by Jay Holben
Frame grabs courtesy of Spyglass Entertainment, ABC and Encore.
Photo courtesy of Ernest Holzman.

On May 27, 1988, in El Monte, California, 3,500 people reported seeing an inexplicable cross of light emanating from the bathroom window of an apartment building. For more than 12 hours, the light remained unaltered, and no rational explanation could be found for the source of the emanation.

During March of 1991, in the Netherlands, eight different motorists reported picking up a hitchhiker who talked of spiritual matters. He announced to each of them that Jesus would appear again soon, and then promptly disappeared from the cars.

On December 4, 1992, in La Cisterna, Santiago, a six-inch porcelain statue began weeping tears of blood. The Santiago coroner’s office and doctors with the Criminal Investigation Division confirmed that the mysterious red liquid flowing from the eyes of the statue was indeed human blood.

Were these incidents signs of divine intervention, or just elaborate hoaxes? ABC’s extraordinary new drama Miracles enlivens such debates every week, as former priest-in-training Paul Callan (Skeet Ulrich) travels from the Catholic Diocese of Boston to the sites of alleged miracles, which he then attempts to authenticate or disprove. "My wife calls it The Exorcist Files," quips Ernest Holzman, ASC, the show’s director of photography.

Holzman is no stranger to the small screen, with strong credits under his belt that include thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, Kindred: The Embraced, Gideon’s Crossing and Citizen Baines. He won an ASC Award in 2001 for the telefilm Cora Unashamed (see AC May ’01) and earned an ASC Award nomination last year for the Citizen Baines pilot. Holzman’s feature credits include Programmed to Kill and Love Jones.

As viewers of Miracles soon learn, Callan is very good at his job. The pilot episode begins with workers unearthing a nun’s coffin that has been buried for over 100 years. When the coffin accidentally breaks open, the horrified workers discover that the corpse shows absolutely no signs of decay. The local church is pushing to canonize the nun as a saint, and Callan arrives at the scene to investigate the claim. With a heavy heart, he declares that her immaculate preservation is due to nothing more than a natural preservative in the soil from a nearby apricot orchard. Once again, a potential miracle is explained away by simple science.

As the show unfolds, Callan travels from site to site, continually finding banal explanations for the seemingly inexplicable events. Along the way, his own faith is continually tested, and he begins to wonder if he will ever find evidence of God’s hand in human affairs.

Miracles is the first foray into television by Spyglass Entertainment. According to Matt Reeves, director of the pilot episode, the production was conceived as a feature film but was eventually reconfigured for the small screen. "Spyglass wanted to make sure they were doing something different, something special, for their first TV series," he says. Reeves was a creative force behind the hit series Felicity, as well as the director of the feature The Pallbearer. He met Holzman on the pilot of Gideon’s Crossing. They got along famously and talked about working together again in the future.

To bring something different to the small screen, Holzman and Reeves decided to take a very unique approach to television cinematography by filming Miracles with anamorphic lenses – even though the show would be broadcast in TV’s traditional 1.33:1 (4x3) aspect ratio. The image is unsqueezed in telecine and only the center 1.33:1 ratio is taken out of the anamorphic frame. "I didn’t want a show that looked like a TV show, and Spyglass wanted to make a real impression," Reeves says. "We felt we should make the show look as much like a movie as we could."

To accomplish that, Holzman shoots Miracles with Panavision Platinum cameras configured for 3-perf pulldown and C-series anamorphic lenses. Panavision created a custom ground glass for Holzman that enables him to compose 1.33:1 images within the center of anamorphic’s 2.40:1 ratio; markings show Holzman the 1.78:1 protection area for potential widescreen broadcast.

"Although the show is going to be seen by most people in 1.33:1, the use of anamorphic lenses brings something absolutely unique to television," Holzman attests. "They provide a very distinct representation of out-of-focus imagery. Anamorphic’s squeeze-and-stretch process causes the out-of-focus imagery to be elongated vertically. Even though we’re not making use of the full widescreen aspect ratio, these lenses have very different qualities that render a very different look."

"Ernie and I talked about a lot of different looks as we planned the pilot," says Reeves. "I’ve always been drawn to limited focus as a very compelling look; there’s something eerie and uncanny about it. Because anamorphic gives you less depth of field for a given lens size, we decided to test anamorphic lenses for the show. Ernie shot some footage, and he had amazing ideas. The goal was to create a mysterious and uncanny world in which things aren’t necessarily all in focus. There is nearly always a sense of this eerie, out-of-focus presence in every scene. When you’re doing a show like this, atmosphere is 90 percent of what you’re trying to create. You’re trying to create a certain sense of reality in the world of the show, and on Miracles the use of anamorphic lenses is key to accomplishing that."

"We know that our current presentation is 1.33:1, so we primarily compose for that," explains Holzman. "Of course, the challenge is to compose for 1.78:1 simultaneously. The style of Miracles is to let everything be underplayed. It’s not about a lot of flashy camera movement or stylized effects, which could take away from the understated drama. We’re not doing what a lot of other people are doing, like endless, circular Steadicam scenes or shooting entirely handheld. We’re treating this show with an organic strategy, keeping it very simple and deliberate to help create a world that we want the audience to experience.