The result is particularly apparent in a musical number that features one of Roxie’s fellow inmates being hanged onstage. Marshall wanted the Onyx’s house soaked in a blood-red wash while an icy spotlight pinned the condemned woman to the gallows. Beebe created the red wash with "a combination of heavily gelled tungsten lights and Vari-Lites gelled Primary Red." Still, it took almost every ounce of juice available to bring the house to a level that was two-thirds of a stop underexposed. "It’s amazing – the red filters just destroy the output of the light," he notes. "It’s something you don’t do every day. Because we only had a single character on the stage, we were able to pull a lot of those resources and throw them into the house instead. We pointed most of what we had; it could have easily been 100K."

Beebe hit the onstage stunt player with an unfiltered 2.5K HMI follow-spot, overexposing her by four stops. "We really wanted her to glow," he says. With a spread of nearly five stops between the foreground and the stage, this was about as contrasty as most films get. "I like contrast," he says, "but at the same time I like the midtones, too. The 5279 held the details on either end really well."

Given Marshall’s penchant for shooting the musical numbers in uninterrupted takes, multi-camera coverage was a foregone conclusion. Having directed music videos before moving into feature films, Beebe had previous experience with multiple cameras, but "not to this extent, where there’s an A and B camera throughout production and occasionally a C and D as well. It’s a very different exercise. It’s similar to shooting a big action shot, except that these numbers ran for three minutes or longer."

Keeping an eye on four cameras at once meant that Beebe couldn’t have his eye in any one of them himself. "Normally I like to operate, and coming up in Australia I operated everything I shot," he says. "But in coordinating three or four cameras, it would have been inhibiting to be behind one of them. I was happy to have the overview, to confer with Rob and get a sense of the cues as everything played out, rather than being in the thick of it." (He left that task in the capable hands of Canadian operators Peter Rosenfeld and Roger Finlay.)

Beebe adds that once the overall choreography and teching was set, Marshall let him handle the logistics. "Our approach was to know what each number’s key ingredients were," he explains. "We’d start a ways out in the house and gradually move the coverage in until we were occupying the stage."

For most numbers, he underslung the A camera on a 12' Aerocrane arm near the stage and placed the B camera on dolly tracks in the wings. If C and D cameras were needed, Beebe usually hid one on a fluid head opposite the dolly camera, "cross-shooting with a long lens, finding details on the fly," and placed another high in the gantry or upstage, shooting into the house. This strategy of moving frames from fixed positions gave Beebe’s compositions a fluid energy while making it relatively easy to prevent overlap.

Aside from the match-framed transitions and digital plate shots, none of this work was storyboarded. Beebe details, "For our A and B cameras, we were very specific about what we required. We’d approach each one with a must-have shot list. But after the essentials were covered, we’d scramble to get anything else we could. There are so many things you can do, and we’d often have just one day to shoot a whole number. Rob and I would run each one until we were dragged kicking and screaming from the room."

The film’s climax is the number "Nowadays," Roxie and Velma’s one and only duet. As the women belt it out – toting tommy guns, no less – a 30'x40' panel of marquee lights descends behind them. When the number approaches its peak, the women whirl around and spray the marquee with bullets. The bulbs spark and explode, and when the smoke clears the remaining lights spell out the starlets’ names.

The gargantuan marquee called for more than 10,000 bulbs, each burning at 25 watts, all wired into a desk that could control the patterns flashing across it during the number. Though the board only ran at 15 percent power for most of the routine, it surged four to five stops over Beebe’s exposure – much to the dismay of the performers, who had to bear the searing heat. During the few moments that it did flash at 100 percent, Beebe says, "You felt as if all of Toronto dimmed for a moment."

Like many of the numbers, "Nowadays" had to be conceived, budgeted and teched while other segments of the film were being handled. By that point in the production, the routine had become old hat for the rigging crew – or so Beebe thought. "With all the planning of how we’d cable and patch this thing and how it was going to pulse and how the names were going to light up, somebody forgot to calculate how long it was actually going to take four guys to screw in 10,000 lightbulbs," he recalls wryly. "We came in to do our tech rehearsals and the poor guys were only halfway done! Eventually we just went home, because it was obviously going to take them another eight hours to finish."

Once the bulbs were in place, the exploding effect had to be rigged. The filmmakers initially wanted to use pyrotechnic bulbs that actually blew up, but they quickly realized that such an approach would be too dangerous. Instead, the marquee was fitted with squibs placed between the bulbs, along with various sparking effects. A flicker pattern was programmed into the board and triggered in sync with the pyrotechnics. The setup was so large that there was only enough time and material for two takes. "It was very hard to photograph because the effect was so bright that the actresses almost disappeared in front of it," recalls Beebe. "I used the 45-degree shutter because there was more than enough light, and with the women moving across all of those individual bulbs, the shutter created a great strobed feel."

Beebe supplemented the light board with HMI follow-spots for Roxie and Velma, as well as a flotilla of Par cans crosslighting the stage from the wings. He also worked with Fisher and Eisenhauer to light the board itself with the Vari-Lites. "We had them throw a wash of deep blue over the panel so that when we dimmed the bulbs down they took on some color, rather than just bashing white light straight at us," he says.

At that point in the show, the Announcer (played by Taye Diggs) bids us "Goodnight, folks." It was also the point where Beebe parted ways with Fisher and Eisenhauer. All parties considered the collaboration to be a resounding success. "We found it so stimulating to work with someone like Dion, who is as interested as we are in light and motion," says Eisenhauer. Fisher appreciated that "both Rob and Dion wanted to take the time to let the lighting tell the story. The attitude wasn’t, ‘Hurry up, we’ve gotta get this shot,’ it was, ‘Let’s make sure it looks right first.’"

Chicago’s supersaturated mise-en-scène isn’t a color timer’s usual fare, and when Beebe and Marshall began discussing postproduction they considered taking the film to a digital intermediate. "When you work with such saturated colors, it’s actually very hard to ask for variations in timing because you have limited control of the analyzer," Beebe explains. "You can’t really say, ‘I’d prefer to have this warmer,’ because you’re not dealing with the standard palette. You have to almost dial the wheel beyond its maximum setting to register change, and then it throws everything else off into strange directions."

The request was ultimately denied on budgetary grounds, and Beebe subsequently put the finishing touches on the film with color timer Chris Hinton at Deluxe Toronto. "It was tricky," he says, "but we managed to make our adjustments subtly." He is still confident that Chicago’s look will impress. After all, this isn’t the Twenties, and subtlety, like jazz, is no longer a dirty word.

TECHNICAL SPECS 1.85:1 Arricam ST and LT Cooke lenses Kodak Vision 200T 5274, Vision 500T 5279 Printed on Kodak Vision Premier 2393 (select prints) and Vision 2383