SCOTCH AND MILK
Director: Adam Goldberg
Cinematographer: Mark Putnam
In his lovely black-and-white debut feature Scotch and Milk, writer/director Adam Goldberg stars as Jim, a desultory hipster so enraptured by the iconography of a bygone era that his entire world has become a moody, scotch-soaked homage. During the course of the story, Goldberg pays tribute to jazz, the French New Wave, American film noir, Orson Welles, Nicholas Roeg and other sensibilities which limn the terrains of lost love, urban angst, and drunken resignation.
Despite the advice of many experienced people in the film world, Goldberg opted to shoot with monochrome stock because Scotch and Milk is predicated on a particular, almost elegiac worldview best replicated in black-and-white. "I've always been enamored of black-and-white films on an aesthetic level," he says, "but thematically, that's how these people perceive the world. Shooting this film in color would only have been an attempt to make it easier to sell."
The film's exquisite opening sequence should dissuade those who think black-and-white is not commercially viable. In a montage of close-up shots, a hand, a cigarette, and wisps of smoke are each framed with the lyricism of individual moving portraits. This opening was carefully scripted by Goldberg, and is repeated in a series of wider shots at the end of the film. "We shot the beginning with 50mm and 85mm lenses," explains cameraman Mark Putnam, who used a Panavision Gold camera. "And then for the end of the scene, we went one lens wider. The first time it's very stylish and impressionistic, and the second time it all comes together as you see the whole scene."
Much of the script works in a similar fashion, with the story being told in flashbacks which form a collage of past and present. "The basic construct is not very complex," explains Goldberg. "The idea was to follow a guy through a week in his life, from the point of view of the end of the week." Although the script is nonlinear to some extent, Goldberg played with the structure much more extensively in the editing room. "The way that certain scenes bleed into other scenes, or overlap, was something that I explored further as I discovered how creative the editing process can be." Putnam utilized filters to help distinguish differing times and moods. "We used black ProMist filters on all of the present-tense footage, and then we'd switch to the white ProMist filters in all of the flashback scenes we wanted each [sequence] to have its own subtle flavor," he says. "We also used old Mitchell diffusion during the love scenes between Jim and Ilsa [Clea Lewis] to create a more romantic feeling. I think people feel the effect rather than seeing it."
The filmmakers began the shoot with their most difficult sequence: the opening shots of Jim riding around in the city in the rain. These shots are intercut throughout Scotch and Milk, and form a framework for the film. Putnam and Goldberg did consider several options while planning the effect, but eventually went with rear-screen projection. "We thought that would be great because the technology would give the sequence this old Forties look," says Putnam. "But for the crew it was a 27-hour day. It was tough because we were all just getting to know each other, and the crew had no idea what to expect. Adds Goldberg in retrospect, "At the end of the day, in a state of total delirium, I had to make this inspiring speech to everyone to keep them from walking away."
An equally difficult task was locating a site suitable for the apartment building where Jim and his equally disaffected buddies live and hang out at a downstairs bar. The filmmakers eventually settled on the Alexandria Hotel. "The building is U-shaped, so we could set lights outside the window on the roof," says Putnam. "During the day we used a lot of reflectors because we didn't have lights bright enough to compete with the outside, and at night we'd switch over to HMIs. We were lucky we ended up with the best possible location."
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