The Magnificent Ambersons.

“It’s only history,” Jack Valenti is reported to have said when allowing scholars access to MPAA files. (1) After studying Hollywood for over thirty years, I should be used to the ways in which trade journalists (and some critics) forget or ignore historical precedents in moviemaking. But I still get bug-eyed when I encounter something like the Variety piece on TV director Tommy Schlamme (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip).

The subhead tells us that this DGA nominee is known for his “hallway shots.” That gets my interest.

I lose interest fast. The writer tells us that Schlamme

developed the “walk and talk” on Sports Night and then mastered it on The West Wing.

The shot—which features two or more actors moving from one location to another on the set, often from one office to another via a hallway—has become a Schlamme signature.

The first sentence could be read as saying that Schlamme invented the walk-and-talk. Since I spent a little time studying this technique in The Way Hollywood Tells It, my inner film historian cries out, Aarrgh. Long before Sports Night (aired 1998-2000) and The West Wing (1999-2006), movies were developing such bravura shots.

The oblique view

In the prototypical walk-and-talk, two or more characters advance, and the camera tracks along, keeping them centered as they move through the environment. Such shots are quite uncommon in the silent cinema, but they emerge in 1930s films from many countries.

They were truly “signature shots” for Max Ophuls and the lesser-known Erik Charell. In Charell’s captivating The Congress Dances (1931) Lillian Harvey sings while a carriage takes her through an entire town and into the country, all in flowing tracking shots. Call it a ride-and-sing.

If that’s not as pure an instance as you’d like, we can find nice ones during a street scene of The Thin Man (1934). A more somber example occurs in Mizoguchi Kenji’s Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), with the camera in a river bed angled upward at the couple it follows.

Usually such traveling shots from the 1930s and 1940s are shot obliquely to the actors. That is, the performers are seen in a ¾ view, and they walk along a diagonal path with respect to the frame edges; the camera moves on a similar trajectory. Sound cameras were mounted on dollies that usually ran on tracks. Framing the actors head-on raised problems with this gear. Performers couldn’t walk smoothly if they were stepping within rails, and there was a risk that the rails in the distance might appear in the frame. It was simpler to set the camera at an oblique angle so that actors could walk unimpeded and the tracks wouldn’t be seen. Directors continued to use this framing into the 1950s, as in Welles’ Othello (1952) and Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957). Both are unusually long takes; in the second, poor Gene Barry seems to be panting to keep up with the other men.

Back off

Today’s walk-and-talk is more likely to be a head-on framing, with the camera retreating from the actors. (More rarely, it dogs them from behind.) With a retreating Steadicam, you don’t have to worry about glimpsing the ground or floor behind the actors, in the distance, since there are no track rails to be exposed. Again, though, we have some precedents, most famously the splendid camera movements, evidently executed with a crane, in the ball sequences of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), when George and Lucy stroll through the party.

When location shooting became more common in the 1940s and 1950s, cameras could be supported on more versatile dollies that didn’t require track rails, and these reverse-tracking shots become a bit more common. Kubrick, highly influenced by Welles and Ophuls, captured his officers striding through the trenches of Paths of Glory (1957). Vincent LoBrutto’s information-packed book (2) tells us that Kubrick’s dolly rolled backward on the planks that the actors walked on (authentic details, as boards were indeed used in the muddy trenches). Godard’s long traveling through the office lobby in Breathless (1960) was shot from a wheelchair.

Such head-on (and tails-on) shots can be found in several films well into the 1970s, as in Arthur Hiller’s The Hospital (1970). In fact, hospitals, police stations, and other sprawling institutional spaces seem to invite this approach.

By the 1980s, these shots proliferate in American films largely because the Steadicam makes them easy. One famous example is De Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), which follows the drunken Peter Fallow through a hotel as he picks up and drops off many other characters.

Today such shots are very common in both high- and low-budget films. Schlamme’s “signature” device seems to be in pretty wide circulation. At best it’s a convention, at worst a cliché.

They’re called actors; let them perform action

I argue in The Way Hollywood Tells It that walk-and-talk is one of two principal staging techniques of contemporary Hollywood. The other, usually called stand-and-deliver, plants the characters facing one another and simply cuts from one to the other. The scene is built primarily out of singles (shots of only one actor) or over-the-shoulder framings. Here’s a typically static dialogue scene from The Matrix Revolutions (2003).

Both stand-and-deliver and walk-and-talk began in the studio era, decades ago, but then there were other options as well. Directors cultivated smooth, unobtrusive blocking tactics that moved characters in ways that reflected the developing scene. The actors had to perform with their whole bodies, and bits of business motivated them to circulate through the setting and turn toward or away from the camera. One example given earlier on this blog is from Mildred Pierce; here’s another, from the program picture Homicide (1949).

Detective Michael Landers has a hunch that the purported suicide of a former sailor is really murder. He has to persuade Captain Mooney to let him pursue some leads out of his jurisdiction. Today this might be played out in a stand-and-deliver session, with both men seated and shot/ reverse-shot cutting carrying the scene. But the director Felix Jacoves decides to let his actors earn their money through ensemble staging, not merely line readings. Here are just three shots from the middle of the scene that illustrate my point.

Landers stands at Mooney’s desk and gets a refusal. As he turns away to the left, Mooney walks to the rear files to put the papers away.

As they’re retreating to the opposite ends of the screen, Landers’ partner Boylan, who’s been offscreen for this phase of the scene, strides into the center and pauses at the door. The result of this choreography is both a balanced three-point composition and a chance to let us observe Boylan’s skeptical reaction to Landers’ next plea.

The camera tracks in as Landers approaches Mooney. Boylan shifts closer as well. What seems somewhat stagy as we analyze it doesn’t look obtrusive on the screen, because we’re following Landers’ arguments and watching the older men’s reactions. The closer framing and the position of the men, now face to face rather than separated by a desk, raises the dramatic pressure. As Landers pauses, Mooney folds his arms—a simple piece of body language that lets us know he’s still resisting.

Now a cut to Mooney, in an OTS framing, stresses his continued resistance as he tells Landers off, and a reverse shot gives Landers’ angry reaction.

Interrupting the sustained take, the shot/ reverse shot cuts have gained more emphasis than if they were part of a string of OTS shots. Jacoves has saved his cuts and closer views for a moment that raises the stakes visually as well as dramatically.

I’m not claiming that this is a brilliant stretch of cinema. (But you have to like a plot in which the hero defeats the killer by denying him access to insulin.) It’s just that the sequence activates, in a way that directors once took for granted, aspects of film art that we don’t find too often nowadays. Once you didn’t have to choose between Steadicam logistics and static dialogue; there is a very wide middle ground if you’re willing to move actors around the set and give them some body language and prop work. No need for a walk-and-talk here.

Schema and revision

The Variety article explains that Schlamme utilizes his long walk-and-talks to save time and money. But directors in the studio era shot their fully elaborated scenes like that in Homicide to be economical as well. If actors know their lines and hit their marks, playing out pages of dialogue in a few sustained setups can be very efficient; the Homicide full shot consumes 45 seconds. I’d argue that most contemporary directors have never learned to stage scenes this way. It’s a lost skill set. I make the case in more detail in Figures Traced in Light and The Way Hollywood Tells It.

To some extent, however, another skill set has emerged. Some walk-and-talks in The West Wing and other programs have an extra feature that the Variety writer and I haven’t mentioned. Often character A and B are walking toward us down the corridor, then B drifts off and C catches up with A. A and C walk for a while, then A peels off and C picks up somebody else, and so on. This approach is suited to multiple-protagonist dramas. You can show the plotlines crossing and separating.

I’m no TV historian, but I think that this technique showed up on St. Elsewhere (1982-1988), and it’s definitely on display in ER (1994-). Hospitals again. I think we also find this mingling/ separating choreography in contemporary film, but I can’t recall many examples in earlier eras. You could argue that one of the shots in the Ambersons’ ballroom does this, though I don’t think it’s a pure instance. (The principle of overlapping character actions is at work in many Renoir films, most famously in the final party melee in Rules of the Game, but Renoir doesn’t employ what we’re calling a walk-and-talk.) Did movies pick up this intertwined walk-and-talk from TV or vice-versa? I don’t know. If you do, drop me a line!

In On the History of Film Style and Figures Traced in Light, I argue that stylistic change in filmmaking often follows a logic of what art historian E. H. Gombrich calls schema and revision. (3) A pattern or practice becomes standardized, but then creators extend it to new situations or find new possibilities in it, and they modify it.

Camera movements have long been used to link characters. For instance, when Nick Charles circulates drinks in The Thin Man, Van Dyke tracks leftward to follow him from guest to guest.

So maybe in the 1980s and 1990s, when ensemble stories had to balance attention among several major characters, directors blended the multiple-interaction aspect of lateral camera movements with the schema of the advancing walk-and-talk. The result makes characters move in and out of each others’ orbits along a single trajectory. Whoever came up with this device, I’d speculate that it arose from the realization that the backing-up walk-and-talk could be repurposed for dramas following the fates of several protagonists.

It’s only history, but it matters if we want to understand stylistic continuity and change.

(1) Thanks to Richard Maltby for passing this along.

(2) Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Fine, 1997), 141-142.

(3) E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, N. J. Princeton University Press, 1960), especially Chapter III.

After the Wedding.

Can’t stop bloggin’ about those blonde, smørrebrød-loving Nordics. Why?

Well, there’s news. First, two Danish films have been nominated for Academy Awards. Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding (I talk a bit about it here) is up for best foreign-language film, and Søren Pilmark’s Helmer and Son is nominated for best short. You can read more at the Danish Film Institute site, and stock up on Carlsberg or Tuborg to cheer them on Oscar night.

Second, the new English-language issue of the Danish Film Institute’s magazine Film is online here, as a pdf. It’s a must for von Trier fanatics, with lots on The Boss of It All. I also have an essay in it (pp. 16-19).

Third, Thomas Christensen, a Boss of It All at the Danish Film Archive and a graduate of our UW film program, alerted me to YouTube video from a Danish band, Phonovectra. It swipes—sorry, appropriates—Dreyer’s classic short film They Caught the Ferry.

Three Kings (1999).

DB here:

Why, asks Sharon Waxman in the New York Times, have the much-touted directors of the 1990s slowed their output so drastically? Kimberly Peirce released Boys Don’t Cry in 1999; her second film, Stop-Loss, will come out this spring. Darren Aronofsky followed Requiem for a Dream (2000) with The Fountain, which hit screens last fall. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love is over four years old. David O. Russell, Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Baz Luhrmann, and several others of their generation have, Waxman points out, “taken long hiatuses before stepping back up to the plate.”

Immediately, exceptions spring to mind. Some filmmakers who built their careers in the 90s are pretty prolific. Soderbergh is the prime instance; he sometimes releases two movies a year. Christopher Nolan has given us several one-two punches: Memento in 2000 and Insomnia in 2002, Batman Begins in 2005 and The Prestige in 2006. James Mangold is now doing postproduction on 3:10 to Yuma, his seventh movie since 1995. Kent Jones reminds me that Richard Linklater has finished twelve features in under 16 years!

Still, the slow pace of some heralded filmmakers is noteworthy. Waxman’s explanations, culled from interviews with Hollywood cognoscenti, intrigue me. Probably no one explanation will provide the answer, but it’s worth thinking about the many forces at work. I’ll run through Waxman’s five main points, commenting on each. Then I’ll toss in a few of my own.

1. Filmmakers undergo closer scrutiny and quicker judgments than at earlier times. Critics, audiences, and studios pounce on every failure, and with investments becoming more precarious, a single weak showing can push the director down the list.

Seems plausible to me, given the dumping of Shyamalan after Lady in the Water. Shyamalan is ambitious in his storytelling aims, trying to turn genre movies into art movies/ event movies à la Kubrick. Unlike Kubrick, he’s not winning a secure place as a person you want to be in business with. Strange as it sounds, a director who has earned over a billion dollars at the global box office is making the rounds trying to sell his newest idea.

2. Filmmakers are pressured to write lucrative scripts rather than direct questionable projects, or to direct sure-fire franchise hits (e.g., Bryan Singer and Superman and X-Men).

Partly true. But a producer friend commented to me that a lot of indie filmmakers whom he meets sincerely want to direct big films. Bryan Singer, who admires Spielberg, hasn’t made a secret of his desire to be a mainstream filmmaker. Aronofsky was long involved with Frank Miller on a new Batman, and Karyn Kusama moved from Girlfight (2000) to Aeon Flux (2005).

3. An overindulgent studio culture lacks strong executives who would challenge precocious filmmakers to extend themselves.

Put aside the fact that this explanation is somewhat opposite to the previous one. It’s hard to claim that today’s executives are too complaisant; surely one reason for the delays in output is resistance from the studios’ to directors’ ideas. If executives might be reluctant to derail a project, certainly stars are willing to do so. Once a picture enters production, however, it is more difficult for today’s executives to curtail the pricey directors to the extent that classic studio-era moguls could. The director’s demand for final cut, for instance, is still a powerful chip in the game.

4. The 90s directors might not be capable of dealing with the big issues of a post-9/11 world. Waxman writes: “Perhaps Quentin Tarantino, child of the video culture, feels at a loss when faced with the war in Iraq and global terrorism.”

It might be too early, though, for filmmakers to come to an initial understanding of this ongoing crisis. The major films treating Vietnam appeared some years after we pulled out: Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and so on. Moreover, not all films need to deal with big issues, at least directly. What aspects of American politics did Pulp Fiction and Memento address?

5. There’s no shared creative community, in which filmmakers help and compete with one another. Three currently successful directors from Mexico, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro, and Alfonso Cuaron exemplify how a cadre of friends can offer frank criticism and spur one another on.

Oddly enough, James Mottram’s book The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood maintains that just this sort of community exists among several 90s directors. The book opens with a meeting of the Pizza Knights, a cadre of young filmmakers who gather every month to watch 70s classics. The group includes Fincher, Jonze, Anderson, Peirce, and Payne (p. xv)—the very directors whom Waxman lists as surprisingly unproductive. They may not bond with older directors, but according to Mottram they constitute a pretty tight group.

Some other possibilities strike me.

*Maybe this particular batch of directors is just an easygoing demographic. Tarantino took his time moving from Jackie Brown (1997) to Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). The Virgin Suicides came out in 1999; does Lost in Translation (2003) look like a movie it took four years to make? They don’t call it Gen X for nothing.

*We should consider the possibility of burnout. Dwight Macdonald once remarked that the stress of making one film is much more intense than painting a picture or even writing a novel. It’s deeply exhausting on many levels. MacDonald speculated that across their careers filmmakers are likely to slow down or burn out or just make weaker films. We can all think of exceptions (Manoel de Oliveira is still turning out extraordinary films at age 98), but filmmaking does require a lot of energy. This might be especially the case if a director achieves early success, because the demands of each new project can escalate before the director finds her or his comfort level.

*Making just one film takes a long time. Aronofsky’s years of effort to produce The Fountain are well-known, as are Luhrmann’s problems with a life of Alexander the Great. Even a midrange project might be years in preparation before it finds backing. Once the project is approved, there can be months of preproduction, several months of shooting, and over a year of editing. To launch any big film, the director and stars will be meeting the press, traveling to foreign markets for promotional events, and preparing the DVD supplements. A lot of this will be happening just before or soon after the film’s release, slowing progress on the next project. The avalanche of such demands can only increase your respect for the stamina and multitasking abilities of Spielberg and Soderbergh.

Hong Kong and Japanese directors can be more prolific because the industry is more small-scale and there isn’t the same demand to promote the film afterward. Johnnie To turns out two films a year, Miike Takeshi more than that. They get to develop a body of work that, despite its ups and downs, has a texture lacking in one- or two- or three-shot wonders.

*The market has consolidated. An earlier wave of indie directors like John Sayles, Spike Lee, Gus Van Sant, Oliver Stone, and the Coens faced a fairly diverse marketplace. Their films benefited from the emergence of home video, overseas television outlets, mini-majors, and small but fairly well-funded distributors. They quickly built up individual identities–brands, if you like–that still give them some clout with studios and make them more productive than the group Waxman profiles. Although there are many distributors on today’s landscape, most are tiny. The younger indie auteurs, I think, face a more homogeneous system, with studios and their boutique divisions controlling a larger share of funding and more distribution outlets. There are fewer cozy niches for small, quick projects.

*Finally, there’s critics’ hype. Perhaps too much was expected of these rather untried directors. If you’re called a genius on your first or second outing, how can you top that? Consider these heroic descriptions:

With their films, the rebels of the 1990s shattered the status quo, set new boundaries in the art of moviemaking, and managed to bend the risk-averse studio structure to their will. They created a new cinematic language, recast audience expectations, and surprised us—and one another.

Quentin Tarantino, the rabble-rousing writer-director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction . . . very early in the decade broke every rule in moviedom.

The movies of the new rebel auteurs . . . played with structure, wreaked havoc with traditional narrative form, fiddled with the film stock, and ushered in the whiplash editing style true to a generation of video game children.

In the perspective of film history, these claims are sheer nonsense. (I try to show why in The Way Hollywood Tells It.) They aren’t good prophecy either. I ♥ Huckabees and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou didn’t exactly bend the studios to their directors’ will. In any event, such guff overheats the creative climate. Filmmakers aren’t granted a more gradual and modest exploration of their strengths and limits. When they fail, they may fail spectacularly.

By the way: the author of the souped-up passages I just quoted? None other than Sharon Waxman. (1)

(1) Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), x-xi.

PS Monday: Based on some intriguing box-office data, Karina Longworth gives a sharper-tongued rebuke to Waxman in her lively post here.

From DB, for once a brief blog:

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of The Blair Witch Project was the idea of promoting the film through a faux website that treated the lore around the Witch as genuine. Later, the promotion for Spielberg’s A.I. created an alternate reality game (ARG) by scattering clues to a murder among many websites. The murder wasn’t part of A.I.‘s plot, but it did take place in the film’s fictional world, and online participants pursued an elaborate para-narrative that connected obliquely to the movie. A key character in the ARG, researcher Jeanine Salla, was listed as an actor in the film’s final credits. Ms. Salla evidently died a grisly death herself, as the autopsy report above indicates. She led other lives in fanfiction and online comic strips.

Now, for The Great World of Sound, director Craig Zobel has created a website. Nothing new in that. But Zobel also provides a website for a fictional company in the film. Here’s Screen International’s take (19-25 January 2007, print ed., p. 36):

It’s the 21^st century equivalent of the film within the film—the fictional website of the shark-like record company in the movie. It’s everything you’d expect from a shady music company—flashing primary colors, bad clip art, typos and scrolling fonts, all to the sound of a soul-killing MIDI song file.

It starts well (banner reading, “You’re ad here”) but I found it not as wild as the SI description implies. Still, the idea is good, the execution diverting. Visit it here.

In a parallel thrust from Bookland, Jacquelyn Mitchard’s forthcoming young adult novel Now You See Her is being promoted by a series of YouTube video diaries purportedly made by the heroine, Hope Shay. The first one is up, and already at least one viewer thinks it’s the McCoy. (1)

We can probably expect to see more extensions of fictional worlds to the webworld. Are Hannibal Lecter podcasts next? Or an online university for which reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a prerequisite? See Henry Jenkins’ fine Convergence Culture for more on the A. I. puzzle ARG (pp. 123-128) and reflections on cross-media storytelling in general.

(1) Full disclosure: Hope is played by Lauren Peterson, the daughter of old friends Sue Collins and Jim Peterson. They also live down the street from us. Jim, now an attorney, took a Ph. D. in film studies here at UW. He’s the author of Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order, an outstanding study of American avant-garde film.

PS Monday morning: I don’t watch much TV; The Simpsons, Olbermann, Ebert & Roeper, and the movie channels are pretty much it. So I’m grateful to Olli Sulopuisto for telling me that Lost has created its own ARG, The Lost Experience and that there’s a website for the fictional Hanso corporation. Much, much more can be found on the fansite.