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Filming on Location, 1971
Why are those people in this crowded photo staring at you so intently? There’s a camera, so it’s a film shoot. For clues, look at the general surroundings. It’s an industrial area of New York. The styles of the cars, haircuts and clothes suggest the very early ‘70s. The man pointing a light meter at you is Gordon Willis. The anxious-looking man with the bushy beard is Francis Coppola. It’s the spring of 1971, fifty years ago, and you’re an actor in “The Godfather”. You have no idea what audiences will think of the finished film. In truth, neither do Gordy or Francis.
Acting is always tougher than it looks, and doing it in the streets, with crowds behind barricades, is often the toughest of all. On a sound stage, or on Broadway, you don’t have to outshout jets landing at La Guardia, sanitation men filling garbage trucks, sirens, dogs, or drunks yelling, “Where’s Brando?” When that camera rolls, you’re supposed to shut out all that you see and hear in front of you, and inhabit the mind of a mafia don’s son in December 1945.
One of the biggest challenges of film acting is filming “out of continuity”—out of the actual order of scenes in the story. This happens even in Hollywood, but when almost the whole picture is filmed on the lot, the production is usually free to put up sets and rehearse the actors in the same order as the screenplay. Everyone likes working this way, when it’s possible. On location it’s rarely possible. Access to locations is often time limited, sometimes severely. There are only so many hours when New York will close off the streets around Rockefeller Center to film in front of Radio City Music Hall, so you’d better be ready to get everything you need as fast as you can. Art takes a back seat to the clock.
Seasons also control scheduling. “Godfather” started filming in March, when NYC days are still dark and rainy, so it shot most of its interiors first, as well as night scenes. Then, with better weather and longer daylight hours later in the spring, they filmed the beginning of the movie, Connie Corleone’s wedding, as well as scenes near the end, in churches, cemeteries, and on the steps of Wall Street. This scattered scheduling is tough on actors trying to maintain a consistent character arc. “Okay, remind me, at this point, how cold and ruthless am I supposed to be by now? 20%? 50%? 90%?”
Cover sets are a bane of acting in movies, and they can’t be avoided. A cover set is just a backup to cover a change in schedule, generally because the weather is no good. If you’ve spent all weekend memorizing five pages of dialog and working up your confidence for an important scene, it’s understandably disappointing to have a last-minute shift over to a substitute scene that neither you, the other actors, or the director had focused on yet. That’s why the backup scene is usually chosen to be something simple you’d have to film sometime soon anyway, like an office discussion or one side of a telephone conversation. Cue cards are made up to replace the memorization that couldn’t take place. Actors understand the practical need for it, but it doesn’t happen on a studio lot, or on a Broadway stage.
Controlling the streets and crowds is always a compromise. Filming permits are precise right down to the general direction the cameras will be pointed. But as much space as the permits clear for filming, most casts and crews also require as much or more space behind the cameras, for their fleets of trucks. People are often astonished how many vehicles are needed to make a movie, each one driven by burly Teamsters. At the least, you need a camera services truck, and “Godfather” had one of the first, a walk-in studio camera department called a Cinemobile. Fouad Said, the Egyptian-born cinematographer of TV’s “I Spy”, invented and marketed the Cinemobile to deal with the many locations of that globe-trotting show, revolutionizing the camera production side of going on location.
You’ll need a generator truck to support the colossal number of lights, and probably a production office in a motorhome or trailer. On big productions with lots of bit players and extras, the costume and make-up departments each get their own trailers. All this stuff needs to be guarded. All these people have to be fed. Rest rooms must be provided. On the perimeter there needs to be a mobile command post for NYPD, and parking space for nervous studio executives, agents of the stars, assistants, and (at least in the time of “The Godfather”, and for thirty years thereafter) messengers carrying cans of film to the lab. While all this is going on, advance crews are preparing the next location before the whole caravan moves to it, and yet-more junior advance crews are preparing the ones after that.
Fifty years ago, filming anywhere but on a Los Angeles studio lot was treated as “on location”. To some degree, it still is. The term TMZ refers to an arbitrary “thirty mile zone”, a map radius drawn from a spot near Wilshire Boulevard. Anything beyond it is treated as on location, triggering contract clauses requiring special rates of pay, and rules regarding meals and lodging.
New York was always a special case. Silent films were made in New York for years before cameras ever rolled on the west coast. When sound arrived, there was a brief rush to quickly and cheaply throw together sound stages in New York, in the mistaken belief that Broadway actors would be needed for the talkies. Once that 1928-’31 fad died out, those primitive, bare-bones facilities would be all the city’s film businesses could offer. To the major studios, NYC was where their corporate headquarters were, not where films were made. With rare exceptions, Hollywood filmmaking teams made short visits to the streets of Manhattan only when they needed a specific outdoor city scene for films like “On the Town”, “North by Northwest” or “West Side Story”. The indoor scenes were filmed in Los Angeles, which had, and still has, the best movie-making equipment, facilities, and technical personnel in the world.
New York’s “native” film crews made do with a handful of TV shows, a few low budget independent films, and from about 1950 on, lots of TV commercials. They were familiar with problems like limited room, congested streets, fickle weather, and sidewalk onlookers. They knew how to navigate the bureaucracy to get filming permits. Without the resources of the west coast crews, cameramen like Boris Kaufman, Owen Roizman and Gerald Hirschfeld made up for it with a gritty urban look.
A couple of things made filming “The Godfather” on location a particular challenge. “The Godfather” was made with a predominantly east coast, local crew, but Coppola didn’t want that hard, bright, realistic east coast look. He was aiming for something statelier and solemn, something hard to create with a gigantic cast and crew in the streets of 1971. Unlike “The French Connection”, then the most recent big-time crime picture to film in New York, this was going to be a period piece, set from 1945 to ’55. A lot of the outdoors was going to have to be modified to fit that era, or excluded from the camera image.
For another thing, more than 12 million people had already read the book. Unlike, say, “Star Wars”, it wouldn’t be a film that came out of nowhere. The film crews weren’t going to be able to sneak up on the city. Readers already knew what the big scenes were. Casting Marlon Brando was controversial; everyone wanted to see what he looked like as the Don, but Life Magazine had been promised an exclusive on pictures of him. Few people knew who Al Pacino was. Crowd control would be a bigger than usual problem.
New York City is full of Italian-Americans, all of whom seemed to have read the novel, and there were strong mixed feelings. A lot of people were excited about the film. But a time when Black groups demanded respect and an end to insulting stereotypes, many white ethnics were in no mood to accept insults themselves.
Protective leagues and anti-defamation groups sprang up. That spring, my girlfriend was living on Second Avenue and 70th Street. We watched the nightly Italian-American protest marches at the FBI’s New York offices up the block on Third. Since the storyline of “The Godfather” would involve filming in Italian neighborhoods south of Greenwich Village and on the edge of Spanish Harlem, it was necessary to establish good community relations. In the blunt, practical world of that era, that meant payoffs, and lots of them, to “neighborhood groups” that had the muscle to encourage cooperation as well as do things the cops couldn’t legally do, like scaring nervy kids off fire escapes that would be on camera. It wasn’t done by Marquis of Queensbury rules, but it worked.
Location filming has its moments of humor. When Vito Corleone was gunned down in the streets of Little Italy, all the spectators standing on the fire escapes of the non-filming side of the block cheered Marlon Brando’s elaborate fall to the ground. After the director called “cut”, Brando stood up and graciously bowed to the crowd. When the production moved uptown, way uptown to Pleasant Avenue to film Sonny Corleone’s street beat-down of his brother-in-law, James Caan was surprised that his for-the-camera brutality made him the hero, not the villain, of the noisy mob of local onlookers.
By July, a subset of the crew had moved on to Italy. By this point, Paramount was cheapening the production, lightening the load wherever it could, but Coppola was able to convince them that going forward with the Sicily shoot would add a dimension to Michael Corleone’s character that you wouldn’t necessarily get filming in the studio’s preferred location, upstate New York. With the cast and crew gone, New York’s gossipy tabloid media turned to other subjects.
That summer, Academy Award winning cinematographer, inventor, and entrepreneur Ross Lowell was testing the idea of teaching a film lighting class at New York University. Based on the success of that prototype summer course, he’d begin decades of NYU instruction on working on location with portable light fixtures, many from his own company, Lowel-Light. I was his student assistant in July-August 1971. Since it was his first time on campus, he pulled out all the stops, and we got to meet many accomplished movie cameramen (as they all were back then). One of Ross’s friends was Gordon Willis, fresh off the “Godfather” job.
He came across as an artistic risk-taker who, unusually, was plain-spoken and unpretentious. Willis talked about how to subtly light a location, without overdoing it to the point of losing the qualities that made you like it to begin with. (I’ll give him that; I doubt that a single Godfather viewer has ever said, “Why did they have to overdo it with all those glaring lights?”) Willis complimented Ross Lowell on the usefulness of his Lowel-Lights, and declared that thanks to them, he no longer carried bulky arc lights in his location equipment packages. One tenth the weight and size, less wasted heat, fewer workers to attend them. Location filmmaking had come a long way. Better film from Eastman and better lenses were also making working in less light possible.
He knew, of course, that everyone wanted to hear insider stuff, and despite a reserved manner he gave us some. He said that Coppola was “to a fault” in the habit of bringing a magazine photo or a 16mm film clip to the set, ostensibly to praise his interest in detail but with a slight suggestion of risking being too derivative of older examples.
Still, Gordy was gentlemanly, especially by Hollywood standards. He thanked Coppola for defending him to the studio. Willis knew Paramount didn’t like his dark “look” and joked that the soundman was also in the doghouse because of Brando’s sometimes indecipherable mumbling. “It was a hard shoot.” The actors, he said simply, are great; we’ll just have to see how people react to the film. Not a ringing endorsement. Nothing bad, but little that suggested code language for “In a couple of months this will be the biggest box office hit since ‘Gone With the Wind’”. Without naming names he said that he thought “the girl” (Diane Keaton) had been miscast, but he wasn’t mean about it. It was a shrug.
Willis talked about the challenges of making a film in real places that’s set roughly 25 years in the past. Ross, who’d visited the set of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” earlier in the year, described how equally smart selection of real locations, and the era’s new lightweight camera and lighting equipment, had enabled Kubrick to film in (then) present day London yet present a credible vision of life roughly 25 years in the future.
An aged mobster’s regal gestures to his family’s sacred honor are an inspired imitation of an older generation’s roots in rural Europe. For the writer, the director, and the actors alike, they were a distant, stirring memory of the America of their parents and grandparents. When “The Godfather” opened in 1972, critics jokingly wondered if the Mafia was so poor that they could only afford 10-watt lightbulbs. But for hundreds of millions of film viewers around the world, the dark, dignified images of “The Godfather” became the definitive look of a time and place that’s now almost beyond living witness.
Published in General
Where to start on this? Every paragraph or so, you’re reminding me of something. Like, John Carpenter using super light sensitive film stock on Escape from New York, so he could do nighttime street scenes with only the real world lighting, that were visible for blocks, with a gritty, ultra-realistic feel. Or the first completely digital movie I’m aware of seeing, 28 Days Later, eliminating the need for the messengers. Or… or… or…
Another awesome post, Gary. Packed with peanuts.
This Crest Toothpaste commercial, filmed on the streets of NY in late 1967, stars my brother James, then age 8. I got to watch the shoot, which took all day. Location work was fascinating even when I was fifteen. It was photographed and directed by Len Steckler, a big deal in still photography who was breaking into cinematography.
James became a cop and finished his NYPD career in Aviation (helicopters). Since 2001 he’s been a pilot for various rich NYC folks.
I recall a couple of on-location movie scenes in Washington DC. I was amazed by the number of people involved, the technology, and the time invested in something that may last than a minute on the screen or even be cut altogether.
I saw Will Smith deliver two lines outside of a Georgetown townhouse (the movie with Gene Hackman Enemy of the State) and I think it was cut. The latest Wonder Woman movie had a crew redo the block in front of my office (fake phone booth, old fire hydrant) and a parked truck full of a mind-blowing array of electronics and cables a week in advance for a scene of maybe a few seconds.
Another outstanding industry post, Gary. Thanks so much!
Now we know who got all the talent in your family.
This is of course true even for productions on a back lot. What I find interesting is that as productions come and go from the lot, so do fleets of trailers for talent, the catering trucks, and the equipment moving in and out. Lights and power are handled by the studio, but there is still an ebb and flow of these vehicles on the lot as productions come and go.
I’m always fascinated to learn about the ways that practical considerations, rather than artistic decisions, often dictate what we see on the screen. I started college with an ambition to become a filmmaker, but when I began to get a sense of the sheer expense and logistical challenges involved in making even a modest student film, that (among other things) dissuaded me from pursuing such a career.
If you’re a Trekkie, you’re familiar with Vazquez Rocks, a distinctive stone formation that served as the backdrop for Kirk’s fight with the Gorn (among many other sequences in that and other series). I learned fairly recently that that location was used so frequently not just because of its otherworldly look, but because it lay just inside the Thirty Mile Zone, which meant it was relatively cheap to shoot there.
Reading about all of the lighting equipment and their power needs made me think of some things I’ve heard the producers of modern shows talk about. Nowadays, digital HD cameras are sensitive enough that many scenes, even nighttime scenes, can be shot using only ambient lighting. In one of their podcasts, I recall one of the producers of Better Call Saul talking about how one of their night shots was being ruined because of a light source they couldn’t identify; eventually they realized that the light from the red “recording” LED on the front of the camera was illuminating the scene noticeably. This kind of sensitivity must make it a lot easier, and cheaper, to film on location.
Okay, since you brought up that show…
One of the sons of one of my kid brothers (I’m not sure I’m supposed to talk about it, so I’m being vague) is an occasional extra on Better Call Saul, and my brother has had occasion to be on set late at night, because his son also happens to own an old truck that has been in one or more scenes and my brother has driven it over for him. My brother tells me that he’s seen the star of the show — forget his name but I thought he was great in Breaking Bad — and also that the craft services food is really great. (But my brother is like me in that he will eat anything.)
It’s a definite change from when I first arrived in Los Angeles. Some on-the-lot support functions are outsourced to third parties, who specialize in that area.
Actors who used to say “I’ll be in my dressing room” now say “I’ll be in my trailer”. Trailers were once the province of distant locations, but over the years they’ve been brought into the studio gates, parked right outside the sound stage. And why not? The 1930s-vintage dressing rooms were often pretty modest (at old-time Universal, outright shabby), whereas a motorhome or trailer can be equipped and furnished just the way the actor wants it. They bring it to the job themselves, and the production pays the actors rental for them, a minor part of the overall deal.
There’s still (usually) a studio commissary, but it’s operated under contract by caterers, who also now use the modern variety of food trucks to keep the cast and crew happy.
AFAIK, Clavius’s company is unique in today’s Hollywood as a camera manufacturer as well as being a content provider. The other studios have backed away from providing rental cameras, though their TV productions often lease equipment on a long term basis.
I have nothing but praise for what that company has done to revitalize the once-dominant MGM lot. It thrived in 1939; it’s a booming success today. But in between, like, say, forty years ago, it was a ghost town, ready to be torn down and replaced by condos.
The Vasquez Rocks came up yesterday in the PiT in response (in part) to this thread.
The Paramount lot has a pit, just like Ricochet! Okay, their pit is nothing like our PIT, but it actually had a name and a formal sound stage number, pretty grand for what was little more than a hole in the ground. This small “stage” is seen in a bunch of Treks, both TV and film. It’s often seen “dressed” as a spot in the Arctic, or a caveman’s hideout, or an animal’s lair.
Paramount is not a large lot, and is hemmed in by city streets and dense development. It’s amazing how much they cram into it. They even had one of the last and biggest water “tanks”, used for scale-model flotillas in battle scenes, and for the parting of the Red Sea in 1956’s The Ten Commandments.
Possibly my favorite show.
Bob Odenkirk. (Also great in BCS) have you not seen it?
Everything about it is great, especially the writing. But notable is the cinematography (?) the shot angles, the lighting and such . Very different and creative.
The extras are great too!
Asking Gary, have you seen this show? If not I think you would find it worth your time.
Thank you on behalf of my employer. The facilities group took advantage of the Covid shut-down to redo the underground infrastructure on the lot, replacing pipes and conduits that were 60 years old on a 40 year lifespan. A major project to modernize the soundstages is about to get under way. The old Studio Arts Building, former home of JC Backings, is being renovated into a production office and meeting place. JC Backings made the painted background that allowed productions to appear in a location when they were actually on a soundstage. Modern special effects made them obsolete.
And we even have a rainbow on the lot.
They also have the Big Blue Wall (I think it is still blue). I recall seeing a man on a cherry picker holding a large spray gun creating clouds against the blue backdrop. I was amazed at how each of his applications of paint worked perfectly. Real skill.
I’d like to reflect on a couple of things. First, 50 years before The Godfather was filmed was 1921. This was 8 years before the Oscars were first awarded. There were only silent movies. Your symbol, Buster Keaton was in six films that year; it appears that all of them were a half hour or shorter.
Second, as we were both born in 1952 and are 69 years old, I find it interesting to look at what was happening 69 years before my birth, which would be 1883. The President was Chester Arthur, who succeeded James Garfield after his assignation in 1881. There were only 38 states; the only states west of Colorado were California, Nevada and Oregon.
Thanks for the good advice, Franco. I’ve seen an episode that was, I think, mid-series and always meant to get back to it. Your comment gives me the kick in the butt to get around to it. I thought it was one of the smarter ways to do a spin-off series.
Thanks for your posts, Susan! The compliment means even more coming from someone whose writing I’ve always admired.
It’s sobering to realize that our lifetimes are now one third of the way back to the War of 1812!
Using multiplication, my life-time ( I’m a year younger) times itself (squared)divided by Pi 3.14 brings us smack in the middle of the fall of Rome. (!)
Seriously it is strange to watch how we conceptualize time through the years.
That was a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at movie-making, Gary!
Do movie companies run into the same problem that rock bands face when touring in major cities, as outlined by Frank Zappa in his autobiography? He says that many cities require visiting bands to use local union-only workers to do mundane things like unload their sound equipment from the trucks for $50.00 an hour and many other tasks that the band and their crews would have simply done by themselves. He says this money extortion kept him from playing in many cities.
Everything is unionized. I’m sure Gary can give you the lowdown better than I, but everything is codified. An actor or a director can’t adjust a prop, for example.
Broadway tickets would be 50% less without unions. The actors and musicians are making way less than the union guys.
It never occurred to me that Broadway would run into these hustlers, too.
It’s actually the same union, IATSE, but the stagehands have a real racket going. They really do squeeze the producers. The reason is straightforward: they have what amounts to a monopoly. If Broadway doesn’t like the pay rates, they’re welcome to move productions elsewhere, but unlike film production, which can move, audiences will not take a PATH train to Newark to see a hit musical just because it would save the backers $30,000 a week.
The answer is, “It depends”. If the film is being made by a company that’s a signatory to the unions, they’ll pay union wages. Most films are made by (legal) shell companies, not by the studio that is actually putting up the money. Those shell companies are sometimes subject to the same rules, but not always. At the moment, the major dispute involves the streaming companies. They were given cheaper rates when they were new and small. But now, Netflix, Amazon, and others are as big and rich as the studios, and the unions are understandably yelling foul. (And you know who’s backing them all the way? The big studios, who are sick of these poor little $45 billion startups getting a better deal.)
There are only two film unions of note, the IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators of the United States and Canada–usually abbreviated to “the IA”–and the Teamsters. The IA is not unreasonable about wages, and is not generally resented by studios. If anything, they’ve long been lax about things like working conditions, work hours, and safety. Both the IA and the Teamsters are widely disliked within the union movement for seldom honoring other unions’ picket lines. In fact, in the blacklist era IATSE took the lead in kicking Communists out of Hollywood.
In the OP, I wrote about cinematographer Ross Lowell, whose combination of genius and (uncommon) common sense resulted in gadgets and work practices that made location shooting easier and faster. Here’s another Ross idea. Large, heavy lights and reflectors needed heavy sandbags to hold them down. Dragging the sandbags around, loading and unloading them was backbreaking work for decades. Ross Lowell had a simple, elegant solution that no one had ever thought of; he found a manufacturer of plastic water jugs, like gallon milk containers but sturdier. Even the most remote film location has water nearby. They were delivered empty, filled for filming, and emptied for transport. Brilliant, simple, and cheap, like another of his ideas, cloth-backed “gaffer” tape.
Nothing says New York City as I remember it, like The French Connection.
I can almost smell it.
Here’s a fan-made montage that really gets the spirit of the film across. “French Connection”, unlike “Godfather”, did its daytime exteriors when it was cold, and it shows. People littered more than they do now, and it also shows. 1971 was a pretty low time for NYC. “The French Connection” is sort of a documentary of those days. If you look closely at about 2:05 in, you’ll see, in the background, a sign of a future generation’s New York sadness, the World Trade Center being constructed in the background.
In 1968, “Goodbye, Columbus” shot on location in New York. Someone on the production side screwed up one of the filming permits. They were granted police lines to keep spectators out of the shot, but they asked for the wrong side of the street, and at that time of year, it made a big difference (sun angles). So Gerry Hirschfeld, the director of photography, was forced to point the camera at the “wrong side”–the unprotected side of the street, where there were mobs of highly visible people staring and waving at Richard Benjamin and Ali McGraw walking down Fifth Avenue. How to solve this problem on the spot? Simple–and ingenious.
First, they moved the camera back a bit and used a longer lens (“zoomed” it forward) to compensate. This threw the background slightly out of focus, helping a bit. Then, they sent a female extra and all of the production’s still photographers to stand close to the crowds behind the barricades. She paraded around as if it was a shoot for a fashion ad, and the photogs made sure that (although it was broad daylight) there were lots of flashes going off, facing the movie camera.
So the end result was, they’re walking down the street across from the Plaza Hotel, and all you see behind them is a typical New York City scene of glamour, a Vogue-type cover shoot in progress. You hardly notice it.
That might have been better than the movie!