Though Kuras had employed a veritable cocktail of emulsions on Four Little Girls (a mixture of three 16mm stocks—EXR 7293, 7245, and 7250 reversal—for photos and B-roll material, along with Super 8 Kodachrome 40 stock), her fluency in multiple film stocks came from lessons learned during production of Unzipped. This insider’s look at the world of fashion maven Isaac Mizrahi not only mixed the Super 8, Super 16 and standard 16mm formats, but also combined color and monochromatic footage. "Originally, Douglas Keeve [the documentary’s director and a still photographer by trade] had wanted to shoot all of the scenes before the fashion shows in black-and-white," recalls Kuras. "I suggested that we shoot some Kodachrome Super 8 just to give some splashes of color before the fashion show. But in the editing room, he ended up mixing a lot of the different stocks—very grainy, pushed black-and-white footage followed by some color— yet it all worked together because the story was strong, and because Isaac was a very entertaining character. I decided to not even touch the first answer print. The diversity of looks caused by the color shifts was appropriate to the film’s funky style and editing. Using the cinematography to work symbiotically with the story is something that Spike also ascribes to—he places more emphasis on getting strong acting and story than spending hours on putting in beauty lights."
Doing the Light Thing
Much of The Summer of Sam transpires during the sweltering summer of 1977. As a result, Lee wanted the imagery to indicate the intense heat of a New York city summer—which, as any resident of the Big Apple knows, is marked by a muggy, humidity-filled atmosphere. As a visual guide, Lee asked Kuras to view his 1989 film Do the Right Thing (photographed by Ernest Dickerson, ASC). Kuras also watched Natural Born Killers and two versions of the Jack the Ripper story as a primer on serial-killer films. After conducting several tests on emulsions and exposures, Kuras opted to use antique suede filters in front of the lens during day shooting. This tactic lent the colors a more monochromatic look, as well as a period Seventies feel.
While filming daytime exteriors set in the Bronx, Kuras had to be very judicious in the placement of her fixtures, due to the shoot’s unstable weather patterns and Lee’s preferred working method, which always involves two-camera coverage. "Spike wanted a ’hot’ look, so I tried to give him as many hard backlight and sidelight edges as possible. Those [highlights] had to hug the edge of the frame. I also advised the grips not to dull down the cars or do wetdowns so that the kicks, highlights and glares would play as much as possible, and so the streets would have a blown-out look. While we were shooting, the weather changed quite a bit from hour to hour—in the morning we would have sunshine, and in the afternoon it would cloud over and sometimes rain. Trying to keep consistency throughout a scene was difficult without a lot of available room to put lights or Condors out of shot. We were often on a dead-end street, and we sometimes were backed up right to its end.
"In addition, many of the scenes were played like ensemble pieces. We often used two cameras [Arri 535-Bs] to allow the actors freedom and get matched coverage, sometimes in a scope encompassing 300 degrees. There could be seven actors and cameras moving with hard sidelights; I was constantly challenged when the principals would walk through each others’ lights, because they were casting shadows all over each others’ faces." She relied upon timing as a means to compensate for the variable cloud cover.
To convey the sense of humidity and atmosphere at night, Kuras employed pre-exposure flashing. During preproduction, she experimented with filters and a Lightflex, but found the effect somewhat confining. "The Lightflex gave a haze to the film that was very similar to New York’s hot, humid nights, during which the blacks aren’t really quite black," says Kuras. "However, we would have faced the problem of double reflections from headlights playing off the filters in front of the lens. We often had cars driving straight at camera, so I would have had a lot of double lights going through frame. We sandwiched filters as much as we could, and used a tilting matte box, but we just couldn’t avoid the reflections in certain situations because the camera was moving so much. Flashing was a viable way to achieve the same effect while keeping the image clear of double reflections."
In keeping with Summer of Sam’s sweeping scope, citywide tension mounts when all electrical power goes dead during the infamous blackout of ’77. Chaos is the order of the night as TV reporter John Jefferies (played by Lee) reports from Harlem, where mobs have begun burning and looting the neighborhood. Though the lighting for this night exterior was motivated primarily by fire effects (burning barrels, smoke and lighting instruments placed out of frame), Lee opted for shooting it with reversal stock. Kuras managed to persuade Lee to go with the faster 7239 stock instead of the 5017, since one of the cameras would be running at a rate of 40 to 48 fps. The cinematographer recalls, "We used two 80’ Condors rigged with space lights, but the grips rigged them in a line instead of in a square-box pattern. We placed them at either end of the road to light the street for ambient fill. We then took some 6K Pars, removed the lenses, and used them almost as if they were searchlights sweeping across the scene. Besides having smoke and fire barrels, we also implemented the idea of using safety lights—the battery-operated kind with a strange salmon color that are placed in storefronts. We put flame gels over those lights as if they were coming from inside the stores, yet the instruments were played outside of shot."
As it turned out, the look of the night riot scene turned out to be radically different from the filmmakers’ wildest predictions. When combined with the reversal stock, the "searchlights" imprinted a white-out like aura upon whatever objects or persons crossed through their panning beams. This blown-out brilliance imbued the 5017 with the X-rayed appearance of a film negative.
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