The Strategic Producer

On the Art and Craft of Making Your First Feature

Federico Arditti Muchnik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317301868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Today's technologies and economic models won't settle for a conventional approach to filmmaking. The Strategic Producer: On the Art and Craft of Making Your First Feature combines history, technology, aesthetics, data, decision-making strategies, and time-tested methods into a powerful new approach to producing. An ideal text for aspiring filmmakers, The Strategic Producer orients the reader's mind-set towards self-empowerment by sharing essential and timeless techniques producers need to get the job done while also embracing the constantly evolving production landscape.

- Written in clear, succinct, and non-technical prose.

- Includes six sidebar in depth interviews with industry professionals providing additional perspectives.

- Clearly presented line drawings help readers quickly understand complex ideas like production timelines, story structure, and business models.

- Includes samples from key documents such as script pages, budgets, shooting schedules, and business plans for potential investors.

Part 1 Back Story

DOI: 10.4324/9781315648729-2

Chapter 1 History

DOI: 10.4324/9781315648729-3

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl.—Charlie Chaplin

I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don’t like that, then tough tills, don’t go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don’t do homage.—Quentin Tarantino

For millennia humanity has been playing with images and telling stories. Prehistoric cave paintings suggest stories about humanity and hunting. Before language and the spoken word we assembled around the campfire and acted out stories about how our day went, what to watch out for during the hunt, who was sleeping with whom, and what gods we feared or loved. Happy, sad, thoughtful, informative, scary, reassuring, comic, tragic . . . there’s a story and an audience for every aspect of the human condition. And we’ve always needed to do this collectively. We’ve always wanted to share. Some of us developed into better storytellers than others who chose to listen instead, delighted by the increasing sophistication of the storytellers’ techniques and the stories they spun.

In China, shadow plays dating back 2,000 years to the Han dynasty can be viewed as precursors to today’s motion pictures. Sophisticated characters in complex narratives entertained and enlightened audiences for centuries before the invention of cinema.

And when it comes to live action storytelling we can look to early Greek civilization and plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and others.

But alongside the artists on the frontlines and in the spotlight were the individuals and groups of people who facilitated things. Someone had to help prehistoric artists select the cave and wall on which to paint. Someone had to build the shadow puppets and provide a venue for the performances. Someone had to assemble the wood frame onto which a canvas was stretched. And someone had to invent the first cameras that took the first pictures. In other words: artists have never worked alone. Everything from materials, to venue, to personnel, to salaries, to getting the work seen had to have been done by people other than the artists creating the work. Is it a stretch to call these people producers of one sort or another?

Let’s go to the moment the movies were born. In the late 1800s technology was being developed and shared across continents. Cinema officially saw the light of day in a darkened theatre in Paris in 1895 with a film by the Lumière brothers entitled, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon. The film, made using an all-in-one camera/projector called the Lumière Cinématograph, is approximately 48 seconds long. Workers must have been an astonishing sight for audiences. The eye and the mind had never been fooled in quite this way. The degree of photographic realism combined with motion must have felt radically different, even superior to the most realistic paintings and photographs of the time.

Figure 1.1 Cave painting at Bhimbetika Rock Shelter by Nikhil Shah

[Credit: Licensed under CC BY SA 3.0]

Figure 1.2 Chinese shadow play figures by S. Meierhofer

[Credit: Licensed under CC BY SA 3.0]

Figure 1.3 Amphitheater in Epidaurus by F. Ingalo

[Credit: Licensed under CC BY SA 3.0]

The birth of the American film industry is generally attributed to Thomas Edison and his invention, the Kinetoscope. At first Edison imagined his camera and projector as nothing more than a home consumer product, much like today’s camcorder and now obsolete VCR.

The major distinction between Edison’s Kinetoscope and the Lumière Cinematograph is that Edison’s device was designed to be used by individual viewers—very much like today’s smartphones, whereas the Cinématograph’s design and purpose was geared toward a collective viewing experience, very much like today’s multiplexes. As filmgoers, we all understand the difference between watching a film at home alone and watching one in a packed movie theater. As individual viewers we’re left to our own devices (phones, laptops, etc. . . .). Will we react differently to the same film depending on the conditions we see it under? While the question is beyond the scope of this book, it’s nonetheless worth posing.

So, while it’s good to know when the movies were born or how the first filmmaking technology worked, it’s nowhere near as important as knowing how the movies evolved. Before stories, actors, and editing, before the arrival of fiction filmmaking, movies were more like short—very short—documentaries. They captured street scenes, people tending to their gardens, trains pulling into stations, workers leaving a factory, and so on. Daily life captured on celluloid and projected to audiences for their diversion and entertainment.

Figure 1.4 The poster advertising the Lumière brothers Cinématographe, showing a famous comedy (L’Arroseur Arrosé, 1895).

[Credit: Public domain]

Figure 1.5 Today’s multiplex echoes the first collective viewing experiences presented by the Lumière brothers over a hundred years ago.

[Credit: Photograph by the author]

Figure 1.6 Publicity photo of the 1895 version of the Kinetoscope in use, showing the earphones that lead to the cylinder phonograph within the cabinet.

[Credit: Public domain]

Figure 1.7 Smartphones and their ability to stream audio and video are modern day examples of what Thomas A. Edison invented over a hundred years ago.

[Credit: Photograph by the author]

Even by today’s YouTube cat videos standards, the very first films were ridiculously short because cameras like the Lumière Cinematograph could only hold one 50-second long strip of film negative. Remember, we are talking about film before the invention of editing, which involves stringing together a series of shots allowing for something longer. So at the dawn of cinema one shot equaled one movie, filmed in black and white, without sound and with a camera locked onto a tripod that neither panned from left to right nor tilted up or down. Moreover, the framing of that single shot was rarely—if ever—a close up or wide shot. It consisted of one 50-second proscenium-style shot. A proscenium-style shot essentially involves placing the camera at eye level 20 to 30 feet away from the subject allowing for a full body shot of people plus some degree of background environment. Imagine you are sitting in a small theater, about halfway back, in the center of the orchestra seating area, with a perfect view of the actors and the stage. That’s your proscenium shot.

So how did movies evolve from a basic single shot unit to today’s highly complex productions?

Up until the introduction of the Latham Loop, which became a standard feature on cameras and projectors in 1905, movies were short not only because cameras could hold just 50 seconds of film, but also because projectors could only project films of that length. In the case of the film projectors, as a film finished un-spooling the tension on the take-up reel became so powerful that it literally snapped the remaining film on the feed reel. How, the loop’s inventors wondered, could they remove the tension from the feed reel and prevent the film from snapping in two? Their ingenious idea was to invent two small cylindrical barrels which sat above and below the projector’s lens and the registration pins. The barrels have sprockets on them which hold the film in place, creating two loops, taking the tension off both the feed and take-up reels. The loop isolates the filmstrip from vibration and tension, allowing movies to be continuously shot and projected for extended periods. All of a sudden, with this tension gone, filmmakers could connect many 50-second shots without snapping the fragile film strip. Mr. Woodville Latham and his colleagues had just invented a way to show longer films. And when films became longer, they were no longer limited to merely showing daily life events like people leaving a factory or trains coming and going.

Now movies could tell stories.

The Latham loop is important not only because it allowed film to become a long form storytelling medium but also because it illustrates an important concept with regard to art and technology: throughout film’s history, technological innovation leads to artistic development.

Let’s jump to the mid-1920s with the introduction of sound. Here, a new technological advancement allowed producers to give voice to actors, to convey the sound of a door slamming, or to underscore a dramatic moment with a music cue.

Later, with the advent of color film, cinematographers, production designers, and art directors could create the illusion of three-dimensional space using color as well as focus the audience’s eye on a particular part of the screen. Movies were able to work with a much wider palette, creating new feelings and atmospheres using the new color technology.

Figure 1.8 U.S. Patent Office illustration of the Latham Loop. The two barrels above and below the lens effectively removed tension and torque from the projector’s feed and take up reels allowing for longer films to be made—and shown.

[Credit: Public domain]

More recently the invention of computer generated imaging in the mid-1990s has led to a new kind of cinematic artistic expression, one in which every single pixel is available to the filmmaker to imagine and manipulate.

But with every technological innovation motion pictures experienced a temporary artistic set back.

The first sound movies were visually earthbound. Cameras could no longer soar with the same fluidity they did during the last years of the silent era. With the arrival of sound the new microphones could hear the whirring noises from the camera forcing filmmakers to encase them inside large soundproof room-sized boxes that couldn’t budge. An awkward transitional period had these large boxes moving on rails but it wasn’t until smaller soundproof cameras were perfected that cinema began to find and improve upon the virtuosic camerawork developed during the silent era.

The arrival of sound also brought temporary artistic compromises. Scriptwriters may have had experience writing silent movies built entirely out of action scenes and the occasional title card, but when it came to dialogue they had little or no idea about what they were doing. It took several years before dialogue began to sound natural. And even once dialogue began to find its feet filmmakers were faced with the problem of delivering it in a believable way. Actors used to acting in silent movies who could not make the transition to performing in dialogue scenes were out of a job, replaced by actors who could. Singin’ in the Rain (1952) provides not only plenty of entertainment but also uses the transitional years from silent to sound film as a central plot device.

Figure 1.9 As new technology was introduced there were—at first—artistic and creative setbacks or compromises. Over time, however, filmmakers mastered the new technology, bringing greater creativity to cinema, until the next technological innovation.

[Credit: Illustration by the author]

Figure 1.10 With the advent of sound, the camera lost the fluidity gained during the silent era. Here, a cameraman stands inside a soundproof camera booth with a Vitaphone camera, circa 1926.

[Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress]

Figure 1.11 Today’s smartphones have effectively freed the camera to film everything everywhere and with great fluidity, turning us all into camera operators.

[Credit: Photograph by the author]

Similarly, the first color movies faced major technical challenges. Images were oversaturated and color negative film didn’t hold well, leading to unintended colors. A...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Back Story
• Part 2 Getting to Work
• Appendix: The Business Plan
• Index