In “Cinematic Immunity,” the Greatest Drama Is Offscreen
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Directing movies is also a matter of production—of the interpersonal, the administrative, and the technical practicalities that go into creating the images and sounds that end up on the screen. The vast implications of that casual notion unfold in fascinating, appalling, comedic, and nearly tragic detail in “Cinematic Immunity” (Feral House), Michael Lee Nirenberg’s oral history of filmmaking in New York City from 1954 to 9/11. Subtitled “An Oral History of New York Filmmaking as Told by the Crews That Got the Shot,” it’s a workers’-eye view of Hollywood on the Hudson, looking behind the scenes of films that were made, wholly or in part, on location in and around New York City (plus a few shot out of town but with New York-based crews). The book is manifestly a labor of love (and a love of labor) because the world it portrays is the one in which Nirenberg, a scenic artist based in New York, has made his career. In a hundred and fifty interviews, nearly four hundred pages, he hears from crew members, current and former, who worked on films including “On the Waterfront,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “The French Connection,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” “Do the Right Thing,” and “Goodfellas,” as well as TV shows (“The Sopranos”) and commercials.
As a cornucopia of anecdotes, sassy portraits, and revealing asides, the book is unputdownably engaging; it’s futile to resist the temptation to quote it at length. But the stakes involved, both artistic and social, make these recollections far more than mere yarns. First, movies are workplaces, and Nirenberg’s interviewees reveal the stressful negotiations involved in the daily life of filmmaking—not only with executives and producers but also with directors, who, though employed by those very same businesspeople, are also the immediate bosses of the crew. Thus this is intrinsically a story of class differences, involving labor unions and labor relations in general. At the same time, because directorial control is the very definition of the art of cinema, this is also a story of how that art happens, of the kinds of relationships on which the very ability to function as an artist depends, and of the process of communication (sometimes mysterious, sometimes strikingly literal) by which a plan becomes a reality. In the era that Nirenberg covers, that reality is starkly physical and often impossible to control and, therefore, dangerous. These stories make plain the bodily harm that crew members have routinely risked, and how these workers—whose enthusiasm for their work and for cinema itself is palpable—consider a profession whose hazards are not only physical but also psychological, professional, and familial.
The first movie discussed is “On the Waterfront” (1954), Elia Kazan’s bruising drama of union corruption and resistance among longshoremen, starring Marlon Brando. Ironically enough, union policies played a significant role in shaping the film. Kazan, struggling to find a local cinematographer whose work appealed to him, lucked into hiring a living legend. Kazan heard from a cameraman named Boris Kaufman, who said that he’d shot a waterfront movie before. That movie was Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante” (1934), a mighty classic of visual poetry and emotional power, and Kaufman—Russian-born and the young brother of the famous Soviet directors Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman—had had a distinguished career in France, before the Nazi Occupation forced him to emigrate. Despite his long and illustrious experience, union strictures prevented him from working as a cinematographer in Hollywood, which is why he remained in New York, working mainly on short films and documentaries—and why he was keen to work on Kazan’s film. Amazingly, although he won an Oscar for his cinematography in “On the Waterfront,” Kaufman still wasn’t able to shoot studio pictures in Hollywood; union requirements would have forced him to start as an assistant and work his way up. Instead, he stayed put and became a go-to cinematographer for New York productions such as “12 Angry Men” and “Splendor in the Grass,” while also becoming a prime mentor for a new generation of New York-based camera crews. (One of his camera operators for “On the Waterfront,” Gayne Rescher, went on to be the director of photography on such classic New York movies as Elaine May’s “A New Leaf” and Otto Preminger’s “Such Good Friends.”) Hollywood’s loss was indeed New York’s gain.
Nirenberg’s book then leaps from the production of “On the Waterfront” to that of “Midnight Cowboy,” in 1968, with only one brief chapter summarizing the intervening decade and a half. That’s the period during which Hollywood’s monolithic studio system broke up, as a result of a 1948 antitrust decree and of commercial pressures that included the growing popularity of television and a shift toward suburban life styles. Hollywood technicians who’d previously been studio employees became freelancers, like the New York ones, and when John V. Lindsay became the mayor of New York, in 1966, he saw an opportunity; he launched a program to promote and facilitate film production in the city, and part of the lure for filmmakers was the promise of extraordinary coöperation from the police and other agencies. The book’s title, “Cinematic Immunity,” is a phrase movie people use to describe the normally illegal exploits that the police allow film crews to get away with. The official in charge of permits was Mary Imperato. An assistant director who knew Imperato remembers her tenacity: “The production manager would call Mary and say, ‘Mary, we want to close down the Lincoln Tunnel at night.’ She would get it done.” The mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting brought the city a dual boost: a financial one from film budgets spent here and a public-relations one from the image of New York onscreen. Even dramas depicting the city as an inferno of crime and decay added to its legend. As a result, the nineteen-seventies, even while the city was in conspicuous economic decline, were something of a golden age of New York film production.
Official assistance sometimes took dangerous forms. For “The French Connection,” the police did far more than block streets. The story was based on the exploits of the New York police detectives Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso. A third detective, Randy Jurgensen, was a technical adviser for the movie, and he recounts that his job was, in part, didactic:
Recklessness was also built into action-film shoots themselves, and there are hair-raising tales about the making of “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” much of which was filmed on actual subway tracks—while trains were running. Tom Priestley, Jr., later a director of photography in his own right, was a camera assistant on the film and recalls, “There was no safety—there’s no safety switches in there that turn the power on and off at certain areas.” Craig DiBona, an additional camera operator, had intended to shoot through the train conductor’s front window but found it too scratched. So he and an assistant came up with another solution to employ as the train hurtled along at seventy miles per hour: “I stood on the front of the train and he held onto my belt.” On “Saturday Night Fever,” the assistant camera operator Gary Muller shares, “The stunts—hanging over the Verrazano bridge—I remember [the crew member Jim] Finnerty putting a rope on my waist and then hanging over the fucking Verrazano bridge looking down.” (Another colleague of Finnerty’s remembers him saying, “It’s easy to say no, but the hard part about it is how to say yes to make the story happen.”) Such stories reflect a sense of personal commitment to the art of movies in general and to the vision of individual directors—who, to all appearances in “Cinematic Immunity,” don’t order crew members to take wild risks but, rather, leave the crew with an extraordinary degree of autonomy to realize the shots, and even whole scenes, that the directors have planned.
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The physical dangers inherent in productions at this time were inseparable from the stories appearing onscreen, because simulation was more or less impossible; filmmaking was analog. Art departments were virtual armies of set dressers and sign painters, and the sheer quantity of art work, as well as the ingenuity that went into making sets and locations both plausible to the eye and feasible for filming, is astounding. For “Midnight Cowboy,” the prop master Richard Adee covered an entire block in Little Italy with artificial snow—tiny plastic flakes, shot out of a blower—and then “used cotton to drape the window edges and stoops and all that kind of stuff.” On “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” the station platforms were all done in one abandoned station, which had to be quickly made to look like a whole series of stations. “We silkscreened miles of tiles,” a charge scenic artist—a term for those responsible for painting and texturing the set—recalls, and the fake tiles were then mounted on sticky tape. “It was miles of it—the Seventh Avenue line at 28th Street and all that and all those numbers with tiles.” Another charge scenic artist describes the fifteen hundred painted signs required for Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X”: “I mean, it could be fifty signs in a building, and the second-floor signs and above could all be vinyl letters—we didn’t care because that’s way up in the air—but everything below that had to be handmade.” Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence” required the installation of five thousand cobblestones.
The hours were long, stressful, and emotionally demanding. Priestley recalls a moment on “The Exorcist” when William Friedkin, the director, surveyed a two-story set that the crew had built in a New York studio to represent a house in Georgetown:
Crews often found release in rowdiness, camaraderie, practical jokes, and the inevitable coping mechanisms of drink and drugs. Russell Engels, a gaffer, or chief lighting technician, on the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona,” spoke of his union’s reputation: “I mean, those stories came from what it was like in my father’s days in the sixties and seventies. There were some really tough crews, and a lot of alcoholism, drinking—tough, nasty guys on set.”
Amid such a tumult of exertion and indulgence, the art of directing may seem like an afterthought or a footnote to the sheer volume of creative work that occurs even when the camera isn’t rolling. Yet the interview subjects of “Cinematic Immunity” emerge as discerning observers of the ways that directors, their bosses, worked, and they keenly distinguish the marks of artistry and the varied methods by which it’s achieved. The director Sidney Lumet, New York-based and at the head of many city-set productions, is a major figure in the book, for such films as “Network,” “The Wiz,” and “The Verdict,” and his crew members are alert to his technical virtuosity and also his limitations: Priestley, speaking of the constantly evolving nature of shoots, says, “It’s not very cut and dry, except if you work for Sidney Lumet.” Mitchell Lillian, the key grip on “9 ½ Weeks,” described the methods that its director, Adrian Lyne, imposed on Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke: “He would do crazy things to build an insane tension. He wanted them to be angry, and he got them angry. It was fucked up.”
One of my favorite anecdotes in “Cinematic Immunity” illustrates the way that crew members’ inventiveness can sometimes elevate the art of relatively modest filmmakers to great heights. During the shoot of “Saturday Night Fever,” directed by John Badham, the movie’s star, John Travolta, briefly paused filming to be with his partner, Diana Hyland, who had cancer (and died of it, in 1977). During the downtime, crew members came up with the famous shot, filmed after Travolta returned, of his feet walking rhythmically as the camera then rises to his face. Nirenberg gets the story in fascinating detail. It required special equipment, which the crew made, so that Priestley could execute the shot: “I lay on this piece of wood. My elbows were tucked in. My feet were on a board across to take my weight. They pulled me down the street. John was walking. My hands are almost rubbing [the ground] sometimes. As we walked to the music, two grips, one grip on each side, had a long board across the wood, and they lifted me—lifted the whole board up with me on it.” The crew did something similar to bring to the screen one of Travolta’s celebrated dance scenes, which Priestley also shot: “We were tied together, and we both lean back against the rope, and then as he moved to his left I moved to my left. We were counterbalancing each other, and we spin around. I had the camera on him. And that’s how the background was so fast.”
The long experience and tight teamwork of unionized camera crews, art departments, and so forth from production to production both maintains high professional standards and reinforces long-standing professional norms. Muller, the assistant camera operator, recognizes the danger of habit and routine: “A lot of these New York movies run together. They all become the same because you see the same people. All you do is change the name on the slate. If you do one picture after another, it becomes like a factory.” Engels, the gaffer, describes the essence of his job thus: “I have to learn what you [the director of photography and camera operator] want in a week and forget what I did for the last few years. I gotta learn his style right away and get it going.” Sharon Ilson-Burke, a makeup artist, says, “Your job is to kind of interpret something that other people have been masticating for months, or however long they’ve had a character—the actor, the director, the producers—and you have to figure out what they’re trying to say they want the character to look like, you know what I mean? And then you have to kind of let it go.”
Something that becomes apparent in “Cinematic Immunity” is that directors, for all their imaginative vision and dramatic sensibility, create, foremost, a social reality on the set, of which the events filmed—however artificial the design, however fantastic the story, however hyperbolic the performances—are a camera-angled slice of life. The views of the art of directing provided by the participants in Nirenberg’s book are exquisitely detailed and tangy with emotional immediacy. The vivid intricacy of their reminiscences delights me but doesn’t surprise me. Directors, screenwriters, and actors are all, in their different ways, professional storytellers, and they approach the experience of filmmaking with the same transformative power that they bring to their art, shaping their experiences by shearing off details that seem extraneous. By contrast, people who aren’t experts in this kind of transformation—which is to say, just about everyone else—are, instead, experts in memory. Their experience is raw material, and, for crew members, the passion and memories attached to this raw material are intensified by relations of class and power. It’s inevitable that employees cathect and retain the words and deeds of their bosses, whose privilege also entails forgetting.
The two prime artistic heroes who emerge in the intertwined tellings of “Cinematic Immunity” are Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee. Scorsese is first discussed in regard to the making of “Goodfellas,” where he provides fascinating and paradoxical contrasts of freewheeling spontaneity and meticulous planning—and, in both modes, manifests an intensely collaborative approach. The first assistant director Joe Reidy describes a scene:
Nirenberg devotes particular attention to the movie’s so-called Copa shot—a three-minute take with a constantly roving camera, in which the characters played by Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco go from the street into the Copacabana night club by way of its kitchen. (In a footnote, he recommends that readers head to YouTube to watch it before reading about it.) The story of the shoot, at the real-life club, in midtown Manhattan, is a breathtaking adventure. Scorsese, surveying the kitchen, noted that it had only one door but suggested that a quick scenery change could make it look like two doors while the camera was following the characters. Reidy remembers:
Moreover, as the assistant director Joe Burns recalls, there weren’t enough extras to fill the ranks both of people in the street and people in the night club:
Reidy says that, even in the course of this exacting choreography, which was rehearsed at length and took some fifteen takes, there was still room for imaginative freedom: “There was a guy named Mr. Anthony. We pan over to Mr. Anthony. That was a thought that Marty had on the day. He didn’t plan that. We had to find somebody in the crowd to be Mr. Anthony.” In the finished film, that quick camera glance—amid the darting and gliding of the long Copa shot—imparts a thrilling sense of spontaneity, and it’s no surprise to learn that it has its origins in actual spontaneity on the set.
Spike Lee figures in “Cinematic Immunity” for “Do the Right Thing,” “Mo’ Better Blues,” and “Malcolm X,” and it’s for the first of this trio, from 1989, that his originality—artistic, practical, professional, and in human relations—becomes most apparent. His heroism, as described in the book, involves matters that reach deep into the history of New York’s cinematic craft unions. The jobs of Nirenberg’s interviewees were, essentially, manual-labor and crafts positions, but they were unusually lucrative, promising entry into the middle class: Maggie Ryan, a scenic artist, tells of a veteran colleague whose accountant asked him, “Are you a lawyer?” One result was nepotism; as Muller says, “It was a father-and-son business for years. It was difficult to break in if you didn’t have the proper last name.” As a result, the film crafts in New York had very few Black members, something that Lee, in “Do the Right Thing,” took it upon himself to change, Nirenberg’s interviewees said. He hired experienced white crew members whose jobs also involved training young Black crew members. “You are going to train yourself out of a job,” Jonathan Burkhart, an assistant camera operator on the film, recalls Lee telling him. “You’re going to work on all the films I do—commercials, music videos—and one day I’m not going to call you anymore because I have the department that I need.”
The crew was indeed integrated, and Kevin Ladson, a Black prop master who’d got his break on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” recounts a revealing moment when its members’ experience of the shoot converged with the work they were helping to create:
The people on set weren’t seeing what was in the frame, they experienced the staged event in its physical presence, as a sort of real-life theatre—which comes through, to historic effect, onscreen, by way of Lee’s attention-concentrating, detail-grabbing style and his documentary-like alertness to the passionate reality of that fiction.
The consensus of the interview subjects is that the prime period of New York filmmaking was brought to an end by television, which involved far more corporate oversight of production and turned the process into an impersonal assembly line. Some say that the quantity of productions required by streaming services has diluted the talent pool of crews. Others blame social media for hindering crew members from socializing—and carousing—together. One scenic artist blames anti-harassment training for inhibiting crews’ social bonds, though there is general agreement that the industry’s changes in that regard, its increased supervision and regulation, have been for the better. Nirenberg subtly interjects his own perspective, in a definition that he includes in a glossary for technical terms that follows the interviews: “Show cards: Hand-painted signs that were everywhere, on all businesses, before everything became computer-generated.”
Whatever the current state of social relations on the set may be, the movies themselves have stratified, in the same way that economic relations have done in the twenty-first century. The industry now embraces extremes of artistic ambition and extremes of commercial synthetics that wouldn’t have found their way to the public decades earlier. The longtime illusion of a mainstream industry involved truncating both ends of the bell curve, the radical and the mercenary. There’s now no mainstream because there are now fewer illusions, both regarding the public and regarding what goes on behind the scenes; the transparency and the resulting scrutiny that extend to the economics and social life of movies extend to the art of cinema as well. The social world of filmmaking, which is the prime subject of “Cinematic Immunity,” has advanced in step with the art. What these changes bode for the business side is another matter altogether—one outside the control of crews and, for that matter, outside the prophetic purview of critics. ♦