Director of photography Ellen Kuras, ASC helps Spike Lee explore a serial killer’s impact on New York in Summer of Sam.
I am deeply hurt by your calling me a woman-hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam... I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game... tasty meat. The woman [sic] of Queens are prettyest [sic] of all...
— excerpt from a note penned by serial killer David Berkowitz in the spring of 1977
Strangely enough, serial killers have always maintained a hallowed niche in popular cinema. Examples of the genre range from the truly disturbing (Silence of the Lambs and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) to the irreverent (Man Bites Dog and Natural Born Killers ) and historically infamous (The Boston Strangler and From Hell, the Hughes Brothers’ upcoming feature about Jack the Ripper).
Those who resided in New York City from July of 1976 to August of 1977, however, found little entertainment value in the activities of loner-turned-madman David Berkowitz. For those 13 months, Berkowitz kept the five boroughs in a state of panic as he periodically and randomly—gunned down women with long brunette hair. In recognition of the assassin’s revolver of choice, the media branded the nefarious nightstalker the ".44-Caliber Killer." Berkowitz later dubbed himself the Son of Sam.
This memorable piece of New York history serves as the backdrop of Spike Lee’s new film Summer of Sam. Contrary to most films about serial killers, Lee’s picture does not attempt to probe Berkowitz’s deranged psyche. Instead, this ensemble piece (with a script penned by actors Michael Imperioli and Victor Colicchio, and later polished by Lee himself) uses the frenzy surrounding the serial killings as a sounding board for its themes of social conformity and media-fueled paranoia.
The film begins in July of 1976, as punk music and disco fever are sweeping the nation. Aspiring punk rocker Ritchie (Adrien Brody) has returned to his predominantly Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx to catch up with some old pals, including Vinny (John Leguizamo), a philandering hairstylist. Because the budding guitarist (and part-time dancer at a local gay strip joint) is sporting spiked hair, an affected Cockney accent, and a plethora of piercings, some of his former friends brand him a freak of nature. Matters are made worse when he inducts the local tramp, Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), into his alternative lifestyle, recruiting her as his partner in both punk licks and porno flicks.
To help him craft this jagged tale of neighborhood conflict, Lee once again teamed with New York-based director of photography Ellen Kuras, ASC, with whom he had previously collaborated on the Oscar-nominated documentary Four Little Girls (see AC Jan. ’98) and "Niggericans" (a never-aired episode of HBO’s Subway Stories series), as well as various commercials, the most recent of which are a series of spots commissioned by the United States Navy. A key figure in the indie film scene, Kuras is a two-time recipient of the Sundance Film Festival’s Best Cinematography Award (in 1992, for Swoon, and 1995, for Angela). Her other credits include I Shot Andy Warhol (see Sundance Festival coverage, AC April ’96), Postcards from America, Unzipped, the HBO film If These Walls Could Talk - Part I, Just the Ticket and The Mod Squad.
Stock-Picking
Though most of Summer of Sam was captured on Kodak’s Vision 500T 5279, its most interesting imagery was rendered on two separate Eastman reversal stocks: 5239, a 160 ASA daylight Ektachrome emulsion that was been used to elaborate effect by cameraman Malik Sayeed on Lee’s film Clockers (see AC Sept. ’95) and by Robert Richardson, ASC on U-Turn (AC Oct. ’97); and 5017, a still-photography print stock that Sayeed rated at 64 ASA for portions of Clockers and He Got Game. Although relatively unstable, cross-processed reversal stocks have become integral to Lee’s cinematic style. Since his experiments on Clockers, the director has cross-processed reversal emulsions on his last three pictures: Get on the Bus (AC Oct. ’96), Four Little Girls and He Got Game.
Kuras was already familiar with the results of cross-processing, having utilized 7250, a 400 ASA tungsten Ektachrome stock, for all of "Niggericans." She explains, "Working on ’Niggericans’ was my first introduction to cross-processing. Although I knew the look from Clockers, I wanted to explore a cool [blue] tone through lighting and color timing. Fortunately for me, we decided to keep the subway cars [that we shot in] static, which meant that I could light the interior of the cars from the subway platform. Taking into account the existing interior lighting of the car and the illumination on the platform, I decided to use the fastest reversal stock possible [the 7250]. Then, we had to rely on a ’poor man’s process’ to give the illusion of movement. I wanted to light it with very hard, blown-out edges which would shine through opal diffusion on the subway windows, so I needed a lot of latitude in the stock. The piece was to be released on film as well as TV, so the color timer and I put the negative up on the analyzer to see how far we could to take the film to the cool side. A reversal film that’s cross-processed [as negative] tends to have an amber cast, so I asked the timer to make it as blue and black as possible—like a blue-tinted black-and-white Xerox. I had to make sure that I could get the effect on film before going to the tape transfer."
Being able to gauge the behavior of reversal in a projected (rather than broadcast) format definitely proved beneficial while the filmmakers were viewing their footage from Summer of Sam. Since Lee prefers projected dailies, Kuras never had to evaluate footage from a video monitor and ascertain a correct color schematic within the narrow parameters of a small display screen. "Today, it’s a luxury for cinematographers to see projected dailies," Kuras states. "I really respect Spike’s dedication to projected dailies. He knows it’s important for the director of photography, assistant cameraman and production designer to see what’s really happening on film. Film-to-tape dailies can be inconsistent and inaccurate. The person operating the film-to-tape machine could make a change that affects the way you light the film: if the blacks become a little bit crushed, you might think that you don’t have enough exposure in the shadow areas and you might start adding more fill, even if there is a grey scale or Macbeth chart at the head of the roll. That’s especially true with reversal—it could be rendered very differently on video than on a print stock."
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