Exposure: Rick Baker
If there is one person in Hollywood worthy of laying claim to the crown worn by Jack P. Pierce – Universal Studios’ makeup genius of the 1930s and ‘40s (Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man) – it is Rick Baker. The special effects makeup designer grew up watching monster movies on late night television, and burst into prominence while still in his 20’s, winning an Emmy Award® for his startling aging makeup for Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974). Just seven years later, Baker won the first of his six Academy Awards® for John Landis’ horror comedy, An American Werewolf in London. With The Wolfman, starring Benicio del Toro, Baker not only barks back up the same tree that first earned him Oscar gold, but he puts his own spin on Pierce’s 1941 classic, which starred the legendary Lon Chaney, Jr. Matt Hurwitz went throat to nuzzle with the master of creature makeup to hear about Baker’s designs for the newest incarnation of Hollywood’s favorite monster, as well as his thoughts on the classic films that first fired his imagination.
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Exposure: Peter Jackson
Between his earliest low-budget films and later studio-sponsored efforts, New Zealand-born filmmaker Peter Jackson has blended inventive visual effects (sometimes hilariously over-the-top in nature) and photographic sleight of hand to portray apparitions, both ghastly and ghostly. These treatments have varied greatly down through the years: Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead show grotesque horrors through a darkly-comedic glass and a “home movie” approach to filmmaking that is utterly unique. Heavenly Creatures, by contrast, captured the fantasies of teenaged girls in a delicate, even artful approach that was both giddy and ethereal. Jackson’s acclaimed The Lord of the Rings trilogy, along with King Kong (all shot by Andrew Lesnie, ACS, ASC), boldly reaffirmed his ability and inclination to depict fantastic realms within a deeply felt drama, human or otherwise. With his new adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel, The Lovely Bones, Jackson explores a much different “middle earth” than any J.R.R. Tolkien imagined; a Pennsylvania suburb in 1973, where the ghastly takes the form of a serial killer of young girls, and the ghostly the spirit of his most recent victim trapped between life and what lies beyond.
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Exposure: Ken Burns
Ken Burns was born in Brooklyn and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He enrolled at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1971 with, as he puts its, “a naïve notion of preparing for a career as a narrative filmmaker in the tradition of John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock.” Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes were among his mentors on the faculty. They were both still photographers who focused on socially relevant issues.
“(Jerome and Elaine) taught me that there can be more drama in documentaries than in fiction filmmaking,” Burns says. “I also learned to use the camera to look under the surface, and find the meanings and symbolic importance of the images we recorded.”
In 1975, Burns and several classmates, including Buddy Squires, organized Florentine Films. They lived on the edge of poverty, working freelance for the BBC, an Italian TV network, and some industrial film producers.
Brooklyn Bridge was the first of 22 nonfiction films produced under the Florentine Films banner. Subsequent subjects have ranged from Thomas Jefferson and Huey Long biopics to the histories of the Civil War, World War II, baseball and jazz music.
The documentaries produced by Burns and his colleagues form a “living history” of America and Americans that is preserved (on film) for future generations. The nonfiction master’s most recent venture is The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a 12-hour documentary that premiered on PBS in late September in six two-hour segments.
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Exposure: Debbie Allen
Fans of the old television series Fame will never forget hearing: “You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying in sweat,” from a tough-as-nails teacher whose compassion and sense of purpose was matched only by her drive. It’s been well over 20 years since Lydia Grant, aka Debbie Allen, said those words; and two decades later, Lydia’s passion and drive haven’t dissipated at all. In fact, as cinematographer Mark Doering-Powell (Everybody Loves Chris) says, producer, director, choreographer, teacher Debbie Allen is a lot like her character. “Especially when she’s working with young people. When she’s directing, she’s fast, fun, and moves the camera. She has unbelievable energy and an infectious laugh.”
Allen, who broke onto the scene with Fame, is living the dream those students fantasized. She’s received three Emmy Awards honoring her choreography, and two Emmys and one Golden Globe for her role as Lydia Grant. She’s appeared in, choreographed, directed or produced hundreds of television and stage projects, from award winning sitcoms and television movies, like the second highest rated original movie in Lifetime Cannel history, Life is Not a Fairytale: The Fantasia Barrino Story, to staged musicals at the famed Kennedy Center.
When her daughter returned from studying at the Kirov Ballet, Allen realized there was nowhere for Vivian to continue her dance education. “Are you waiting for permission?” Amistad production designer Rick Carter asked. “Jump off the ledge and open your own school.” Today, Debbie Allen’s Dance Academy (DADA) provides a venue for young dancers to study with instructors from the Kirov, Bolshoi and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. What about Lydia Grant, you ask? Well, fans can see her on the big-screen this month in MGM’s feature updating of Fame, albeit with a new incarnation of Lydia Grant - the school’s tough but caring Principal Simms.
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Exposure: Nathan Crowley
Born in London, production designer Nathan Crowley began his career working as a set designer on Hook and has actually worked far more in the U.S. than in the U.K. He’s been involved on a wide range of projects, moving up the ranks through action, period epic and comedic films like Braveheart, John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A., Mystery Men, and Mission Impossible II. Crowley is probably best known for his four film collaborations with fellow Londoner, Christopher Nolan; those include Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige and The Dark Knight, the latter two earning Oscar nominations for Best Achievement in Art Direction. Clearly, the versatile and talented designer has a way with period movies, whether it’s travelling back hundreds of years in the past to create a peat and fire village in the Scottish Highlands, or decades into the future for the wildly techno-noir Gotham City. It’s no wonder detail freak Michael Mann selected Crowley to recreate 1930’s gangland Middle America: his inventive approach to Public Enemies’ set design included fabricating a removable rubberized cobblestone street and re-welding the steel bars in the dilapidated Indiana jail from which Dillinger made his epic escape.
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Exposure: Chris Lebenzon
Any catalogue of major action films of the ’80s, ’90s or the current decade would be seriously lacking if it didn’t include more than a handful of titles edited or co-edited by Chris Lebenzon. The editor just completed work with director Tony Scott on The Taking of Pelham 123 but the pair first partnered up in 1986 on what was their mutual entrée to the world of studio action pictures, Top Gun. That film became an enormous hit and in many ways the template for today’s modern big-budget actioner. It also marked the beginning of the editor’s ongoing professional relationship with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Scott, and other A-list directors, like Tim Burton and Michael Bay.
While Lebenzon’s resume has plenty of impressive credits outside the action genre -Ed Wood, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Burton’s Sweeney Todd adaptation to name a few - he keeps returning to the kind of edge-of-your seat kinetic filmmaking that he’s been so successful with. Days of Thunder, Armageddon, Con Air, xXx, Pearl Harbor, Crimson Tide, Batman Returns and Beverly Hills Cop II is but a partial listing.
“I never said, ‘I’m going to make action movies my career,’” Lebenzon explains. “It just happened as things do with our lives, especially in the movie business. It’s where my instincts and the people I worked with have taken me.”
Exposure: Alan Ball
Many would argue the original programming that has come out of HBO in the last few decades has forever changed the face of television – for the better. Dating back two decades to the cable network’s airing of Robert Altman’s groundbreaking miniseries Tanner ’88, right on through more recent episodic series like David Chase’s The Sopranos, Darren Star’s Sex and the City, and David Simon’s The Wire, HBO has proven to be eerily prescient at finding the best talent in the industry and letting their creativity run wild in the night; an apt metaphor for their new show, True Blood, about vampires who live (nearly) normal lives among their mortal brethren in rural Louisiana. Created by Alan Ball, whose magical touch for juxtaposing the ridiculous with the sublime was off the charts in his last HBO effort, Six Feet Under, True Blood plays with genre, drama, Grand Guignol comedy, and who-knows-what-else in the most unexpected and visually entrancing ways. Currently shot by Matthew Jensen and Romeo Tirone in Los Angeles and on location in Shreveport, Louisiana, True Blood is, lest we forget, also the product of an Oscar-winning screenwriter [American Beauty], and Emmy-winning director [Six Feet Under], so to say Ball is a well-rounded filmmaker is a bit like saying vampires have fangs, as Matt Hurwitz found out in our May conversation.
Exposure: Patrick Lussier [web exclusive]
Filmmaker Patrick Lussier provides “deep background” on the making of My Bloody Valentine 3D, in a preview conversation of his keynote address at the upcoming Digital Cinema Summit at NABShow, Las Vegas. By John Rootenberg
Exposure: Albert Wolsky
This is not a rhetorical question: can you name another industry pro that’s worked with Bob Fosse, Paul Mazursky, Herbert Ross, Alan J. Pakula, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, John Schlesinger, Warren Beatty, Garry Marshall, Jonathan Demme, Mike Nichols, Robert Towne, and Sam Mendes, not to mention Sven Nykvist, ASC, Conrad Hall, ASC, James Wong Howe, ASC, and has been nominated for (and won) more Oscars than any of them? Paris-born, Manhattan-raised costume designer Albert Wolsky has learned a thing or two about filmmaking in his five decades in the industry, and he stitches a magnificent verbal collage about filmmaking past and present, including his work with cinematographer Robert Elswit, ASC, on the new romantic spy film, Duplicity. It’s probably no accident Wolsky cited Hitchcock’s North by Northwest as inspiration in dressing modern-day stars like Clive Owen and Julia Roberts: those who say movie royalty died off with Cary Grant need only witness the elegant and gracious designer in action. The man embodies old and new Hollywood in the best of all possible ways.
Exposure: James Gray
New York City-native James Gray studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California and made his first commercial film, Little Odessa, in 1994, when he was just 25 years old. That film (photographed by Tom Richmond) earned the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Since then, Gray has written and directed The Yards (2000, photographed by Harris Savides, ASC), We Own the Night (2007), and the forthcoming Two Lovers (both photographed by Joaquin Baca-Asay), all of which were each nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Gray’s cinematic turf is Brooklyn, where Two Lovers is set. But unlike past forays into the borough’s criminal underworld, the romantic drama features Joaquin Phoenix as a downhearted man, driven to connect with a dangerous woman (Gwyneth Paltrow). According to his colleagues, Gray is well versed in cinematic history and often describes his ideas by referring to specific scenes and shots from older movies. David Heuring caught up with this fiercely independent, regional filmmaker to get at the heart of his fascination with Brooklyn, and his working relationships with creative partners like Baca-Asay and Phoenix.
