed-up with the cumbersome
Fearless, Brown launched a project to isolate his handheld self from
the camera. In 1972, he began experiments and had a functional object
a year later.
“Even
my big early versions worked astonishingly well, even though they
were way too clumsy and burdensome to be commercially successful,”
he recalls. “I finally went into a hotel for a week and looked at
all the drawings over and over and forced myself to come up with a
smaller, lighter version that could actually handle 35mm movie
cameras. And the marvellous result was that, unlike most inventions,
mine could be demonstrated without giving away how it worked. I could
show the results — a reel of impossible shots — and just blow
away anybody in Hollywood who knew what was possible and what wasn't,
but give them no clue how it was done.”
The
demo reel included shots of a friend swimming the length of a pool
and his wife (then girlfriend) running across a park and up and down
Philly Art Museum steps. Rocky
director John Avildsen got hold of a copy and called Brown up to
recreate the scene with Sylvester Stallone. The same year, 1975,
Brown was hired to shoot Steadicam scenes in Bound For
Glory for Hal Ashby and Marathon
Man for John Schlesinger.
Having
devised the Steadicam as a humble means to “rid himself of my big
crusty old dolly”, Brown confesses to being astounded by his
invention's present ubiquity and usefulness.
The
somewhat rigid language of old linear moves, literally ‘on rails’,
has given way, he admits, to a flowing vernacular “that transports
movie narratives and more closely resembles the way humans - with our
astonishing internal stabilisers - actually perceive our lives.”
Tracking
shots were part of the lexicon of cinema long before 1975 of course.
Directors like Orson Welles and the classic three and half minute
opening sequence to Touch Of Evil
(1958) or Alfred Hitchcock's experimental black comedy Rope
(1948) composed of several single 10-minute film reels, have always
sought to push the boundaries of cinematic time and space.
The
Steadicam though freed the cinematographer to plot ever more complex
and fluid compositions.
“My
wife will nudge me in the middle of a particularly great Steadicam
shot and it's still a thrill,” says Brown. “There are so many
brilliant practitioners and it truly is an instrument, rather than
just a stabiliser. It’s simply an elegant way to move an object in
space, with a mass and weightlessness that could never be
accomplished by hand. You guide it with your fingertips and the
result is a really graceful, beautiful move. At its best, it's like a
ballet for the lens. Of course it’s not curing cancer or ending
WWII, but it's still extraordinarily useful and an immense amount of
fun.”
A
perfect example of immersive film-making (from Steadicam operator
Larry McConkey) is the three-minute shot in Martin Scorsese’s
Goodfellas (1990) in
which Ray Liotta’s mobster leads his date into a nightclub through
the exclusive back entrance, along winding corridors, through a busy
kitchen and to a VIP table. While showcasing the supreme command
Scorsese has over cinematic technique, the shot also invites the
audience into the continuous hustle and bustle of the mobster's
world.
Feature-length
films like Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002)
have been filmed in one take, choreographed (after having to restart
three times) by DP and Steadicam operator Tillman Büttner to render
the finished piece more like a ballet.
“I
can’t say I am necessarily enthralled with ‘one-ers’ unless
they’re both sensible and valuable – nobody pays any attention to
cuts, after all,” says Brown. “But the freedom to get the lens
exactly where it’s wanted, to carry on up steps and over doorways
in French curves that would drive a dolly crew berserk, remains
completely seductive.”
There
are so many great Steadicam shots, so asking Brown to select a
personal top ten is like asking someone to choose which child they
prefer. “I’ve just re-watched Joe Wright’s Pride And
Prejudice (2005) and Simon Baker
made some ravishingly beautiful and narratively perfect Steadicam
sequences,” he says. “And The Revenant
(2015) was astoundingly vital and gripping. Alejandro Iñárritu
designed, and Scotty Sakamoto operated, some of my favourite
sequences of all time.”
Brown,
a member of American Society of Cinematographers, contributed to
numerous features including Reds (1981),
One From The Heart (1981),
The King of Comedy (1982),
Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom
(1984), Casino (1995)
and Bulworth (1998)
before retiring from shooting in 2004 to concentrate on refining an
arsenal of camera stabilisation supports for which he holds 50
patents. FlyCam is a high-speed point-to-point system; GoCam is a
speedy miniature rail system and SuperFlyCam is an ultra light 35mm
wire-borne flyer.
Brown's
most recently released invention and his all-time favourite, was not
however a commercial success. Tango is a miniature crane perched on a
Steadicam arm that permits floor-to-ceiling shooting and
“marvellously smooth” traverses. “You stroll along, panning and
tilting with a camera-less ‘master’ sled in one hand and a
pantographically controlled ‘slave’ sled on the far end, and the
little lightweight camera perfectly follows your intended moves,”
he describes.
“In
the old days I used to take out all of my camera inventions and shoot
impressively with them to jump-start sales. Since I retired from
shooting, unhappily there has been no champion for Tango. However,
I’m confident it will be revived eventually. It’s too good and
too exciting and is huge fun to operate.”
When
Brown started out, the technology for smooth camera movement were
dollies, cranes and camera cars, all land bound. “Aerials [via
helicopter] came with fierce propwash and needed lots of space,” he
says. “Now, gyro technology lets even minuscule platforms yield
eerily smooth shots; and though much of the operating is ‘legato’
to say the least, and thus a bit dreamlike, that will certainly
improve.”
Filmmaking
via drone has taken Hollywood by storm, much in the way Steadicam
once did. Does Brown think UAVs might also affect the language of
cinema in time?
“Humans
unconsciously ‘operate’ their eyeballs with fierce authority, so
even though drones may show us startling vistas, their ‘effect’
is often relatively druggy and tame,” he says. “Eventually pilots
and operators will acquire the rapid and precise panning/tilting
chops that are a given with Steadicam, and failsafe drones will
finally come into their own as narrative tools.”
Brown
believes that gyro-stabilising and remote-control, and even
autonomously operating technology, are here to stay and will only
become more and more astounding “until of course, we take it all
for granted!” But he's savvy enough to realise that even Skycam
will eventually be displaced “by harmless clouds of nearly
invisible drones that swarm around football squads, each assigned to
a hapless player whose only defence will be a badminton racquet!”
Brown
still has several unreleased inventions, which may yet revolutionise
Steadicam operation and continue to provide the most visceral control
of both moves and framing.
“I
learned long ago to only attempt what I personally want. What still
interests me are the fundamentals – how we perceive moving images,
for example. The externals of camera manipulation, rather than the
internal particulars. I also think we should help people understand
that inventing is something that almost any of us might do. You don’t
necessarily have to be a technical soul; you just have to really want
something and to be motivated enough to chase it with a little money
and a lot of thought.”
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