interphaseMedia

Digicams are the success story of the decade. The world is taking more pictures than ever, thanks to convenience and low cost (never buy film again!).

Photo sharing site Flickr has passed the two billion picture mark, every cellphone carries a camera and in my tourist-honeypot hometown, vacationers tote DSLRs. But while film is almost dead, there are still some things that the old school does better.

Top

Shutter Lag
For landscape photography, this doesn't matter, but for anything that requires (literal) split second timing, even a tiny delay means the difference between a perfect smile and a grimace, a touchdown and a heap of sweaty men.

Digital cameras have delay built in at every step: Out of the box you have focus assist lamps, redeye-reducing bursts of flash, slow startup times and shutter lag.

DSLRs do better, but compacts - even Canon's top-end G9 - has woolly feeling gap between pressing the shutter and taking a picture.

Result? Frustration and missed pictures. There's a reason Henry Cartier-Bresson called it the "Decisive Moment". And that's why he used a Leica.

Top

Batteries
Everything runs on batteries these days, even film cameras, but digicams eat them like Mr. Wimpy goes through hamburgers.

Big LCDs, motorized zoom lenses, image stabilizers and CCDs (the first C stands for charged, remember?) mean that you need to be near mains power for frequent recharges, or carry a backpack full of spares.

Don McCullin toured war zones with a couple of Nikon Fs in a canvas bag. Today's photojournalist probably carries more kit than the soldiers he's tailing.

Top

Viewfinder
Three inches of LCD action on the back panel makes for easy reviewing of images, but sucks for actually taking pictures. Real photographers use a viewfinder, to block out unwanted distractions and to see what is really going on, and also because holding the camera to your head means less shaking, which can blur images.

But digital cameras have viewfinders, right? Yes, but they're the kind of thing you'd find on a plastic dime-store kaleidoscope, not a precision optical device. If you manage to squint into it, you'll only see a part of the image anyway, with some cams only showing a paltry 80% of the image area.

Congratulations: Your 12 megapixel box just became a 9.6 megapixel box. Again, DSLRs do better here, but you'll still never see the actual moment committed to pixels:
Everything blacks out when the mirror flips up.
The only thing that does this properly is a rangefinder, which has a big, bright image and even shows you what is going on outside the imaging area, and if you want a digital rangefinder, start saving. Leica's M8 will cost you BIG BUCK$ before you even look at lenses.

Top

Obsolescence
I still have a few film cameras around the place, some of them old. Forgetting about the Kodak Disc and APS, pretty much any camera bought since the original Leica can still be used today, and it'll probably turn out better results than when it was new, thanks to advances in film technology. The thing is, camera makers are now responsible for the whole bundle - the box and the image recording medium - so the only way to upgrade is to buy a whole new camera. Still using that old one megapixel $xxx xxx? How's that working out for you?

Top

Noise
Digital cameras have trouble with noise. The more megapixels you cram on a chip, the more noisy the images. And when it comes to shooting in low light, with high ISO speeds, forget about it. The pleasing and huge grain of, say, Ilford's Delta (ISO 3200) is a feature, not a bug, whereas the ugly, rainbow colored mess that is digital noise will never be praised for adding a grittiness to the photo. Film grain is so prized, in fact, that there is software to add it back in. Grubba Software's excellent TrueGrain takes scans of classic emulsions and uses a secret sauce to apply them to your ones and zeros. Want to see how the same photo looks shot on Kodak's Tri X, Konica's IR 750nm or Ilford's FP4? You got it.

Top

By CHRISTY LEMIRE, AP Movie Writer
Sat Jan 12, 3:42 PM ET

LOS ANGELES - David Benioff was sitting on a plane, having a perfectly pleasant conversation with an elderly passenger about his job as a screenwriter, when he mentioned that he was working on an adaptation of "The Kite Runner."

"She grabbed my arm and said, `That's my favorite novel. Don't change a word!'"

Based on the international best-seller about a man who returns to Afghanistan to right a childhood wrong, "The Kite Runner" is one of an inordinately large number of films in this year's awards race that come from books.

Screenwriters like Benioff are acutely aware of the inevitable comparisons between book and movie, and face the daunting challenge of telling a cinematic story that will resonate with audiences while remaining somewhat true to the source material.

Sure, every year there are several book-club favorites that turn up at the multiplex. Perusing the list of Academy Award best-picture winners can feel like a trip to Barnes & Noble, from "Gone With the Wind" and "The Godfather" to "The Silence of the Lambs" and "The English Patient."

But during this tumultuous, strike-hobbled awards season, at least a dozen movies with literary roots have real shots at winning the biggest prizes. Some of those novels, like Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner," are beloved and readers feel proprietary about them. Others, like Ian McEwan's "Atonement" and Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," seemed impossible to adapt because they were too complicated, too internal.

The adaptations themselves range from the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men," which maintained much of Cormac McCarthy's rich Texas vernacular, to Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," in which the writer-director merely used Upton Sinclair's "Oil!" as a leaping-off point. Still others come from novellas ("Lust, Caution"), graphic novels ("Persepolis") or are based on non-fiction works ("Charlie Wilson's War," "Into the Wild," "A Mighty Heart").

Benioff was lucky in that he'd read "The Kite Runner" before he got the job, and he'd started his screenplay before the book became a huge hit. Halfway through his first draft, though, he began to feel the pressure.

"It's an amazingly emotional story. People become attached to those characters and they really long for redemption for Amir, for him to make up for what he has done, to heal those wounds," he said.

As a novelist himself, having written "25th Hour" and adapted the screenplay for director Spike Lee, Benioff said he "felt an extra layer of pressure - I didn't want to let Khaled down. I liked him a lot and respected him a lot and he was a real ally. ... When it's your own book, you want the movie to be good but there's less pressure."

Veteran Ronald Harwood already has an Oscar for adapting 2002's "The Pianist," but still found himself pacing his Paris flat for weeks, trying to figure a way into "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." The late author, Bauby, was the editor of French Elle who suffered a paralyzing stroke at 43 and used his left eyelid to blink out what he wanted to say, letter by letter. Harwood tried to blink the alphabet to get into Bauby's head and it drove him mad.

Finally, it occurred to him to begin from Bauby's woozy, obscured perspective in the hospital room.

"That was my breakthrough," said Harwood, whose script is up for a Golden Globe and who has a new book of his own on the subject, "Ronald Harwood's Adaptations: From Other Works Into Films." "I thought, `This is the story I could tell - the story of his illness.' And the camera did the blinking - that was my idea, because it did two things: It gives the audience the sense of what it's like to have locked-in syndrome, and the second thing it did was that they didn't have to look at him for two hours, which would have been dreadful."

Christopher Hampton read "Atonement," a sweeping drama about a young girl's damaging lie, while on vacation and found it so obviously cinematic, he couldn't wait to dash home, pick up the phone and call someone about writing the script. The movie has a leading seven Globe nominations, including best screenplay.

"I didn't know it would turn out to be far harder than I thought it was going to be," said Hampton, who won an Oscar for 1988's "Dangerous Liaisons." "It was a long, long process with many, many drafts."

Adapting "Atonement" was daunting because it's about a writer and much of it takes place within the characters' interiors. Hampton initially had written in voiceover and a framing device - none of which exists in the finished version, which is closer to the book's structure.

"The most effective way is the simplest," he found. "Show it from the young girl's perspective, then loop back and show what really happened. It's so simple. I can't tell you how many different ways we approached it."

It helped to have a rapport with author McEwan, who chose Hampton himself and got an executive-producer credit.

"The relationship between the adapter and the adaptee, if there is such a word, is very delicate, because you're taking his child and educating it and changing it in your own way," Hampton said. "Fortunately, Ian is very experienced in the sense that he's had a lot of his books turned into movies and even done one or two himself. So he knows what the score is."

McEwan said he realizes the process of adaptation is "a kind of demolition job."

"You've got to boil down 130,000 words to a screenplay containing 20,000 words," the author said in the "Atonement" production notes.

Aaron Stockard, meanwhile, was terrified to meet author Dennis Lehane while adapting "Gone Baby Gone," his first produced screenplay, with director and longtime friend Ben Affleck. The crime drama comes from one of Lehane's books about a pair of private eyes in a rough part of Boston, and has made an awards front-runner of supporting actress Amy Ryan as a junkie mom.

"When he came on set for the first few times I intentionally avoided him. I felt like (he must have thought), `What in the world is this kid doing taking this story I wrote, with characters I've written six books about, and making these changes?'" Stockard said of Lehane, who also wrote "Mystic River." "But I kind of kept reminding myself, this needs to stand on its own. And I can't do it to please him and I can't do it to please fans of the book."

In determining what to cut and what to keep, "Lust, Caution" co-writer James Schamus says the key is to remember always that you're making a movie. Based on a short story about passion and betrayal by revered Chinese writer Eileen Chang, the film is a Globe nominee in the foreign language category.

"You have to keep that in mind - not that you are in some way responsible to or beholden to the underlying work," said Schamus, the Focus Features chief who's also adapted "The Ice Storm," "Ride With the Devil" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" for his longtime friend, director Ang Lee. "The primary task is to make sure the movie is good, not to make sure you're faithful to any part of the underlying work. That doesn't mean you're disrespectful - far from it."

Anderson only used about the first 100 pages of "Oil!" for "There Will Be Blood," the story of a volatile oilman which has Globe nominations for best picture and actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Still, that was a huge departure for the maker of the original ensemble pieces "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia."

"The benefits of the adaptation was that it helped me do things that my natural instincts wouldn't lead me to do," Anderson said in a recent Associated Press story, acknowledging his inclination to "spin off the rails a bit more."

"It was like collaborating with somebody," he added.

John Orloff did have a collaborator in Mariane Pearl while adapting her memoir "A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl," about the murder of her journalist husband. (Angelina Jolie is up for a Globe for her starring performance; Orloff's script has earned him a Spirit Award nomination.) But he also went beyond her book to interview the people who investigated Pearl's death and present a fuller picture.

"I talked to Mariane constantly. It was both intimidating and really helpful," Orloff said. "Mariane, in person, is this incredibly open, giving partner in all this who wanted nothing more than having her story be told in the most accurate, dramatic way possible. That said, as a writer, I had this incredible - and I think everyone who had anything to do with the film - had this incredible onus and responsibility to get it right, and to make her feel we got it right.

"One reason I fell in love with `A Mighty Heart' was because I didn't have to make stuff up," he added. "I didn't have to make changes. I didn't have to - quote unquote - be inspired by a true story."

Top

It's 3:00 am and, of all things, I am reading an article featuring an interview with Vittorio Storaro. It's a name that I've been carrying around in the inner recesses of my mind for a number of years. Vittorio Storaro. Just the name alone sounds cool. But why has this name come up now, you might ask? All because I wanted to know the definition of Director of Photography (DP), so I googled it. Only to realize now that what is the difference between a Camera Operator, and a Cinematographer? (Didn't I drive past Post Logic on the way home from the gig tonite?) Top

Stevie's Creole Cafe & Bar 16911 Ventura Blvd. (cnr. of Balboa, next to Johnny Rocket's) Encino, CA 91316 (818) 528-3500
The Maui Sugar Mill Saloon 18389 Ventura Blvd, Tarzana, California 91356
PRINCE O WALES 335 CULVER BLVD PLAYA DEL REY Top

Two years ago, union musicians in Los Angeles were struggling to keep work from going abroad, the result of financial pressures and a perception that it was cheaper to record in London or elsewhere. That's changing now, in part because of a rollback in union rates that is helping to assure the release of more film score soundtracks recorded in L.A.

A yearlong experiment in reducing the fees associated with soundtracks has turned out to be so successful that the language has been written into the contract recently negotiated between the American Federation of Musicians and the Assn. of Motion Picture & Television Producers. The contract is expected to be ratified by musicians this summer.

Now when a film score is released on CD, the musicians who played on the score will receive 25% of the union's record rate -- a repayment for music originally recorded for the film -- instead of 50%. This payment, made by record labels to the union, often exceeded $60,000 for a half-hour album of music played by a full orchestra of 85 to 100 players. Now it's closer to $30,000, on average.

"In theory, we could have lost money," explains Phil Ayling, president of the Intl. Recording Musicians Assn., which represents studio musicians within the AFM. "What we really did was behave in a way that made us good stakeholders in the industry. There are now many more albums out there, so we have 25% of something instead of 50% of nothing."

Robert Townson, a producer at soundtrack label Varese Sarabande, confirms Ayling's assessment. Of Varese's 50 or so soundtracks in 2000, only four were recorded in L.A. "Overseas recordings accounted for the vast majority of what we were releasing," he says. But in 2001, the number of L.A. union recordings released on Varese quadrupled.

The shift in rates was long overdue, Townson says. "It came just in the nick of time. (With costs increasing every year) we were a whisker away from composers realizing that if you record in Los Angeles, you won't have your score released. It was almost that simple."

Some albums are now longer than the usual 30 minutes, too, because of the rate change. Musicians agreed to reduce the rate in exchange for "crediting the musicians, and the community where the work was done," says Ayling. That means listing in the CD credits the musicians who recorded the score as well as citing the Hollywood Studio Symphony as the performing ensemble -- a new "branding" for union players on L.A. movie scores.

Ayling believes that a number of composers are fighting to stay in L.A. to record in part because "we made it easier for them to release soundtracks."

HollywoodStudioSymphony.com

Top