Shooting at real locations in Boston proved tricky as well. “We couldn’t possibly use a dolly, so we often used a zoom in its place. In order to light the cramped locations, I eliminated big lights. We employed quartz lamps and incandescents, using low-key source lighting almost exclusively.” Given that his lenses needed a minimum f-stop of 4.5, this approach compelled Kline to force-process all of his footage by 1 stop.

Each element for the film’s visual mosaic was shot actual size, meaning it was photographed 1:1 in relation to how it would appear onscreen. Therefore, no optical magnification or reduction that would affect the grain structure of the image was required. Kline generally framed each image “dead center” in his viewfinder, thereby using the best portion of the lens, and only lit what would actually be used, allowing the rest of the frame to drop off into darkness. “This caused a certain amount of consternation back at the studio,” he wrote in AC. “People watching our dailies would say, ‘My God, the scene’s too dark,’ not taking into account that the only portion of the shot we were going to use would be a relatively well-lit doorknob in the center of the frame.”

For scenes in which moments of simultaneous action would be presented onscreen from different angles, Kline used multiple cameras, sometimes as many as five, to gather the necessary elements. “This took a bit of care in the lighting, for you’d have five shots that would have to go into one frame of finished film side by side. Color values and density values became very important, because if one of the five images was lit more brightly than the others, or had more vivid color, your eye would go to that panel and ignore the others.”

Kline later collaborated with Fleischer on four more features, Soylent Green, The Don is Dead, Mr. Majestyk and Mandingo. “Dick Fleischer was one of the best-prepared filmmakers I’d ever worked with. If he hadn’t been, The Boston Strangler never could have been made the way we did it.”

Kline worked with another of Hollywood’s finest directors, Robert Wise, on The Andromeda Strain (1971). Based on the bestseller by Michael Crichton, this fact-based thriller concerned the scientific response to a deadly extraterrestrial infection accidentally unleashed on Earth via a returning space probe. The bulk of the film’s action plays out in a vast, multi-level underground research complex, code-named Wildfire. Kline employed a variety of photographic techniques to keep the film visually compelling while retaining the documentary-like feel of Crichton’s novel. The result is a striking look that helps maintain the story’s torturous levels of suspense.

To strip the picture of the high-polish Hollywood sheen, Kline experimented with underexposing and force-developing his Kodak film stocks. Through testing, he found that pushing his footage by 2 stops not only dulled the colors but also resulted in increased depth of field. This method proved very effective in the depiction of a small New Mexico town that is wiped out by the extraterrestrial pathogen.  Indeed, Kline’s inventive approach sucks the vitality out of the desert landscapes and skies as effectively as the disease (dubbed “Andromeda”) drains life from its victims. “The push helped create the stark, barren, awesome look we wanted, while in the laboratory it contributed to the sterile, blank, icy look the story there needed,” Kline told AC at the time.

The Wildfire lab sets were designed and built unconventionally — almost all of them had four walls and ceilings. Featuring extensive practicals that would generally serve as Kline’s keys, the sets were constructed for realism, not to facilitate the filmmaking process. Meanwhile, Kline was plagued by unwanted reflections and glare caused by the show’s set dressings, which featured stainless-steel surfaces and equipment. His solution was to use indirect bounced lighting whenever possible.

Another antidote to Kline’s many challenges was the use of split diopters, which allowed him to effectively combine extreme foreground and background elements in the film’s widescreen Panavision frame. “Normally, I would have done that by building up the depth of field through lighting, but that was impossible in our situation,” he says. “It was often a matter of slipping the diopters in and out of the matte box during the shot in order to conceal the seam or follow an element that was moving within the frame, such as a person walking down a corridor. Although I rarely operated after becoming a cinematographer, I did get behind the camera a few times on this film, because the timing required to do that invisibly was very difficult to achieve, and I didn’t want to put that kind of pressure on my operator.

“Robert Wise is the most complete director I’ve ever worked with, in part because of his background as a very good editor. He was constantly suggesting different ways to cover scenes or suggesting inserts that would help pull a sequence together. I’ve worked with some other directors who overshot, which I feel is wasteful, but Wise was very efficient. In that way, he was so much more like the filmmakers I learned from in my early years.”

Kline re-teamed with Wise on Star Trek — The Motion Picture (1979), the first big-screen adaptation of the cult series. Unfortunately, the poorly planned production tested both filmmakers. “It was a victim of not enough time in prep,” Kline explained to AC. “Unfortunately, in the production of all science-fiction films, there never seems to be enough time. We were not unique in that respect.”

The cinematographer still managed to break new ground during this voyage of the starship Enterprise, boldly departing from the rich, high-key hues created for the series by Gerald Perry Finnerman, ASC. Kline opted for a moody, low-key look befitting the film’s mysterious plot, which involved an alien entity threatening Earth. Since a large portion of the action took place on the starship’s bridge, certain aspects of that key set dictated Kline’s approach.