Motion Pictures
Posted on December 17, 2008
Talking heads. Interviews! Jesus Christ, 20/20, Barbara Walters! Who in the audience still cares about Chatty Kathy? Yak, yak , yak!
I remember when I grew to dislike the talking head. We were held hostage for thirty five minutes at my graduation while the honorary doctorate recipient and guest speaker yammered on incoherently and we all lost our buzz. That was the last time I paid any attention to someone flapping their gums. (Nowadays, at least there’s a game on every phone to occupy you.)
The talking head. Only Erroll Morris can pull it off (and he had McNamara!) Sure editing can save you. Keep telling yourself that. Yeah, editing can make anything coherent and efficient and amusing. For example, just look at jump cut montages of George W. Bush’s malapropisms. That’s entertaining and informative, for about a minute. Beyond that, it’s completely devoid of real, valuable content.
The cutaway to B camera won’t save you either, no matter how much the crew strays into frame (Hi, mom!)
They’re called motion pictures for a reason. Something should happen. Make something happen.
Unless you’ve got Stephen Jones talking about his father, or Tom Cruise laughing maniacally, or a Russian anchorwoman stripping to the financial report, your talking head needs help: B-roll, graphics, animation, re-enactments, expository subtitles/lower thirds. Come on! Exploit the medium!
It wouldn’t be a cliche if it didn’t have a mote of truth: Show it, don’t say it.
I first realized this while attending a performance of City of Angels (the Broadway musical, not the Nicolas Cage movie, you vulgarian.)
Rene Auberjonois plays the producer. His first act song “ The Buddy system”:
“Movies are shadows: they’re light, they’re dark.
They’re faces ten feet high. Close of of him. Close up of her.
Cut to close up of husband watching close up of her watching close up of him!”
“I would never cannibalize or repair a single hair or phrase of your amazing opus.”
“Don’t cling to the words to which you gave birth. Remember how many a picture is worth. The odds are a thousand to one, so get used to it.”
“In motion pictures, words are carved in marble.”
My first film, The Runner Stumbles, was an epic. No script edits from the original play. We did the whole thing! No segue montages, no ligature intra-scene footage. TRT clocked in at two hours! My most horrific moment was at the premiere. I had edited the monologues as one shot. One cut. One take. Not even a reaction shot or an introductory/closing wide shot. (I was also lazy in the shooting: not even a zoom to raise the dramatic tension.) Being a theatre major, it was instinct. I had been trained (read: brainwashed) to honor the author’s vision at the expense of the world. Most importantly, I used the monologues as a way to expedite the post process. We were running out of semester. The premiere deadline was breathing down out necks. So, keeping the monologue moments as one shot, it jumped us forward three or five minutes in to the future of the film/script and saved us a few hours work. I was 24. I should have known better.
It was horrible. In a full length, two act play there are about six important monologues. Every single time, once the monologue started, the scene turned so flaccid and rank. All tempo and dramatic energy just fled the screen. It literally turned cold in the room. Sure, the actors did their best. They were amazing. It’s just not theatre, where you can do that. I should have exploited the medium. (Eight months later, I saw Kenneth Branagh make the same choice in Hamlet, so I don’t feel so bad. But, at least he moved the camera. Some examples of that choice’s success: Rene Zellweger in ‘Down With Love’, Matthew McConaughey in ‘A Time to Kill’, Kevin Costner in ‘JFK’. But, in those films, it was only done once, as a device to aid the climax.)
There is a school of film-making, Anthropological, that strives to make no decisions about the content, subject, or audience expectations. It records the event from start to finish, one camera, no cuts, no graphics, etc. There’s much criticism against this style, but it has it’s uses in creating valid primary sources for history research.
It reminds me of a story one of my instructors told me in grad school. The producer said,”no B-roll.” She didn’t want to waste any of the precious 16mm film on shots she thought they wouldn’t use. They were following a Cuban beat poet in Miami. Later, they took the him back to Cuba to shoot the subjects of one his poems (You know, since it was about his barrio, beauty shots of the location would seem to be the main goal of the trip. ) But no, she continued in her assertion that B-roll was not needed, derided MTV quick-cut editing, etc., yadda…
You know the end of the story: months later, against the deadline, they had to go back to Cuba. The grant money was all spent, so she had to fund this excursion herself. The punchline: now, it was the rainy season. Continuity between the interviews against the B-roll was non-existent.
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