To listen to more of Michael Chapman’s stories, go to the playlist: • Michael Chapman (Cinem...
Michael Chapman (1935-2020) was an innovative cinematographer. He worked with a number of acclaimed directors including Martin Scorsese with whom he created his two best-known films, 'Taxi Driver' and 'Raging Bull'. [Listener: Glen Ade Brown; date recorded: 2004]
TRANSCRIPT: Zero Mostel was one of the lead actors and he was severely blacklisted. It was a Woody Allen movie. It was about the only Woody Allen that Woody didn't direct; he acted in it and... and Marty Ritt directed it, and I think he did it... I think Woody did it because he felt quite strongly about the subject of the... of the blacklists and many of the other actors and people in it... Walter Bernstein is the writer - had been severely blacklisted - and it was, I think, the subject matter that made Woody allow... let himself be directed by somebody else, I guess. It's not a... it's seriously not a great movie, I guess, but it does at least deal with that subject, which as far as I know almost never was... never had been before and never has been since, pretty much, and I just fairly recently supervised the transfer of it to DVD for whatever... I can't remember what studio we did it for, you know, but anyway they were doing their stuff into DVD and I supervised that.
I hadn't looked at it in a long, long time and I realized that I had... and I remember doing this quite consciously - never mind any unconscious material or any nonsense like that - I... I lit it like a '50s television show deliberately, because that's what it was about - it was about '50s television and series, so I lit it with sort of hard light and... and hard shadows... I don't know if you... any of you are old enough to remember shadows across the wall at an angle with a cutter like this, and they were put there so that the people could put the microphone out when it would cross the shadow. Yeah… [sic] in the shadow. It was entirely in order that the microphone be right the way out there and follow the people, so there was a stylistic mark of the period - of always a diagonal shadow across the wall that cut the keylight off and it was entirely so the microphone could get out there. So I lit it kind of that way and when I look at it again I realized that perhaps I shouldn't have done that, it seemed too self-conscious, but I did it anyway... what the hell, there's nothing... it's not the end of the world, and it was... it... like many movies it... it surprises you with what it is - what's good and what isn't - and what's amazing in it is not Woody Allen and not the story , which is okay but rather perfunctory in a kind of jokey way, but Zero Mostel's performance, and it was the last thing that he did and then he died, and it is absolutely extraordinary and heartbreaking, and it is entirely based on his own story. In fact, he pretty much acts out his own story: he was a big comic and then he is blacklisted and then he goes to a place in the Catskills, and they... they screw him out of his money, and it's just one thing after another, and it's very much his own story, and then he finally commits suicide by jumping out a window... he rents a room in a... in the... I forget, the Ritz or some big hotel in New York, and he orders champagne and he drinks champagne and jumps out the window.
And Marty Ritt didn't really care... or didn't seem to in this case, much care about set ups or coverage or anything, and wanted to talk to the actors. He had been an actor, and I guess that was his style as a director; I never had worked with him before, so I pretty much laid out the shots and did that stuff which is fine, I'm very happy to, and Zero and I worked out this last sequence in one shot and it really is quite wonderful - I'm very proud of it, and... and it was as much Zero Mostel as me, but we worked out the whole thing where he comes into the hotel room and he tips the man and then he puts his luggage down, or whatever he does, I forget, and then a man comes in and he's ordered a bottle of champagne and he pays the man and you... you follow him from room to room and he opens the champagne and he pours a glass, and you follow him, and you don't quite know what he's doing, but it gets more and more strange and ominous, and then I forget exactly how I did it - I have to look at it again - but at some point you pan to where he puts the champagne down and you hold on the champagne and then... you're holding on the champagne, and then there's this sort of puff of wind and a curtain blows into the frame and you pan over to the curtain, and it's an open window, and he's jumped, and it's all in one shot, and it’s marvelous kind of silent movie storytelling, and it's utterly, perfectly successful. [...]
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