"Kodak's Vision 5279 is also an amazing film stock, but the latitude was too wide [for our purposes]," he opines. "We would have had all kinds of highlights popping out. Sometimes I had to use 79, such as when we shot in real casinos; the limitations imposed upon us required it. We couldn't use as many lights as we wanted, because the management in those places didn't want us to bother the gamblers. We had very little time to set up."
Logistical considerations also came into play during filming of the Mint 400 race sequences, which were staged 30 miles south of Vegas at the Jean Dry Lake Bed. In accordance with Hunter Thompson's literary depiction of the event, the race eventually devolves into a massive cloud of sand and dust that all but obscures the participants, who barrel over the sun-baked terrain on motorcycles and in dune buggies.
To whip up a dust storm of truly epic proportions, the crew used a jet engine mounted on a truck to blow sack after sack of Fuller's Earth into the atmosphere. "That scene was just agony to shoot," Pecorini recalls with a groan. "It was blazing hot, and we had to seal all of the equipment in plastic wrap to protect it. We had this group of about 20 bikers with us for three days, and we were constantly using two or three cameras. We had these amazing moments of total dust, where you would just see a shadow of something passing by. To keep the sand out of the lens, we used a rain deflector that operated with a little tank of air; there were a few hoses that you could mount on the edges of the matte box, and somehow they managed to keep most of the dust from coming in.
"At the height of the chaos, when Duke is aboard a jeep with a photographer named Lacerda, we had to shoot night-for-day because we ran out of time," he reveals. "It actually wasn't that difficult, because Fuller's Earth is the most amazing diffusion that you can have; I just lit up the dust with my Jumbo lights. There were some dailies of that footage that were really funny; sometimes the takes would go on a bit too long, and the special effects guys would cut off the Fuller's Earth, causing the scene to suddenly go from full sun to complete blackness!"
The filmmakers faced an entirely different challenge for stagebound scenes involving Duke and Gonzo's visit to the Bazooko Circus, a phantasmagorical casino with a big-top theme. In the book, of course, these debauched scenes take place at the Circus Circus, a real-life gambling emporium; not surprisingly, the management of that establishment was less than eager to cooperate with the production, forcing Gilliam's team to create their own carnival of excess.
Exterior shots of the Bazooko's cartoonish entrance a giant clown's head with a gaping grin were filmed at the front doors of the Stardust hotel/casino in Las Vegas, while the fictional fantasyland's elaborate interior was constructed within a Warner-Hollywood soundstage. Production designer Alex McDowell was given free rein to produce a thoroughly over-the-top setting with two separate levels. The ground level consisted of a gambling floor, above which hung a safety net used by a team of aerial acrobats. McDowell's team also constructed a steep ramp leading up to a separate midway area featuring an array of outlandish carnival games and attractions. "To light the gambling floor, I mainly used rock 'n' roll truss rigs equipped with Par cans," Pecorini details. "I also had a few of my Jumbos working. I asked the best boy grip, Vidal Cohen, to mount them on the ends of these big metronome-like devices so that the light would move back and forth, bounce off various mirrors and travel all over the place. Each light had a different-colored gel on it as well, so it was really crazy.
"On the midway level, I put up some Par cans, but that area was lit mainly with practicals within each of the booths. I also used a lot of gelled Kino Flos and some China balls. The midway attractions were pre-existing games that we adapted for our own purposes, so there were already some limitations in terms of how we could light those. But I think limitations can be great sometimes, because they make your decisions easier!"
Pecorini's Steadicam expertise came in handy during the filming of the Bazooko scenes. "We didn't do that much Steadicam work on the rest of the film, but almost everything at the Bazooko Circus was done with Steadicam, because we really wanted to lend those scenes a feeling of craziness. We also didn't want the extras and all of the surroundings to be limited by the technicalities of the shoot; we never wanted the first A.D., Phil Patterson, and his seconds to have to tell the actors, 'Don't step on the tracks.' The great advantage of using Steadicam is that you can adapt to the shot or save the shot as things happen around you. Over the years, I've gotten very good at shoving people out of the way!"
Of course, no big-screen rendition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would be complete without the requisite interludes of copious chemical indulgence. In order to effectively convey the various altered states experienced by Duke and Gonzo, the filmmakers prepared a list of "phases" which detailed the cinematic qualities of each drug consumed by its lead characters. These substances include but are hardly restricted to ether ("loose depth of field; everything becomes non-defined"), adrenochrome ("everything gets narrow and claustrophobic, move closer with lens"), mescaline ("colors melt into each other, flares with no sources, play with color temperatures"), amyl nitrate ("perception of light gets very uneven, light levels increase and decrease during the shots"), and of course LSD ("expanded consciousness, everything extremely wide, hallucinations via morphs, shapes, colors and sound").
The most visual of these drugs, acid, was given some extra visceral impact with the help of some low-tech ingenuity. "We were originally going to use Clairmont Camera's 'squishy lens' for those sequences," Pecorini explains. "They took two lenses made of some unbreakable material and sealed them at a certain distance from each other, filling the gap with optical liquid and adding three motors that could compress and distort the lens [see New Products, page 111]. Unfortunately, that lens wasn't available to us, so we came up with an alternative. We got some pieces of this material called Lexon, which is like Plexiglas, and the grips cut it into 6" by 6" squares and put it into a 6" by 6" filter frame attached to a swiveling matte box. We then used a gas-powered soldering gun to make dents in the Lexon. The result was an optical flat with a different texture in the middle. When we moved that [over the lens], certain areas of the image a character's mouth, for example would suddenly go soft; everything else would look normal except for that one spot. The idea came to me one day when I was looking at a piece of ordinary kitchen plastic wrap. If you make it really nice and tight it's like an optical flat, but if you rub your finger on it, it smudges. You can't control the effect so well with plastic wrap, but you can be very precise with Lexon.
"We used a lot of moving light during the acid sequences," he adds. "The lights were always going up and down and flashing and crashing. We also made liberal use of our colored gels. For example, the same window might have five different colors hitting it, but never at the same time; they would be fading in and out on the dimmer. Eric Erickson, my dimmer operator, would be playing his machine as if it were an organ! Sometimes we would both be working the dimmer simultaneously. One day we were all watching dailies of those scenes and Terry said, 'Is there a color we didn't use?'"
Despite the show's hell-bent 56-day schedule, frugal budget and difficult shooting conditions, Pecorini describes his Fear and Loathing experience as "a very important turning point" in his creative career. He emphasizes the fact that he owes a debt of gratitude to both Gilliam and his core crew members (camera operator Frank Perl, first camera assistant Steve Itano, B-camera first assistant Lucas Bielan, second assistant Hilton Goring, gaffer Chris Lyons, dimmer operator Eric Erickson, key grip Peter Chrimes and loader Forrest Thurman), and underscores the importance of staying open to new ideas during a shoot. "In my opinion, if the movie you get in the end is exactly what you thought it would be at the beginning, you didn't do a good job. A movie should surprise you and go much further than you've planned. The unpredictable can always play a wonderful part in a production; many times it will turn out better than you initially thought possible!"
