Alberti extended this approach even to contrasting scenes depicting the two eras' musical heroes in their respective dressing rooms before they hit the stage. "The first time we see Brian Slade, he's at the mirror in his dressing room before the 'Death of Glitter' concert," she notes. "The room is painted a purplish red. I wanted to make a narrow pool of light in the background, so instead of dealing with a soft light and flagging it down, I used the narrow beam of a Par can with just a little diffusion to open it up a touch, and a purple Lee 180 gel to give the room a heavy feeling. Slade is about to 'kill' the Maxwell Demon character onstage, and he's at the end of his rope. I wanted to keep the room dark, moody and sensual, with no fill light — I was a bit nervous about that idea, but I just went with it. Slade is lit by the small practical lights around the mirror, which give off white light. But I added a tweenie on him with a Plus Green correction gel, which is normally used to correct a lamp to match it with fluorescent light. I used that gel quite a bit throughout the film as a color gel; it's a very nice green. I also used it a lot during scenes in the wings of the rock 'n' roll theater, on the backlight, with smoke acting as a fill light.
"By contrast, for a scene in which Tommy Stone is in his dressing room, I just bounced a light into the ceiling. It's all very white and flat."
Alberti was also asked to simulate the charmingly artless look of early music promotional clips, which can be seen as the prototypes of the modern music video. In these clips, a performer or band would often be photographed against a simple, stark white backdrop. "I lit those scenes with space lights straight from the top, as well as a couple of nine-lights coming through spaced double layers of 1/4 silk diffusion," she explains. "I used double layers so that the light was really diffused. I also used a little edge light from the side, so that the scene wouldn't be completely flat. But the idea is that the room is a white cocoon."
Most challenging for Alberti were fanciful or outlandish scenes in which she didn't have any sort of existing reference to motivate her cinematography. In one such scene, Slade and his fellow musical pranksters dress up in the foppish wigs and pantaloons of 18th-century British aristocrats as they regale journalists during a surreal interview session at the "Posh Hotel."
"I first looked at a lot of [production designer] Christopher Hobbs's drawings, and he had also built small models of the set," Alberti recalls. "I ended up using space lights for the set of the men in black suits who are arranged in a circle around Slade. Otherwise, I used a range of lights as small as Dedos to give a little accent to the sculptures in the background, as well as two 2Ks and a couple of 5Ks. The light in the scene was basically white, with 1/2 CTO on a couple of the lamps to warm up the scene."
Haynes admits mischievously, "I'd love to take credit for that scene, but I can't. It's like what Bowie said in the early Seventies: he was a human Xerox machine, constantly storing references. I tried to replicate that [philosophy] in this film. That scene in particular is a reference to Bowie's management company, Main Man, which once flew a handful of journalists from America to London to witness a Ziggy Stardust show. They put the journalists up at the Dorchester Hotel and wined and dined them. One afternoon, Bowie, his wife, Angie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed basically put on a show for these journalists. Bowie changed his clothes four times, and they drank champagne and ate strawberries. It was this decadent display: 'Let's put on a show, let's make the journalists really believe we are these people!' I really didn't have to take the scene that far from what really happened."
In another highly symbolic sequence, Slade descends a winding staircase as he performs a song in the decadent "Grand Ballroom," a metaphorical backdrop suggesting the singer's (and the glam era's) impending fall from grace. To plan for the sequence, Alberti and Haynes first blocked the action out on a scale-model set. "Todd and I had a small video camera, and we made a little 'man' out of cardboard," Alberti describes. "Todd would hold the little man and walk him down the staircase of the miniature, and I would tape him with a Hi-8 camera so that we could find the right timing and camera moves. I asked Todd, 'What is the Grand Ballroom?' And he told me that it represented decay and the end of an era. The scene [depicts] a last little creative burst or spark. My idea was to light the decaying ballroom as if it had just burned down, so I lit most of the scene from underneath. The set, which was on a soundstage, was basically two huge, flat panels that were painted quite beautifully in perspective. I used a lot of 1Ks and tweenies coming up through the cracks of the staircase, so Slade would be crossing through all of these little 'flames.' I had a couple of 5Ks in the rear. Todd wanted to change the color of some part of the set at the bottom of the staircase, so I used a couple of green gels there to offset the red paint. Slade eventually jumps onto a chandelier rising up from darkness. The chandelier is lit with strings of Christmas lights, and I hid little Dedo lights in there so that once again Slade would be lit from below."
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