Light

"The stuff that dreams are made of"*

The irony that working below the line entails so much heavy lifting to create a product lighter than air is not lost on me. Movies and television (and TikTok, for that matter) are nothing more than images dancing across a screen: light, color, and shadow crafted into the world's most popular form of entertainment, but when everything falls into place with a smart script, good director, talented cast, and an experienced crew, the results can be magical. As with all true magic, the audience never sees the blood, sweat, and toil — the seven-eighths of the iceberg below the waterline — that goes into creating the illusion, but in the end it's what’s on screen that matters, as ephemeral and mysterious as a dream …

A few years before he passed away, the Oscars finally got around to honoring Gordon Willis, albeit thirty years late. Willis was his usual dyspeptic self: like all true New Yorkers, he viewed Hollywood as a moral, intellectual, and aesthetic wasteland, and wasn’t the least bit reticent in sharing his crusty opinions. You can hear that in this brief 2002 interview with Willis, during which he attributed his failure to win a Little Gold Man (at that point in his career) to a dislike for the game of golf and his obdurate refusal to wear white shoes. Willis, it seems, felt that the academy favored those in Hollywood who spent every non-working hour playing golf while wearing white shoes — and for all I know, maybe he was right. At one point he described his love for the light in New York City: the myriad ways the hard East Coast sunlight is reflected and refracted by all those enormous towers of stone, concrete, and glass, creating fleeting images of stunning urban beauty. Having wandered around Manhattan a few times, I've seen enough to know he's right.

“Light means a lot to me in life,” he said, “and the light is terrible in LA, except in the fall.”

Right again, Mr. Willis.

Everywhere I’ve been in this world, the light is always better in autumn, but the difference is particularly dramatic in Southern California. From late spring through late summer, the thermonuclear fusion engine of our sun blasts the holy crap out of LA like some monstrous Death Ray from space. This flat, blinding light floods everything with a bleached-out ugliness that eases for a brief spell after sunrise and before sunset, when the sun hangs just above the horizon like a big ripe orange. This effect is enhanced by the seasonally lower sun beaming its rays through a much thicker atmosphere, shifting the light toward the warmer end of the spectrum in stark contrast to the crisp blue skies of fall. This low, mellow light banks off palm trees with a metallic sheen and skids across rough stucco walls to reveal textures that were hidden in plain sight during the harsh summer months. Everywhere you look, be it the natural world of landscapes or the urban cacophony of man-made structures, is suffused in a rich buttery glow accented by shadows that grow longer, sharper, and more intense every day. This lush autumnal light turns all of LA into a painting.

The light was one reason the film industry migrated from New York to LA, but this was a matter of quantity over quality. Filmmakers were at the mercy of the sun in those early days, and given the sheer abundance of sunlight in this desert-by-the-sea — where real weather (clouds, rain, sleet, ice, and snow) rarely intrudes — LA was a perfect location for the young industry to grow and flourish. Getting a crisp image on film was enough of a challenge at the time, so it didn't matter that all this hard overhead sunlight was ugly as sin, but as cameras, lenses, and film improved, techniques were developed to control the raw natural light. Although the technology has vastly improved since the old days, the same basic methods are still employed on location sets to cut, soften, reflect, and otherwise modulate raw sunlight.

Forty years working in set lighting introduced me to the infinite variety and qualities of light on set and out in the real world, teaching me to appreciate the light all around us: its directionality, tones, and ever-varying textures. Although the actual work of set lighting begins and ends with wrangling very heavy cable (and in between, manhandling and adjusting equally heavy lamps that are usually extremely hot), the end result of all that sweating, grunting labor is the creation of something shimmering and bright up on screen. Although I only worked with one DP who was a big enough asshole to declare, “I paint with light” — and he was a spray-painter at best — when you get down to it, that’s exactly what a gifted cinematographer does.

The natural light show all around us isn't there simply to please cameramen and film crews, but for everybody to enjoy. As the seasons unfold, I urge you to get out into the world, turn off your cell phone, and take a good look at what's all around you. Once you learn to see it, there's more true magic in the real world than you'll ever find on a screen.

* Hollywood dreams, that is: IYK,YK