Though he was faithful to period lighting in the rest of the film, Beebe took great liberties during this dance number. “Japan had electric lights back then but no ability to use rich color at all,” he says. “But Rob wanted the deep saturation of color that we used in Chicago.” Working in a former theater in downtown Los Angeles, Beebe and his team installed Vari-Lites with programmable colorwheels. “We had a lot of light cues throughout the dance — nothing anybody could have done in the 1930s, but we wanted a dramatic impact,” says Beebe. “A control desk ran all the Vari-Lites and a separate desk ran the film lights; the house lights dim down on one desk as the theatrical lights come up on another. Also, paper lanterns were tied into the dimming board. It became a quite complicated series of lighting cues, and we spent two days working [the sequence] out.” Gas footlights added a period touch, he adds. “According to John’s research, a scalloped frontpiece reflected the gaslight back at the players. So we had computerized Vari-Lites in the ceiling and gas footlights in the floor, integrating modern and traditional [sources].”

Traditional sources like oil lanterns, cooking fires, paper lanterns housing 25-watt or 40-watt bulbs, and antique electrical bulbs dominated the rest of the film. “I knew we wanted to pursue a practical-lighting approach,” says Beebe. “I also knew I wanted to work in very low-light situations.” For that reason, he shot most of the picture on Kodak Vision2 500T 5218, which he often pushed one stop. This was supplemented by Vision 200T 5274 pushed to 400 ASA. “I prefer to use tungsten-based stocks even for day exteriors, because it affords a certain flexibility,” he notes.

Throughout the picture, Beebe’s lighting suggests “a journey through time, a narrative progression,” he says. “Young Chiyo arrives frightened and scared in this strange house. We wanted it to feel dark and mysterious to capture how it must have felt to this young child.” Then, as Chiyo gains confidence and control of her life, “light starts to come in. Very subtly, we used this metaphor: the interior opens up and reveals the transformation from young girl to woman to geisha. This was a combination of lighting effects and set design.” Sliding screens are closed at the beginning but open as the film progresses, and panels change from solid wood to reed, paper and glass.

Golden’s novel makes much of Chiyo’s first glimpse of electrical lights when she arrives in Kyoto, and Beebe carefully integrated these into the lighting design as the story progresses. The practicals were bare, antique bulbs with large coiled filaments, “but they really didn’t give that much light,” says Buckley, and they were further dimmed to make the coil visible. As a result, they were often augmented with small Kino Flos or soft lights. But inside the geisha house, lightbulbs were rare. “We wanted to suggest that this place was somehow fixed in time,” says Beebe. “This was a place steeped in tradition, so we stayed essentially with lantern light for most of that interior throughout the movie. We made use of electric light mostly for post-war scenes as a means of reflecting the changing attitudes towards the old ways.”

Augmenting the firelight was a “covered wagon,” one of Buckley’s creations. Short batten strips measuring 1'-4' held rows of cleat sockets, which accommodated regular lightbulbs. Avery wire created a 4" gap over the bulbs, which were topped by Full Grid cloth and Full Straw gels. This soft light was cabled to two flicker boxes. “It worked pretty well,” says Buckley. “I had about 30 of each. Really, that was the light of this movie.” Beebe adds, “It takes up very little space. We often shot wide in tight interiors, so we’d have these 1-foot flicker effects tucked behind whatever piece of furniture was available.” When there wasn’t enough furniture, serving trays and even the actors were used to hide lights.

Beebe’s low-light approach wouldn’t immediately suggest the use of the anamorphic 2.40:1 format, but it’s what he and Marshall preferred. “Both of us immediately felt Geisha was a widescreen film,” says Beebe. “It needed that size to give the story scope, and it was important to me to shoot the full negative. I also felt that [anamorphic] would contribute to the mystery of this world. I knew we were going to be using a foreground layering effect, and anamorphic would allow focus to fall off nicely. Within those small sets, the walls in the close-ups become more textural rather than immediately present.”

Beebe took inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (AC March ’76), the first picture to be lit mainly with daylight and practical candlelight. “Those shots are completely static because there’s no depth of field at all,” he notes. “It creates portraits that are so painterly. With that in mind, [first AC] Mike Weldon and I went to Panavision, sat with [senior vice president of marketing] Phil Radin and [senior technical adviser] Dan Sasaki and discussed how we wanted to shoot in anamorphic in low light. Most anamorphic lenses work best at about T4 as the standard setting, but I wanted to shoot at T2.” Panavision ultimately provided a full set of fast E- and C-series anamorphic primes. “One was a 40mm that opened up to a T1.3, which is unheard of for anamorphic,” says Beebe. “That allowed me to shoot most of the movie at under T2.8, which really was key to the look. I could use literally two bulbs tucked away on a 1-foot strip and supplement with low levels of additional light. If I was trying to get up to T5.6 on, say, a regular anamorphic zoom, it could not have worked. I’d have had to supplement with much bigger sources.

“Working under T2.8 in the anamorphic format with a moving camera is sort of frightening,” he continues. “I could have started that way and realized it wasn’t going to work.” The key to success, in his view, were Weldon and B-camera first AC John Grillo. “They were able to actually work those stops. It was they who really allowed me to shoot the film this way, because it could have been too compromising otherwise.”