Jazz Dance
The next step in my de-professionalization came few weeks later, when Roger Tilton came to me with what seemed at that time to be a wild idea. He wanted to make a short film about an evening at a dance hall in New York’s East Village. A wild evening of Dixieland Jazz. He had spoken to several cameramen and they had all told him that the only way to do it was with the big studio cameras, the microphone boom, the clap sticks, setting up and shooting each individual shot -- the same old routine. Roger refused to agree to this. A kindred spirit! So I agreed to try making this film the way we had filmed combat.
He rented a hall and the band from Nick’s with Peewee Russell on clarinet. We lit the hall with the new high-intensity spot lamps, deciding that we would not bother to hide them... let them be in the picture. I shot on the floor. I had two 35mm Eymos, hand-held spring-driven “news” cameras. Their maximum load was 100 ft. (one minute of film) and the longest shot I could take was 18 seconds before I had to stop and rewind the spring. So I had two cameras, and Hugh Bell -- a superb still photographer and graduate of the Harlem film school – would constantly be reloading one while I shot with the other. Bob Campbell, the other cameraman, filmed the musicians with a rudimentary synch system attached to his camera and was therefore less mobile. We shot wild! NO tripod! Move! Shoot! I was all over the place, having the time of my life, jumping, dancing, shooting right in the midst of everything. We spent a fabulous evening shooting to our hearts’ content.
Roger and his editor Richard Brummer laid these fragmentary shots in synch with the four pieces of music selected for the film; slow, medium, fast and faster! It worked! On a big screen in a theater, WOW! You were there, right in the midst of it and it looked like it was in synch... it was in synch! We couldn’t film dialogue or sustained musical passages this way. But it gave us a taste, a goal.
Tilton tells me that he was invited out to Hollywood by the biggies, but when he told them that they couldn’t do this sort of thing with their clumsy equipment they told him to get lost and didn’t even pay his fare back!
It had taken Roger and his editor quite a while to get this film into shape. I was absolutely stunned by it and still am. How would you shoot it today with all our new technology? I think I’d do it the same way!
He rented a hall and the band from Nick’s with Peewee Russell on clarinet. We lit the hall with the new high-intensity spot lamps, deciding that we would not bother to hide them... let them be in the picture. I shot on the floor. I had two 35mm Eymos, hand-held spring-driven “news” cameras. Their maximum load was 100 ft. (one minute of film) and the longest shot I could take was 18 seconds before I had to stop and rewind the spring. So I had two cameras, and Hugh Bell -- a superb still photographer and graduate of the Harlem film school – would constantly be reloading one while I shot with the other. Bob Campbell, the other cameraman, filmed the musicians with a rudimentary synch system attached to his camera and was therefore less mobile. We shot wild! NO tripod! Move! Shoot! I was all over the place, having the time of my life, jumping, dancing, shooting right in the midst of everything. We spent a fabulous evening shooting to our hearts’ content.
Roger and his editor Richard Brummer laid these fragmentary shots in synch with the four pieces of music selected for the film; slow, medium, fast and faster! It worked! On a big screen in a theater, WOW! You were there, right in the midst of it and it looked like it was in synch... it was in synch! We couldn’t film dialogue or sustained musical passages this way. But it gave us a taste, a goal.
Tilton tells me that he was invited out to Hollywood by the biggies, but when he told them that they couldn’t do this sort of thing with their clumsy equipment they told him to get lost and didn’t even pay his fare back!
It had taken Roger and his editor quite a while to get this film into shape. I was absolutely stunned by it and still am. How would you shoot it today with all our new technology? I think I’d do it the same way!