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

7. Mainstream Successes: The Sixties and Early Seventies

89 Chapter 7 MAINSTREAM SUCCESSES The Sixties and Early Seventies Although most Arriflex use as a principal camera for shooting dramatic features occurred on low-budget films, this was not invariably so. This chapter will accordingly examine Arriflex use as a principal camera on various mainstream projects. In this area, television led the way with the popular series I Spy, starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, which ran on NBC from 1965 through 1967. A fundamental premise of the series was that it would be shot on location in such faraway places as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mexico City, Rome, and Morocco. After an initial unhappy experience trying to rent suitable equipment in the Far East, Sheldon Leonard, the show’s executive producer, concluded that the production crew needed to transport their own equipment with them,1 a decision that led to the reliance on Arriflex cameras , with a sound blimp when dialogue was being shot. The key figure behind this approach was Fouad Sa’id, a cameraman hired for the series who tackled the equipment transportation problem with his much-imitated invention, the Cinemobile. An Egyptian by birth, Sa’id had studied cinematography at USC, graduating in 1957. Facing closed doors in Hollywood, he got his initial experience as a cameraman outside the United States, experience that led him to rethink the extravagantly high costs of traditional Hollywood location shooting, which required multiple truckloads of cumbersome studio equipment. To solve this problem, he created his first Cinemobile in 1964, a 16-foot van that carried a range of lightweight lights, stands, cables, sound equipment, tripods, a generator, and Arriflex cameras.2 Sa’id’s invaluable contribution to I Spy was eventually even celebrated in TV Guide. According to 90 Mainstream Successes a 1968 article, Sa’id “ignited a one-man revolution against what he considers hopelessly antiquated filming techniques”—a success that by no means initially endeared him to the film craft unions.3 Nevertheless, Sa’id’s innovative techniques allowed I Spy to shoot up to twelve pages of script a day, allegedly twice a normal studio rate, and to save the show 60,000 per episode. By 1967, his newest version of the Cinemobile, which could still be loaded in the hold of a cargo jet, typically carried six Arriflex cameras. In an endorsement that he provided for Arriflex in the autumn of that year, Sa’id explained, “I chose the Arriflex as our basic camera for its mobility and lightness. With four or five major changes of locale in each shooting day, it is necessary to use very portable equipment that can be rapidly set up on top of a truck, a building, or a cliff, if need be—or that can be hand-held in any situation.”4 As the advantages of the Cinemobile became increasingly apparent, Sa’id began to be hired to provide equipment and technical support for location-made features. One of the earliest of these was Take the Money and Run (1969), Woody Allen’s directorial debut.5 Although Take the Money and Run was supposed to have been set primarily in New Jersey, it was actually shot in the San Francisco Bay Area, with some sequences filmed inside San Quentin prison. The film was a manic compound of farce and satire, chronicling the career of a particularly inept criminal , Virgil Starkwell, who was played by Allen as a romantic but hopeless naïf.6 The film was structured as a pseudo-documentary, with a solemn voiceover narrator providing dubious commentary , and with occasional inserts of footage from interviews with people who had known Virgil growing up, including his parents —satirical contributions that mocked various sociological and psychological explanations for Virgil’s descent into a life of crime. Vincent Canby described the film in the New York Times as “a comedy of short takes . . . in effect, a feature-length two-reel comedy,” which he found “very special and eccentric and funny.”7 Sa’id’s Cinemobile was obviously highly suited to a project that required a series of quickly filmed location scenes and vignettes, a number of which could be shot without dialogue. So too was the Arriflex. According to Lester Shorr, the director of photography, “We had five Arriflex cameras—no other type of camera.” Shorr The Sixties and Early Seventies 91 went on to underline the production’s...