Another accomplished key grip, Dick Deats, is a second-generation expert whose son, Jerry C. Deats, has also taken up the trade. Deats has been gripping since 1963. "There was a studio apprentice program back then," he recalls. "You started out on the backlot and didn't work on a production for five years." He finds that gripping is a special industry niche that attracts dedicated workers. "Most key grips I've known live to serve. They have incredible egos, and they aren't in it just for the money. I know maybe six grips who became cinematographers, and a few of them went back to keying. It's very rewarding when you can pull rabbits out of hats all day, every day, and do things on the spur of the moment that are inspiring to you and to others. Gripping is a very creative job."
According to Deats, the relationship that grips and cinematographers share "has a lot to do with the special needs of that cameraperson, and with the logistics of shooting. It's a question of knowing if the light is just right, too bright or too dim. It's also a question of the grip making the cinematographer's wishes and dreams come true, however that can be done." Deats calls ASC members Vilmos Zsigmond, Laszlo Kovacs, Haskell Wexler, Caleb Deschanel, Stephen Goldblatt and Andrzej Bartkowiak, six cinematographers with whom he's collaborated, "not only wonderful people to work with, but good friends too."
One of Deats' most interesting collaborations was his pairing with Zsigmond on Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. One of the job's major undertakings was the construction of a temporary extension to a hangar in Mobile, Alabama. "The structure was 200 feet wide and over 300 feet deep, and it had to be blacked in, with tarps over all the windows to keep the light out," Deats remembers. Because it was temporary, the extension had to be taken down when shooting was completed. "It was a huge amount of work," says Deats. "We had weeks to build the extension, and then we had to maintain it for six months till the filming was done."
Several years later, while shooting Heaven's Gate, Zsigmond found that he required a lightweight, portable crane. To fulfill this need, Deats invented the Little Big Crane, which won an Academy Award for Best Special Achievement in 1983. Deats recalls that director Michael Cimino "hadn't used cranes much, and wasn't planning to use a crane for that movie. But I'd worked on a lot of Westerns when I started out in this business, and I felt that to do a Western-type movie without a crane would be a disaster. A person on horseback is 10 feet up in the air, and without a crane, you're shooting up into the sky and there's no vista." Deats had a lengthy discussion with Zsigmond to convince him to bring a crane to the Montana location, but to no avail. "They didn't want to bring a crane, until I told them my idea about building one that was portable and could be put anywhere. Vilmos agreed to help fund it if I'd build it and make it available to the film company on an as-needed basis." Deats built the crane, and the company wound up using it four workdays out of seven. The inventor recalls, "They were happy to have it up in the woods, and in the plowed fields, where the portability factor came in very handy."
Deats' dedication to serving his cinematographers also resulted in another invention: the Griffolyn. "It's made from a material similar to plastic or propylene that's used as temporary covers for football fields, and big grain barges that go up and down the Mississippi," he notes. The dimpled texture of the nylon netting "has an incredible light quality," says Deats. He made up some large reflective surfaces and showed it to Kovacs, Wexler and Zsigmond as a prospective means of bouncing light. "Now you can go anywhere in the world and ask for a 12' x 12' Griffolyn, and everyone knows what it is, because I began building them for these cameramen."
Deats calls his relationship with Zsigmond "a personal as well as a professional one, because we work well together and we socialize off the set. We have dinner together and our families are friends. Bonding with a cinematographer is part of a grip's job," says Deats. "You work so closely with that person's desires that you can't help but become emotionally attached to the person. And the longer you're involved in the business, the more you become partial to a few particular people whom you work with over and over."
"Grips do it all," Laszlo Kovacs maintains. "They rig, create camera positions from the most impossible places, build dolly tracks, set flags and nets and support the electrician."
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