The following year, Kemper shot Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying All Those Terrible Things About Me?, working with visual-effects supervisor Joe Westheimer, ASC. A portion of the picture demanded bluescreen matte work, necessitating that the two work closely together on certain sequences. Kemper arrived early for the first day of matte shots, and although he had never before done bluescreen photography, he began properly balancing the light on the screen until Westheimer's arrival. The dailies were perfect. Impressed, Westheimer checked on Kemper's previous pictures and, in 1971, nominated him for ASC membership. "It was an unbelievably emotional feeling to be invited to join the ASC, because the members were icons to me," remembers Kemper. "I'll always be grateful to Joe."
Kemper's roundabout career path finally led to Hollywood. "I never walked onto a soundstage in Hollywood until I shot The Last of the Red Hot Lovers at Paramount in 1972," he says. "It was a lot different than shooting in New York, where we didn't have Brutes, heavy-duty grip equipment and big trucks with everything on them. We had learned to work with less because it was the only way we could work. We shot The Last of the Red Hot Lovers for about 2 1/2 weeks in Philadelphia and then moved to Los Angeles. Lloyd Ahern Sr. [ASC] was my standby cameraman, just as I had been a standby for Aldo Tonti."
Kemper subsequently shot The Candidate, starring Robert Redford, in Northern California. Filmed almost entirely with two handheld cameras, the 1972 picture features a distinct music video/documentary feeling, though it was made long before MTV became the rage. The operators would "roam" while the sound man tried to keep pace. "Sometimes one camera got the other crew in the background," the cinematographer says. "We were roaming freely like news crews covering a campaign. We weren't signaling each other. We used what we needed and cut out the rest. We had used the same techniques on Husbands and most of the other pictures I'd shot up to that point. It was a different type of artistry with its own flow of movement. I was tired of the erratic handheld look, which is now having a renaissance, as though it was just discovered."
That same year, he worked on The Hospital, starring George C. Scott and directed by Arthur Hiller from a script by acclaimed writer Paddy Chayefsky. "He was a hands-on writer," says Kemper of Chayefsky. "He'd come on the set and ask what I was doing and why I was doing it. There was one six-page scene that we were going to shoot without any cuts, which would run for seven to eight minutes. We were rehearsing the scene in a metropolitan hospital in New York, and it was a monumental lighting job. We had to light the entire floor of this ward, which carried from the elevator to the nurses' station to the pharmacy it was a very large area for a small hospital. Scott was cast as a doctor. In this particular scene, he peeks into a room to talk to one of the patients, and then walks all the way back across the nurses' station, past the elevator and into another room where it is reported that someone has died in bed. Scott then continues with a very emotional scene in which he asks how this death could possibly happen in a hospital. Arthur Hiller loved to move the camera, and I did as well."
While Kemper was laying out the shot, Chayefsky arrived to offer his concern that the aggressive camera movement would detract from his dialogue. "I had to come up with a very good answer for him, or he would have gone to Arthur," Kemper reminisces. "I said, 'This doesn't take away from the focus of the dialogue. It goes with the dialogue. That's why the camera is moving.' He thought about that for a while and asked, 'Is that how the rest of the film is going to work?' I answered, 'Absolutely.' He was always involved. He wanted to know why or how the camera was helping his story, and that was a valid request."
According to Kemper, comedy is much more difficult to shoot than drama. "Timing is essential," he observes. "The reactions of people in the cast, the scenery and environment are all part of every joke. Everyone in the cast has to be looking in the right place at the right time, and responding flawlessly. That requires rehearsals, but if you over-prepare, the humor loses its edge and it's not funny any more." He elaborates, "I'm not an actor, so I can't speak from their point of view, but I've seen the transition from the script to the spoken word many times. A good actress knows how to cry, and she has no problem repeating it time after time. But if a joke misfires and the audience doesn't think it's funny, you're on the road to disaster."
The Four Seasons is one of Kemper's favorite comedies because the film additionally featured a dramatic story that required a powerful presentation. He also admires The Jerk because actor Steve Martin made an implausible character believable.
In 1990, Kemper got behind the camera for Crazy People (AC May '90) a romantic comedy set in a mental institution. Dudley Moore starred as a burned-out ad executive who is stashed in a sanitarium for some mental fine-tuning, and Daryl Hannah appears as one of the resident "crazies." Director Tony Bill initially considered using a documentary style for the picture, but Kemper nudged him in the direction of a less oppressive look with sharp, crystal-clear images virtually devoid of grain.
Kemper notes that Hannah and Moore seemed an unlikely romantic couple, but in the movie itself an electric current seems to crackle between their characters. "Daryl is irresistible on film," he says. "You can model her face with light. She takes three-quarter sidelight from above the lens beautifully from either side. But Tony didn't want her to look glamorous just beautiful and down-to-earth." Moore, on the other hand, looked best in flat light. On two-shots, Kemper lit Hannah first, and then flattened Moore's light with a separate handheld unit either alongside or below the lens, depending upon the angle. "The light on his face was always soft," the camera notes, "and he was never overexposed."
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