I went to film school at Loyola Marymount University from 1983-1987. In 1986 I interned at a commercial company called "The Film Tree," where I learned how to load Arriflex BL mags. In 1987, after a short stint as a production assistant on "Circus of the Stars XII" (where the producers, knowing my ambitions to be a cameraman, let me work as an operator shooting show opens with Kirk Douglas) I went freelance as a second camera assistant. Things were spotty for a while: jobs came my way but the pay frequently sucked.
For example:
This is the crew photo from a production entitled "Chinatown Connection." It starred Lee Majors, Jr. (yes, son of the great actor and equally as talented) and Bruce Li (supposed relative of Bruce Lee). I worked on the last week and a half of this three week shoot. We worked 16 hour nights with eight hour turnarounds; I made a whopping $150/week, flat.
I'm way in the back. Look under where the side view mirror on the blue van would be and you'll see someone with big hair holding up a bottle of some sort.
The guy with the slate in the foreground is Pat Swovelin, crazed vet, skydiver, and camera assistant extraordinaire. He trained me as a camera assistant. The gentleman on the far right in the blue baseball cap is Jack Anderson, the DP and another of my early mentors. He taught me much of what I needed to know to work in a professional union environment. I met Jack while he was shooting a spec piece at my university in 1985. Through him I met Pat, on a low budget feature about angels visiting the earth and wreaking havoc. (We did that job out of the back of a station wagon.)
Between 1988 and 1992 we did probably 20 jobs together, most of them features. He transformed me from green film school graduate into the anal retentive detail-oriented painstakingly efficient professional I am today.
Here I am making $500 per six day week on "Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers," starring Vic Tayback and Art Metrano. At this point I'm just starting to make a decent living in the industry after trying to break in for a year and a half.
This was the job where I learned that having an actor named "Art," a second camera assistant named "Art," and an art department can make for very confusing on-set communications.
This is me in 1989 working as first camera assistant on a low budget wonder originally called "Say Bye Bye" (released as "Digging Up Business"). It was the story of a funeral home that would cater to ANYONE'S last whim, and included a combination wedding/funeral scene at the end. "We gather here to lay to rest our dearly beloved... and to join this man and woman in holy matrimony!"
(I'm wearing my "Vietnam War Stories" T-shirt. That was an HBO TV series I worked on as second unit second camera assistant. The DP was the Bay Area's own Steven Lighthill, ASC.)
"Say Bye Bye" featured cameos by people like Ruth Buzzi, Yvonne Craig (the original Batgirl), Billy Barty, Murray Langston (The Unknown Comic without his bag) and others. It was a two week shoot, and the executive producer skipped off to Catalina with his wife for a nice vacation afterwards. The problem was that he financed this vacation with the second week's payroll.
The other executive producer, a Texas construction magnate, insisted that if he was going to put up money for the production he was going to have a major co-starring role. He did; and he was awful. But he was a lot of fun to talk to. The sound crew used to wire themselves up and have conversations with him at lunch, recording his various theories about UFO's and black helicopters.
I don't remember much about this shot other than that I was the first camera assistant on a UCLA graduate project and I'd never had to sterilize a Panaflex Platinum before. I'm on the far right; the guy with the beard was a friend, Jeff Baustert. We'd hire each other for various gigs. If he was shooting something I'd gaff or pull focus, and he'd do the same for me. He worked as my second assistant from time to time, as you'll see in further pictures. As best I know he's working as a DP in LA.
This was my first job as a camera operator. I have no idea what the name of the feature was, but it was a nine day wonder shot in a rented house in South Central LA. The call sheets for jobs like these read, "Please do not wear red or blue (gang colors) at this location." (I frequently wore purple just to see what happened.)
I started out as first camera assistant, with Jeff (see above) as my second, but when the operator was fired we both moved up.
Here I'm checking focus on a stand-in. This is before I was promoted. This was also my first time working with a Moviecam. (I "grew up" with Arriflex cameras. I still love them.)
You can see an IA bug on my frontbox. I was admitted to the International Photographers Guild (now International Cinematographers Guild, Local 600 IATSE) in 1989. For 30 years the IA had locked out most of the crew people in Hollywood. Unless you were very lucky and had relatives in the local, or unless you were on a feature that was organized by the IA, you simply couldn't get in. By the late 80's there were non union crew people who had been around so long that they were really good at their jobs; good enough to crank out sitcoms and episodic television shows, traditionally the IA's realm. The IA finally wised up and let everyone in, and I was part of the rush.
My first "big budget" movie experience was "Texas Chainsaw Massacre III." That's 2nd AC me, with mentor and 1st AC Pat Swovelin.
Pat's frontbox was his prized possession. It was organized to a "T". I dropped it once... and I barely survived with my ego intact. Pat could take you down with a single look.
He was an adrenaline junky and an avid skydiver, and he had hundreds of skydiving shirts. He'd wear a different one every day, and he boasted that he'd never repeat a shirt over the course of a shoot, no matter how long the shoot was.
Yes, he convinced me to go skydiving. Once. I've never regretted the experience. I recommend that everyone skydive at least once.
This is on the set of a TV movie called "Bodyguard," not related to the movie starring Kevin Costner. It starred Jennifer Tilly, and I was the "B" camera first assistant. The DP was a gentleman named Tim Eaton, from whom I learned much about lighting.
In this picture I'm grabbing focus marks. I'm looking at a berm several hundred feet away through the long end of a 150-600mm zoom. We're in the windmill farms near Palm Springs. There's a reason why they put windmills there, as we learned when the wind picked up at noon every day.
Here I am working on a feature whose name escapes me. It starred Hoyt Axton and Ray Walston and had something to do with killer rabbits who come down from outer space to invade the earth.
In the white T-shirt is Steve Sheridan. Last I heard he's working in LA as a DP. In the red sweatshirt is Tony Cutrono, and last I heard he's been shooting up a storm. I lost track of him after he took over shooting the Disney series "Dinosaurs."
That's me on the left in my "One Cup of Coffee" T-shirt. That shirt was from a really cool little baseball movie that I was quite proud to work on that was eventually renamed "Pasttime." I highly recommend it.
Around this time I decided to work on making the jump to full time camera operator. Weighing 125 lbs. and dragging around huge cameras was taking its toll on my back and I was frequently in excruciating pain. A friend helped me get a gig on "The New Candid Camera show," which helped me out considerably while I was hunting those elusive film jobs. (In this case we're shooting people out the back of a van: a shill was standing nearby with binoculars and he'd stop passing men and tell them to look at the third apartment from the left on the top floor of an apartment building. They'd see a woman stripping. Apparently this was funny.)
Everyone thought I was much too young to be trusted as a film operator, and while I was a bit green compared to a lot of the older and more experienced union pros I've always had an extremely good eye for composition. I discovered that, while film operating jobs were a little difficult for someone that age to come by, video companies had no problem hiring me. And then, when I showed them what I could do with a couple of lights and a bounce card, I started getting even more work. Coming up through the feature and episodic television ranks had allowed me to see some really good DP's at work, and although I moved myself up pretty quickly I paid close attention and took a lot of notes.
Here I am in the Cal-Neva Casino in Lake Tahoe. I'm the key first camera assistant on a TNT TV movie called "Dead on the Money," eventually renamed "The Scream." It starred Amanda Pays, Corbin Bernsen and John Glover.
That's me, dressed in purple to the right of the camera, with DP Tim Eaton. Amanda Pays and John Glover are rehearsing on top of that rock. We're up towards the top of Donner Pass watching a storm come in. Not long after this picture was taken a ranger told us we needed to evacuate the mountain top for an hour or so until the clouds passed. When asked why, he pointed to the tree you see standing on frame right.
That was a 20 day shoot, and the first 17 days were fine. The last three were spent on this mountain top and we had to carry everything everywhere. My back was screaming in pain. Around this time I decided I'd had enough pain and started thinking about a one year plan to become a full time camera operator.
The DP took a chance on me and let me operate on a couple of stunts. In this shot I'm getting a focus mark for a high fall, but in the next shot I'm actually operating a third camera. (I'm in the purple hat.)
That's me on the bottom left shooting Corbin Bernsen's stunt double falling off a cliff at 120 frames per second while Amanda Pays watches. Jeff Baustert is pulling focus for me.
After "The Scream" I made two minor (but informative) mistakes:
The first was working as the second second camera assistant on the sitcom "Evening Shade," with Burt Reynolds et al. The experience was, overall, a good one: it was my first union job and I had a chance to see how things were done in the hardcore union world. I stayed on for the first five episodes, spending most of my time in the dark room. For the pilot, which was a full hour instead of a normal half hour, I loaded and unloaded 80,400' of film in about ten hours. That's 80 1000' foot rolls and 1 400' roll. That's a lot of film.
They were shooting long takes, which made things quite exciting for me: if the scene ran longer than about four and a half minutes all the mags would come off the cameras and new ones would go on. There were four cameras, so suddenly that's four mags down. After a few of those I'd start to sweat, because every time I opened the darkroom door there be a longer line of mag cases to download and reload. The last thing you want on a sitcom is make the actors and crew wait for film in front of a studio audience. I learned I could squeeze two Mitchell mags at a time onto the darkroom counter so I started reloading two at a time.
I learned a lot from watching a seasoned sitcom crew at work. Union crews are astoundingly efficient and cool under pressure. Eventually, though, it became clear that I was only going to be brought on to work one shoot day a week and that wasn't enough. I also wasn't happy going from fairly high up the foot chain on a TV movie straight to the bottom rung on a TV show. For a while it felt like "Evening Shade" would be a chance to get a foot in the door in the union world, but when Pat Swovelin called me up to work on an eight week feature I jumped ship.
That was my other mistake: working on "Suburban Commando," starring Hulk Hogan, Shelly Duvall and Christopher Lloyd. I went from key first camera assistant and part time operator on a TV movie to union loader on "Evening Shade" to second assistant on a big-ish feature. It wasn't much fun. Working with Pat was fine, but my back was still killing me and I was feeling a bit stressed and more than a little bored being second camera assistant again. I didn't really want to be an assistant anymore. The conditions on this feature weren't the best, although the pay wasn't as bad as it could have been on a New Line film.
I got to operate two shots. Twice the DP told me to place a camera in a specific place and wait for him to set it. I'd set it up, put a lens on it, frame up what I thought was a nice shot, and then wait. He'd wander by, look through the lens, frown, move the camera around a little, and then frame it how I'd left it. He wasn't happy that his second assistant was able to frame shots that he liked. It REALLY ticked him off.
Not long after that I was hired as second unit camera operator on a TV movie for USA called "Child of Darkness, Child of Light." We shot car stunts at the edge of the Columbia River Gorge.
That's me, wrapped for warmth, ready to shoot two stunt men flying into space against a beautiful vista.
That's where they were going to land. That's the "A" camera assistant (David Dechant) and the DP (Marty Oppenheimer) having a chat.
That was a fun job, and I was quite happy that I nailed the money shot, which was a van rolling over and sliding down a road at high speed. I've since recognized this stretch of road in more than a few car commercials.
You can never have your assistant snap too many publicity shots. I'd mastered the geared head but not, obviously, my hair.
\The year was 1993. This was one of my last jobs before I decided to leave LA and move back to my native San Francisco Bay Area. It was also my first feature credit as "A" camera operator, a three week wonder that became known as "Deep Down." It starred Tanya Roberts, Paul Le Mat and George Segal, making his first film appearance in years.
We're waiting for the right magic hour moment for a shot of a car driving up a hill. The gentleman with the beard is the DP, David Miller. The camera assistant, whose back is to us, is Erin Cook. Sadly, Erin is no longer with us, having passed away within the last year.
The production manager didn't want to hire an operator but the DP insisted. The director ended up supplementing my pay out of his, but when he was fired he felt he shouldn't have to do that anymore. The production manager didn't want to cover the director's share out of his budget, saying "Cameramen are a dime a dozen." We were so blown away by that comment that we posted it on the camera. That's what is written on the white tape on the camera motor housing.
That's me smiling on the set of "Deep Down," which probably meant that Tanya hadn't arrived yet.
The story was that of a young man seduced by the older woman next door, and we had to shoot several love scenes between the two. During the first one the young man, actor Chris Young, walked off the set, saying that Tanya was getting a little too serious with the love scene for his taste. We tried again a few days later and the same thing happened. "I don't want that woman's tongue in my mouth!" he said while walking away with his agent.
Not much later he came up to my camera assistant and I and told us that Tanya's husband had threatened him with physical violence if he didn't do the scene. Chris was amazed. "That's the first time I've ever been threatened for NOT sleeping with someone's wife," he said.
We eventually shot several love scenes with a stunt double, but there were problems. The production manager had ticked off the makeup woman, and she came up with a marvelous way to get even. The stunt double was a lot hairier than Chris was, so the makeup woman only shaved his legs, chest and back. I remember looking through the camera during a scene when Tanya Roberts undoes the stunt double's pants. As they fell to the floor, I gasped: that was one of the hairiest butts I'd ever seen, surprising for a character who was supposed to be 18, blond and hairless.
The next day I saw Chris Young at the craft service table. He asked how the scene went. "Fine," I said, "but you've got the hairiest butt I've ever seen." His jaw dropped: "Nooooo!" he yelped, and raced into the production office. He bucked up and did the final love scene himself.
In May of 1993 I moved from Southern California to my native Northern California. I loved the work I was doing but I didn't really like the inhumane way Hollywood worked. It was a cutthroat industry and I found it was very difficult to trust anyone. That took it's toll on my psyche and I needed a break.
As soon as I drove all my belongings 400 miles up Highway 5 I immediately returned to LA for several weeks as second unit DP on the feature film "American Yakuza."
Hopefully you recognize the blond gentleman in the foreground. That's Viggo Mortenson in his first starring role, long before he became Aragorn in "The Lord of the Rings." That's me just above and to the left of Viggo's head. I frequently joined first unit to provide extra coverage, and then I'd grab inserts when they moved on. Occasionally I shot entire sequences on my own.
The gentleman in the red shirt is the film's DP, Richard Clabaugh. He was the one who got me hired. We'd been friends for a while, and I'd assisted him on various projects, and all the while I'd been showing him work that I'd done as a DP or operator. He really liked my eye so he gave me a chance to show what I could do. Years later he says, "I still can't tell exactly which shots you did. They blend perfectly with the rest of the movie." That's high praise for a second unit DP.
I returned a few years later as second unit DP on the film's sequel, "No Way Back," starring Russell Crowe.
A setup for the film's finale. Three cameras, two units, no waiting. As if I needed to tell you, that's me (with the big hair) behind the camera on the left.
Around this time I realized that I was much more in demand as a DP than as an operator. I'd been shooting professionally on and off since 1989 anyway, I just never thought I'd be able to move into the job so quickly. I'd always been told camera operator was the next step, but everyone told me I was "too young" to be an operator and besides, operators had the highest unemployment rate in the union. The days of an operator on every camera were coming to a close.
As an operator I did a few more jobs: "Lawnmower Man II" in 1995, "Executive Decision" in 1997, and more recently day playing on "Angels in the Outfield" and "Nash Bridges."
This is the blue screen/special effects unit camera crew on "Lawnmower Man II." We spent a month on a stage in Valencia next to "Melrose Place" making people fly through the air and shooting pickups. The second gentleman from the left is Alex Funke, one of my mentors and the miniatures unit DP and supervisor on all of the "Lord of the Rings" movies. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met and he's extremely generous with his knowledge. I learned an incredible amount from him. He's a special effects genius and a very nice guy.
A year or so later I worked with him on the plane crash sequence in "Executive Decision," starring Kurt Russell. We spent a week in a quarry in which a miniature airport had been built, complete with an 800' runway. The 30' 747 model was originally hung between two construction cranes and lowered to the runway via computer controlled motors. After it hit the runway it was reset to operate off a cable system that ran down the center of the runway in a huge several thousand foot loop. At one point, while shooting a shot of the plane's nose heading straight into my camera and stopping, I was told that if the cable I was straddling snapped I'd likely be cut in two pieces. Fortunately that didn't happen.
That's about it for the Southern California era. I've got a few pictures I'm going to throw in from recent years:
Shooting hidef in Phoenix, Arizona in 2005 with camera assistant Petr Stepanek.
Shooting a spot for Kaiser Permanente, Summer 2006.
Lighting a set for a spot for Shuttle Computers, May 2006.
Shooting a spot in the desert for Hilton.
Shooting B2B spots for Cisco.
Food shots for the restaurant chain "Fresh Choice."
More pictures as they happen!