Return to "The Naked City"
by
Andrew O Thompson
Mark Dillon
''There are eight million stories in the naked city This has been one of them.''
So echoed producer/narrator Mark Hellinger's famous sign-off in The Naked City, a 1948 feature-film drama which heralded a new direction in Hollywood moviemaking. The film took the movie camera out of the glamorizing confines of a studio and onto the bustling streets of New York City, giving audiences a heightened sense of ordinary people's lives. In relating Malvin Wald's Academy Award-winning story of a model's homicide and the subsequent police investigation, director Jules Dassin and cinematographer William H. Daniels, ASC shot at such Big Apple locations as the Roxy Theater, the city morgue, Roosevelt Hospital, the Universal Building, and the Williamsburg Bridge. (Daniels won an Oscar for his work on the picture, and later served as ASC President from 1961 through 1963.) Everyday sights, sounds, and passersby interweave with The Naked City's fictional murder yarn, making the film as much a pictorial study of America's largest metropolis as it is a terse thriller. The picture's popularity -- along with a resultant shift toward location shooting for the small screen -- led to a Naked City television series which ran from 1958 to 1960.
To commemorate this seminal film's golden anniversary, veteran TV writer/director Jeff Freilich (Quincy, Baretta, Dark Justice) has produced two updated, made-for-cable Naked City movies for Showtime in association with Paramount Network Television. In this modern incarnation, Scott Glenn assumes the role of seasoned detective Sgt. Muldoon, while Courtney B. Vance plays his inexperienced partner, Officer Jimmy Halloran. Freilich wrote and directed the first film (subtitled Justice With a Bullet) with Polish native Miroslaw Baszak handling cinematographic duties.
Director Peter Bogdanovich is helming the second film, A Killer Christmas, from a script by Freilich and Christopher Trumbo, in which a serial murderer panics the metropolis during the Yuletide season. Muldoon and Halloran's investigation is hampered when the killer alerts TV reporter Gerry Millar (Laura Leighton) of his next victim. Instead of warning police, the ratings-obsessed Millar brings a video crew to the intended crime scene in the hope of filming the attack in-progress, but she arrives after the murder has already occurred. Muldoon becomes emotionally entangled in the case when his girlfriend, Eva (Barbara Williams), is coincidentally wounded in the assault. (Justice With a Bullet airs on Showtime later this month, while A Killer Christmas will appropriately have its broadcast in December.)
One measure of how the film industry has changed over the past 50 years is that these stories -- so indigenous to New York City -- were shot in Toronto, Canada. A strong exchange rate on the American dollar, favorable government tax credits, and an abundance of respected local technicians have recently made Canada's largest city an irresistible location for a number of Hollywood productions.
It was on a frigid February morning that the Naked City crew set up for the climactic scene of A Killer Christmas, in which the cops trap the serial slayer on the roof of a dilapidated office building. A city block was cordoned off for the arrival of prop vehicles, including a TV news van, a fire truck, a yellow New York cab, and NYPD squad cars. Two 18K HMIs shooting through 216 diffusion frames -- one on a tower and the other on a rooftop -- bounced light off a white emergency vehicle, giving the impression of a less overcast day. Some 70 extras -- playing Manhattanite pedestrians who encourage the killer to jump to his demise -- shivered as they awaited instructions from an assistant director. Meanwhile, cinematographer James Gardner, CSC, SASC anxiously eyed the darkening skies.
Gardner cut his professional teeth shooting low-budget movies in his native South Africa. He recalls, ''[We would] just shoot them quickly and make sure there was a good exposure.'' He later moved on to commercials, benefitting from ''a big influx of English directors and cameramen such as Nicolas Roeg, who would come down between their features to do commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken and Castle Beer. They would wind us all up and show us that there were different ways of doing things.''
While Gardner can't cite any one crime film as an overriding influence on his photography for The Naked City, he does single out Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC as a favorite cinematographer. ''That guy is a superstar, an excellent cameraman. The Shawshank Redemption is one of the best-looking films out there. He looks at what's going on and reacts to it as a human being, and that's how he lights. Cinematographers try not to be mechanical people -- when you get it right you just know it. No light meter, nor any other tool, can tell you how to light.''
On The Naked City, Gardner and Bogdanovich are aiming for a style that the cinematographer describes as ''having as little color as possible -- not because the original was black-and-white, but because that's the way we thought it should look. We're trying to get a very grainy, gritty look, which is nearly impossible on Kodak stocks nowadays.'' Gardner utilized Kodak's Vision 500T 5279 to achieve the necessary depth of field. ''We're trying to shoot at T4 if we can, because when you're playing an entire sequence with multiple characters in one shot, you need everybody sharp. With the exteriors, we don't have huge contrasts since it's winter, there's not a lot of sun, and there are no deep shadows.''
In the scene photographed on this particular day, Muldoon sends a cell phone up to the killer in the fire truck's aerial tower basket, in order to facilitate a dialogue. Bogdanovich settles into his director's chair under a rain cover, facing two video monitors -- one for the A-camera (an Arriflex 35 BL-4 tracing the aerial tower's ascent), the other for the B-camera (an Arri 35 BL-III trained on the crowd below). The director explains that a two-camera system is not one he usually employs or even likes, but acknowledges that ''on a 27-day shoot you have no choice.''
During rehearsal, the fire truck crane enters the shot, and production designer Franco de Cotiis sets another task for himself: covering up the ''City of Toronto'' insignia emblazoned on the crane's arm. This is but one detail that the location and art departments of The Naked City must attend to in transforming Toronto into New York. Explaining the most noticeable visual differences between the two cities, Freilich points out that ''there are no overhead streetcar wires in the streets of Manhattan as there are in Toronto, and there are few remaining tracks.
''It's also rare to find the mosaic of architecture that you find in Manhattan, where you can take a 40mm lens, point it at a certain corner and see 10 generations of architecture, dating back to the late 18th Century. Here you're lucky to find one older building among 20 skyscrapers, and the degree of 'skyscraping' is different -- it's rare here to find the assemblage of tall buildings you would find in New York.''
An expedient shooting tactic would have been to use long lenses, blur the backgrounds, and not bother about the accuracy of geographic detail, but neither director chose that route. Notes Bogdanovich, ''I generally use wider lenses than most people. They're usually surprised -- I use the 40mm lens a lot, on down.'' Freilich feels that long lenses had become so commonplace in television production that after a while it seemed ''to be a cheat for a lack of functional and accurate backgrounds, whereas 25mm to 40mm lenses -- which are closer to what the eye sees -- enable the audience to look anywhere on a picture and focus on something. Of course, you then have to supply enough in that picture for the audience to look at. You also have to make sure that what's in the picture is accurate to the story you're telling and to the environment you're trying to present.''
Gardner estimates that 80 percent of the film was shot with prime lenses, explaining, ''When camera moves are tricky and involved, it's easier to use zooms, but there's definitely still a huge difference between prime and zoom lenses in terms of clarity -- we even see it in our video rushes.''
Locations that couldn't be duplicated in Toronto were shot in New York with a second-unit crew. Freilich's Manhattan shoot lasted two days, whereas Bogdanovich shot there for three days over the Christmas holidays to capture Gotham's festive atmosphere. Recounts Freilich, ''The art department built a smaller version of those locations [in Toronto]. We shot the big pieces in New York and then came here to shoot closer pieces of coverage. Franco [de Cotiis] has such an amazingly accurate eye -- he came on the second unit, took photographs of everything, and duplicated it here to such a degree that the people at Paramount and Showtime can't tell what was shot where.'' De Cotiis and the art department reproduced New York subway stations inside and out, as well as the streets of lower Manhattan, right down to particulars such as New York-style hot dog stands.
One of the filmmakers' biggest concerns is to give The Naked City a look distinct from the many other television cop shows set in New York, such as NYPD Blue and Law & Order (see page 52), which are known for their frenetic handheld camerawork. For the most part, Freilich avoided using handheld and Steadicam shots. While he finds such techniques undeniably ''representative of the energy level of the city, it's also very stylized.'' On the other hand, Bogdanovich filmed approximately one-third of his feature on a Steadicam, noting, ''The Steadicam gives you a lot of mobility, say, if you're moving people around the different rooms of a house. You don't have to lay track and it's quicker. I don't see any point in doing handheld stuff that is very jittery, because I don't like to call too much attention to the camera.''
Gardner was quite impressed with Bogdanovich's blocking ability in the film's Steadicam sequences, which were shot by operator Rod Crombie. ''It seems very easy for him to move actors around. We tried to get away from cutting back and forth between two talking heads, like you see on many TV shows. In this film, in a single shot, one guy would get up, wander around, somebody else would join him, and then the two would walk through the door -- so in one take we'd done two double circles and some S-bends.'' The cinematographer concedes that such involved setups require elaborate planning and are difficult to illuminate, but he finds them a welcome challenge after the more than 900 commercials he has photographed, ''where you easily end up with 28 cuts in 30 seconds.''
For any subsequent Naked City movies, Freilich would like to bring in new filmmaking teams to shoot each installment. ''Part of the fun is seeing what each individual cinematographer and director brings to this,'' he says. ''1 want to make each movie significantly different, because there's no sameness in New York City; you turn a comer and you're suddenly in a different world, and that's what you need to convey to the audience.''
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