EVERY FRAME A REMBRANDT ART AND PRACTICE OF CINEMATOGRAPHY Andrew Laszlo, A.S.C. with additional material by Andrew Quicke Focal Press An Imprint of Elsevier Boston Oxford Auckland Johannesburg Melbourne New Delhi Focal Press is an imprint of Elsevier Copyright © 2000 Butterworth-Heinemann (Si A member of the Reed Elsevier group All rights reserved. All trademarks found herein are property of their respective owners. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo­ copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier's Science and Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK. Phone: (44) 1865 843830, Fax: (44) 1865 853333, e-mail: [email protected]. You may also complete your request on-line via the Elsevier homepage: http://www.elsevier.com by selecting "Customer Support" and then "Obtaining Permissions". 0 Recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, Elsevier prints its books on acid-free paper whenever possible. GLOBAL E*sev*er suPPorts me efforts of American Forests and the Global ReLeaf REPEAT program in its campaign for the betterment of trees, forests, and our environment. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Laszlo, Andrew, 1926- Every frame a Rembrandt: art and practice of cinematography / Andrew Laszlo, with Andrew Quicke. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-0-240-80399-9 ISBN-10: 0-240-80399-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Cinematography. I. Quicke, Andrew. II. Title. TR850.L38 2000 778.5—dc21 ISBN-13: 978-0-240-80399-9 99-058083 ISBN-10: 0-240-80399-X British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The publisher offers special discounts on bulk orders of this book. For information, please contact: Manager of Special Sales Butterworth-Heinemann 225 Wildwood Avenue Woburn, MA 01801-2041 Tel: 781-904-2500 Fax: 781-904-2620 For information on all Focal Press publications available, contact our World Wide Web home page at: http: / /www.focalpress.com 10 9 8 765 Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS About the Author vii Foreword BY JOHN MASON ix Preface BY ANDREW QUICKE xiii Introduction xv CHAPTER i Southern Comfort 1 CHAPTER 2 The Warriors 53 CHAPTER 3 First Blood 93 CHAPTER 4 Streets of Fire 147 CHAPTER 5 Inner space 189 Glossary 233 Filmography of Andrew Laszlo, A.S.C. Index 249 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Andrew Laszlo's career in film and television spans nearly fifty years, from the original Phil Silvers Show (''Sergeant Bilko") (1954-1958) to Walt Disney Pictures' Newsies (1992). Mr. Laszlo came to the United States in 1947 as an emigrant from Hungary where he started his motion picture career as an apprentice at the Motion Picture Studios of Budapest. He served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps as a cameraman from 1950 to 1952, and after being honorably discharged from the Service, worked in many jobs allied with photography and the entertainment industry In connection with his professional activi­ ties, he has traveled extensively throughout the world. He is a member of The International Cinematographers Guild, The Direc­ tors Guild of America, The American Society of Cinematogra­ phers, and The Motion Picture Academy, and has served two terms as Governor of The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He received Emmy nominations for The Man without a Country in 1973 and Shogun in 1980. In addition to his activities in motion pictures, Mr. Laszlo lec­ tures extensively at such institutions as Dartmouth College, New York University, The American Film Institute, and is an Adjunct Professor at Montana State University, Bozeman. In addition to vii viii Every Frame a Rembrandt his lecturing in the United States, he has given seminars for indus­ try professionals as well as future filmmakers around the world. Mr. Laszlo's hobbies include, quite naturally, photography, writing, flying, wood- and metal-working, and above all, fly-fish­ ing. He lives with his wife on Long Island, New York. FOREWORD It gives me great pleasure to write this foreword to Andy Laszlo's book on the art, craft, and experience of cinematography It will take only a few turns through the pages of this wonderful book to impress readers with Andy's abundant talents as a creator of mov­ ing images designed for theatrical presentation and television and with his skill as a problem solver and teacher. I remember my first contact with Andy on the set of Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) on the historic MGM lot in the mid-eighties. I was beginning my career as a sales rep for Kodak in Hollywood with responsibilities to call on feature film directors of photography I asked Andy about setting exposures, and he pulled out of his ditty bag an exposure calculator he had customized that elegantly and accu­ rately displayed the variables of exposure, which included film stock speed, T-stop calibrations, shutter speed, and so on. He then proceeded to give me a tutorial on how this ingenious system worked. He was always inventing new ways and tools to improve things or to solve problems on the set, and he never tired of shar­ ing his insights and experiences with others. Every Frame a Rembrandt is a splendid distillation of Andy's more than fifty years as a cinematographer and of his work with Kodak for the past decade. In the early nineties Kodak launched a worldwide program for film school students called, appropri- ix x Every Frame a Rembrandt ately enough, the Kodak Worldwide Student Program. One of the key components of this effort was a seminar called Visiting Artists, which featured Andy talking about the art of image cre­ ation and illustrating this concept from his rich inventory of experiences in feature films, television, commercial production, and documentary. Andy's work on numerous high-profile fea­ ture films is well known; not as well known but just as significant is his work in other fields. Andy traveled with Ed Sullivan to film one of the first (if not the first) interviews with Fidel Castro after Batista was ousted in Cuba. Andy was on the field at Shea Sta­ dium as director of photography when The Beatles took America by storm at the legendary concert there in the early sixties. In 1963 he filmed one of the early truly independent films, One Potato, Two Potato, a film about race relations that was well ahead of its time. His experiences have all added immeasurable richness to Kodak's Visiting Artists Program, which has been presented to hundreds of film school students at dozens of colleges and universities around the world. Andy Laszlo "the man" is even more impressive than his achievements. His story represents many of the qualities and virtues we as a nation most admire and would want others to model. Andy came to this country from Hungary by way of Ger­ many right after World War II, arriving in New York in January 1947. He taught himself photography in Hungary, but the motion picture situation in Budapest after the war was practically bank­ rupt, so he came to America to start a new life and career. He was penniless, and he didn't have much more going for himself be­ yond his desire and dreams. In 1950 he was the first draftee from New York taken for the Korean War, and he essentially learned photography while in Army service during that conflict. By the mid-fifties he was shooting television films in New York—and the rest is history. The story of Andy Laszlo is the story of a person who fought hard for what he believed in and gave everything to succeed. He mastered his craft and, throughout a most distinguished career, was able to make worthwhile contributions to the art of moving Foreword xi images. He is loyal and generous, and Every Frame a Rembrandt and the Visiting Artists Program both represent his characteristic way of giving something in return for a life and industry nobly served. John Mason Manager Kodak Student and Emerging Programs, United States and Canada PREFACE The first movie I helped to direct took place on the island of Cyprus in 1960.1 was lucky enough to be working for Peter Mon- tagnon, who later made the famed documentary series Civilisation (1968) and The Heart of the Dragon (1985). He was making a 16mm documentary film about working in the Royal Air Force. That summer we found that freelance cameramen were hard to find, and we ended up hiring a wonderful director of photography who had been prominent in silent cinema in the twenties. I was naturally nervous when I directed my first sequence, but he was very helpful. We had dinner together every night and talked about movie-making. Listening to him was an education; I learned a great deal from his stories and the way he set about making a movie. I never found a textbook that matched his ability to convey what making movies was really like. Thirty years later, after I had directed film in thirty-three dif­ ferent countries, I retired from the industry to teach motion pic­ ture production at the university level. In 19951 was lucky enough to meet a very distinguished director of photography at the Kodak Visiting Artists seminar at Regent University Graduate School of Cinema-Television. Andrew Laszlo had more than knowledge, he had a brilliant way of imparting it. Though a book can never be the same as a live seminar, I felt sure that some of his xiii xiv Every Frame a Rembrandt wisdom could be transferred to the printed page, so I went to Long Island to try and persuade him that a book was possible.