Chronicle of a Camera: The Arriflex 35 in North America, 1945-1972

6. Shooting Low-Budget Features: The Sixties and Early Seventies

68 Chapter 6 SHOOTING LOW-BUDGET FEATURES The Sixties and Early Seventies “Y’all a bunch of communists and we know what you’re doin’. You’re trying to start a revolution. . . . Get outta town or go to jail.” This was not film dialogue but what Roger Corman remembered the sheriff of East Prairie, Missouri, telling him and his film crew when they attempted to shoot a scene in a schoolyard there. Corman was directing The Intruder (1962), a film about racial bigotry in the South, which he was shooting—amidst growing local suspicion and hostility—in the nearby town of Sikeston, Missouri .1 Having substituted another schoolyard for close-ups, Corman concluded at the end of the shoot that the story required an establishing shot of the East Prairie schoolyard. Because no one on his crew was willing to return to East Prairie, Corman decided to get the shot himself. He had his cinematographer put a wideangle lens on the camera, estimate the exposure for an hour later, and tape the lens to remain focused on infinity. Corman drove to the school, set up the tripod and camera, attached the battery, and then noticed the sheriff’s car at the far end of the schoolyard. “I stayed calm, kept at it . . . moving very quickly without looking frantic. The camera was rolling as [the sheriff] approached. I unhooked the battery, heaved the camera into the car, got in, and beat him out of there. We had the film complete.”2 The camera was an Arriflex, and this was Roger Corman’s introduction to the camera—which a cameraman had recommended to Corman as ideal for location shooting. Indeed, The Intruder was shot entirely with an Arriflex, with a sound blimp added to the camera for dialogue shots.3 The Sixties and Early Seventies 69 Corman was among the first commercially successful American directors and producers to recognize the potential of the Arriflex to serve as a principal camera, and this recognition went hand-in-hand with his increasing interest in the authenticity that could be gained by shooting films outside the studio.4 In fact, Corman was sufficiently impressed by his experience filming The Intruder that in the following year he decided to purchase an Arriflex II directly from the Arriflex factory in Munich. This was the primary camera used for shooting his European Grand Prix film The Young Racers (1963), the second of his films to be shot exclusively with Arriflexes. On race days, moreover, Corman supplemented his own camera by renting two additional Arri- flexes locally, one of which was often operated by Francis Ford Coppola—who had been hired to record sound—to help capture actual Grand Prix footage for intercutting later on with staged footage of the actors.5 More broadly, from this period onward, Corman came to rely “almost exclusively” on Arriflexes for shooting outside the studio when speed was critical and dialogue was not a key ingredient.6 In Corman’s view, the convenience and versatility of using a lightweight camera was often more important than the guaranteed quality of a Mitchell.7 Indeed, the Arriflex was obviously ideal for a filmmaker who once declared “when in trouble, get the shot, loop it later.”8 Corman’s films are as famous for their modest budgets as they are for their marketplace success.9 His budgets, however, were reliable—in contrast to those for the projects later described by Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond as “no-budget films.”10 Moreover, in a later interview, Kovacs noted that big budget studio productions often tried to cut below-the-line costs too severely, and he reportedly once told a studio executive that “I used to work for Roger Corman and he cared more about what showed up on the screen. He really didn’t cut the wire so close.”11 Corman’s turn to the Arriflex for location shooting was thus not a step in the direction of inferior cinematography. Zsigmond, for example, noted that “he could not believe” the quality of the footage that he was getting with Arriflex cameras in this period, given the camera’s small size and low initial cost.12 Others involved in 70 Shooting Low-Budget Features non-studio production increasingly agreed, with the result that more and more filmmakers in this period were willing to view...