Kemper has an uncommon talent for creative problem solving. While shooting Eddie (AC June '96), a sports comedy about a female cabbie (Whoopi Goldberg) who becomes the coach of the New York Knicks, the cinematographer found that the Charlotte, North Carolina, location used as the team's home court was permanently lit with a combination of sodium- and mercury-vapor lamps designed and installed by Musco. "The lamps produced wonderful lighting for basketball games, but they generated tremendous green spikes on film," Kemper recalls. "I could almost see the green tint with my naked eye. I remember thinking that it would take forever to shoot tests and decide how to compensate with color-correction filters."
Of particular concern were the high tiers of stands in shadow areas, where the fans' faces would assume a greenish tint. Many filmmakers might find such a problem to be relatively small, but Kemper felt that even a hint of unreality could jar the audience into remembering they were watching a movie. The cameraman knew it was important for viewers to feel engaged in the sport's excitement.
During this period, Kemper met Mitch Bagdanowicz during a visit to Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, New York. Bagdan-owicz had been experimenting with a spectral radiometer, an instrument designed to measure every color in the spectrum generated by direct and reflected light sources. Kemper invited him to bring the spectral radiometer to the Charlotte arena and measure each source of light for white, black and neutral skin tones in shadow areas and in pools of light.
Bagdanowicz ran the collected data through a computer that plotted a spectral curve which predicted where the green spikes would occur. Two days later far less time than other solutions to the problem would have taken he recommended to Kemper a combination of lamp and camera lens filters which would compensate for the green spikes. "Victor was at the peak of his career when he visited our research labs," Bagdanowicz recalls. "Most people in his position would have felt they had nothing more to learn, but he wanted to stay on the cutting edge. He was intensely curious about my experiments, and he understood how to apply it in a creative way."
Kemper made an indelible impression on the ASC when he served as president from 1991 through 1996, the longest consecutive tenure in the organization's 78-year history. In 1993, after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced plans to replace NTSC with a new television system based on digital transmission, Kemper appointed an ad hoc committee to study the proposal's ramifications for both filmmakers and the public. The ASC subsequently became the creative community's first organization to give the FCC recommendations concerning this technology. "Our most important recommendation is that with digital transmission and widescreen TV, you can display all films the way they are meant to be seen, in their original aspect ratios," he emphasizes. "We wanted the FCC to ban panning-and-scanning. We haven't won, but we also haven't lost. The FCC left it up to the marketplace to decide. We aren't giving up. We have a moral responsibility to ourselves, to future generations of cinematographers and to the public."
When asked to name some favorites from his own body of work, Kemper confesses that, like most cinematographers, his first film, Husbands, remains his first love. But he adds that since he has shot so many films, a great many of them have special meaning. He singles out Magic, a 1979 thriller directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Ann Margaret and Anthony Hopkins. Kemper recalls that Attenborough gave him free reign to construct the lighting, setups and look of the film. "In Magic, we had four or five different looks because of the shifting emotions in the story. There was also a lot of night work, and that's always fun."
He also cites The Last Tycoon, a period film about Hollywood in the Thirties directed by Elia Kazan in 1976. "That picture was easy to make look good because of the work done by production designer Gene Callahan," says Kemper. But 20 years later, he still regrets not shooting the film in anamorphic: "It deserved to be seen in 'Scope, particularly the opening scenes with the earthquake and the flood that followed."
Dog Day Afternoon, directed by Sidney Lumet, invariably comes up when film aficionados discuss Kemper's work. Critic Pauline Kael characterized it as "one of the best 'New York' films ever made." Kemper muses, "I couldn't have shot it in Hollywood that way. It was counter to everything Hollywood believed in at that time. It wasn't glitzy. Sidney Lumet and the producers told me to make the film look as if it was happening right then in Brooklyn, New York. I just kept going over the script, watching the rehearsals and the sets being constructed. We made some interesting lighting changes during the bank robbery. That was conceived in my head, with no research. I suppose there might have been subliminal mimicking of something I saw before, but I doubt it."
They Might be Giants is also on Kemper's list of personal favorites. It's another "down-and-dirty New York film" made on a hope-and-a-prayer budget, shot entirely on practical locations. Pausing during this remembrance, Kemper maintains, "I still have some stories to tell. You never know what opportunities the next film will bring."
When asked what makes a cinematographer great, Kemper advises, "Part of it is a craft you can learn; for instance, I learned about the elegance of reducing rather than adding light. But there is also something innate which whispers in your ear and tells you to move the camera a foot in a particular direction, or to shield a face partially in shadows. That talent may be there in your heart and soul, but you also have to learn the craft. You have to learn how to work with the director, cast and crew, and you have to be able to do it consistently."
Theorizing about why so few cinematographers achieve celebrity status, he observes, "Great cinematography has to be unobtrusive. It should never call attention to itself. You are there to help the director tell a story. Cinematographers aren't responsible for scripts or the tenor of stories, but if I accept a job I also accept responsibility for realizing what kind of influence it might have on the people who watch it. I made a conscious decision not to work on films which glamorize gratuitous violence or sex. I prefer pictures like Dog Day Afternoon or The Hospital, which have deep social meaning. I would also enjoy shooting a Western which I've never done or an epic story where the audience can really observe the environment."
Looking back on his long career, Kemper says that he wouldn't do anything differently: "If I had another life to live, I would probably do the same things over again."
