Michael D. O'Shea, ASC
Relativity — "Karen and Her Sisters "
"Although the series Relativity began with a different cameraman," says director of photography Michael D. O'Shea, ASC, "I was grateful that Michael Watkins, ASC recommended me to the show's producers, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz. I had just worked with Michael on the Movie of the Week To Love, Honor and Deceive [see additional article in this section]. In reading the script for Relativity, I knew the show had a quality that would afford me some unique lighting opportunities."
O'Shea was also drawn to the series due to the involvement of line producer Peter Schindler, with whom he had previously worked while shooting the feature comedies Dracula; Dead and Loving It and Robin Hood: Men in Tights for director Mel Brooks. "Peter is an old friend, and I knew I could count on him to help me develop my concepts for this series," the cameraman says.
O'Shea broke into the industry in 1965 as a loader at Warner Bros. before becoming a first assistant and operator for Howard Schwartz, ASC. After operating for many other cameramen (including ASC members William Jurgensen, Edward R. Brown, Robert Stevens and James Crabe, as well as Nick McLean), he served as a second-unit cinematographer on such features as Spaceballs, The Goonies, The Lost Boys, Geromino and The Specialist.
O'Shea earned a previous Emmy nomination for his work on the lighthearted drama Doogie Howser, M.D., which was his first series as a director of photography. He filmed Howser for three seasons. "I came on to operate for Frederick Moore, who left after a year and let me move up with the complete crew. When I got the job, I knew what I liked lighting-wise, but had to accomplish it in a roundabout way. While I had operated for a long time, my focus and vocabulary needed to expand to include all of the departments working around me. Fortunately, I had a wonderful gaffer, Tim Evans, and a great crew, who taught me. I'm still learning every day."
The cinematographer's other credits include the feature Double Dragon, the series Raising Cain, Sweet Justice and Weird Science, a pair of Rockford Files telefilms, and pilots for Life 101 and The Player.
O'Shea credits Relativity's succession of strong directors, including Ed Zwick and Michael Watkins, for some of his success with the image-making. "As a cameraman, it's important to have directors who know what they want," he says. "You can just embellish that or make suggestions on what you think might work, but having that starting point is essential. Mark Piznarski, the co-executive producer on the show, directed 'Karen and Her Sisters,' the episode that was nominated. His background was in commercials, and his style was a bit different, so it was fun. He really liked to play things in one shot, with a lot of pan-offs and long-lens work. That was interesting for me, especially in watching how he blocked the scenes and worked with the talent.
"This was a show about real-life relationships," he adds. "It wasn't mushy, and it also had a stark quality. The sets were nice, which gave me a lot of options. We were also very fortunate to have some very pretty women in the cast. If you're shooting Kimberly Williams, for instance, you can bounce light off of dirt and she'll look good. She's very easy to light: she can take the light flat or around from the back. Of course, we still had to be careful and manipulate things until they looked right.
"The lighting on the show was primarily soft on the keys, but I liked to play the faces down and add a lot of hot streaks across the sets and the costumes. If we had a day scene with hot windows, I liked to blast light through while still keeping it soft on the faces and bounce it into mirrors and anywhere else it might go in the set. That gave the image a lot of separation, although you have to be careful with that look, because it can also start to look repetitious. But I like those hot spots even for intimate scenes, as long as they aren't distracting to the audience.
"I owe a lot to my crew on that show, because they were patient with me. The core group included gaffer Jack Schlosser, key grip Frank Montesanto, first assistant Steve McLean, second assistant Chris Thompson, loader Jason Garcia, and operator Clint Dougherty. They really worked hard for me."
O'Shea is currently serving as director of photography on the ABC dramatic series Nothing Sacred, which concerns the trials of a young Catholic priest running a parish in the Northeast. "We're shooting in Los Angeles, so the biggest problem is avoiding the palm trees and making it look cold," he attests. "Fred Murphy, ASC shot the pilot and did a wonderful job, so it's going to be a challenge to keep that going."
— David E. Williams
Roy H. Wagner, ASC
Gun — "Ricochet"
Veteran cameraman Roy Wagner, ASC's nomination for Gun gives him the opportunity to add a third Emmy to his list of achievements; he earned his two prior awards in 1988 and 1989 for the pilots of two rather successful fantasy series Beauty and the Beast and Quantum Leap. He also won a 1991 ASC Award for the Michael Mann miniseries Drug Wars II.
Gun was an anthology series with only one consistent "character" a pearl-handled .45 pistol. In each episode, the weapon gets passed on from one individual to the next, thus initiating a cycle of events which forever alters the lives of the particular episode's protagonists. "Ricochet" begins with a middle-aged Japanese man standing on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean; after he shoots himself in the head, the man's gun tumbles down the cliff, only to fall into the hands of a vagrant. The detective in charge of the investigation discovers that the suicide victim had left a million-dollar insurance policy for his greedy widow; she, however, happens to be having an affair with the her deceased hubby's business attorney.
Wagner began his professional career in the early Sixties as a photographer's assistant, and soon began shooting commercials for TV stations. When the Vietnam War escalated, he joined the Air Force, in which he served as a documentary cameraman; his work earned him several awards from the National Press Photographer's Association. After leaving the service, he embarked on numerous independent productions, including a documentary on cannibals that was shot on location in Australia and New Guinea. His first feature as a cinematographer was the indie film Hype; since then he has shot such features as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Another Stakeout, Nick of Time, Drop Zone and The Pest. He has also compiled extensive episodic television credits, including the series Undercover, Nasty Boys, Christine Cromwell, Mann and Machine, Crime & Punishment, 2000 Malibu Road and Party of Five. He is now shooting ABC's adaptation of the British detective drama Cracker.
Wagner became involved with Gun at the behest of executive producers Rob Dweck, James Sadwith and Robert Altman. The cinematographer has a rather succinct recollection of his initial discussion with the trio, which he says basically "centered upon finding a visual approach to Gun that would stop channel surfers." The cinematographer says that the director of the "Richochet" episode, Peter Horton, "was very much into discovering a look based upon the locations, character intent, and his interpretation with the actors. This allowed last-minute course changes as we refined the visual tools for interpreting the story."
Wagner shot "Ricochet" with a Panavision camera and Primo lenses, over eight days in and around downtown Santa Monica, Van Nuys and other L.A. locales. Wagner's penchant for exploring the full dynamic range of light-to-shadow on film lent many of the show's scenes a hot aura typical of the brightest Southern California sunlight. This achievement is all the more impressive given that the episode was shot during the winter months, when L.A.'s natural illumination can be overcast and the hours of workable daylight somewhat limited.
Some of this episode's most stylistic scenes occur in a Chinese restaurant, where the underhanded lawyer presents a scam to some Asian businessmen. The Chinese men are bathed in a hot toplight that almost seems to make them glow. Wagner comments, "The only interesting aspect of the location [an eatery in Van Nuys] was its ceiling. I felt like Nicholas Musuraca, ASC when he was asked about how he developed his style of film noir there was no set. [For more insights on Musuraca's work, see Wrap Shot on page 112]. The best possible thing to do was to obscure the location by not lighting it. I mounted a 4K HMI Par straight down behind the businessmen, creating the illusion that their deeds were shady; they were principally shown in silhouette. The only light upon any face was that which was bounced back from others moving around them or whatever happened to be on their tables. I knew that the film stock could hold the highlights and the slight detail in the shadows if I placed the exposure in the proper zone."
Reflecting upon his work on the series, Wagner offers, "Each episode had its own challenges, failures and successes. I liked 'Ricochet' because of the opportunities that I had to discover new approaches to extremely difficult circumstances. We tested Eastman Kodak's Vision stocks to their limits, and I am proud of some of the results particularly in terms of how the negative held highlights, solid blacks and middle values. The stocks were also extremely helpful because they reproduce color faithfully under extreme lighting conditions. We never used fill light anywhere; we allowed the key to produce its own fill."
— Andrew O. Thompson
Jonathan West, ASC
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — "Apocalypse Rising"
Cinematographer Jonathan West, ASC likens the somber Star Trek spin-off Deep Space Nine to a "film noir set in space." The Emmy-nominated episode "Apocalypse Rising" (directed by James Conway) takes that concept to an even further extreme: it's set mainly within the world of the Klingons, the nefarious warrior race who regard honor to be the most sacred of all tenets. In this particular show, the Federation crew of the Deep Space Nine space station are surgically altered to appear as Klingons; the officers' mission is to infiltrate the Klingon empire's ranks.
West is no stranger to the milieu of "the final frontier," having boldly served as director of photography on the final two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation (after previously serving as TNG's special effects cinematographer). His predecessor on TNG, Marvin Rush, ASC, designed the lighting of the show's primary settings the various interiors of the Federation Starship Enterprise to have a rather crisp, clean look provided primarily by overhead fluorescent fixtures. West comments, "Going from that to DS9, which is generally a darker show, was a big change in lighting style. The station itself was supposedly designed by an alien race, so we tend to keep it moody. But it depends on where you are: the promenade [a recreation area with a bar, shops and restaurants] is a little bit brighter, and the corridors tend to be darker and more stark."
West's interest in cinematography stems from a four-year stint in the U.S. Air Force, where he served as a cinematographer, editor and narrator of documentaries. After his discharge, West did freelance work until he was accepted into the union as an assistant cameraman in 1974. He then spent seven years as a camera operator; West spent most of this time working with cinematographers Chuck Arnold, Gayne Rescher, ASC and James Crabe. In 1985, Touchstone Productions promoted him to full-time director of photography. His televisual credits include the pilots for Hope, San Berdoo, Doogie Howser, M.D. and Heartbeat. He also shot the specials The Visit, The Big Bang, The Whereabouts of Jenny (which earned him a 1991 Emmy nomination), Finish Line, A Small Good Thing and PBS' Great Performances' Tale from the Hollywood Hills: The Golden Land. In addition to The Next Generation, West also served as cameraman on the series Private Eye, WIOU, Heartbeat, Our House and Eerie, Indiana.
The cinematographer shoots DS9 with a Panaflex GII and Kodak 5298 stock. He finds that the 98's 500 ASA rating is best-suited to the space station's level of ambient light, which generally hovers around a T3. Unlike the big-screen Trek adventures, the television show doesn't have to take effects work into consideration with regard to the film stock. As West explains, "The 98 affords me a very fast speed in case I have to go a little bit brighter for more depth of field. [In terms of effects work], we transfer everything to digital Beta and do all of our postproduction, including the visual effects, on either D1 or digiBeta. Once we get the footage out of the camera, nothing is done optically on film."
"Apocalypse Rising" was photographed primarily on Paramount's massive Stage 18, which was redressed as the Klingons' Hall of Warriors. The cameraman describes the set as "a large structure with 12-foot statues of ancient Klingon warriors, which was lit primarily by fire. We had a lot of fire effects with our own versions of flicker boxes. In contrast to that was a Klingon prison, which had a very cold, austere quality; we used overhead blue light in conjunction with the firelight at the end of the hall."
Since all the action taking place in the Hall of Warriors occurs at night, West could cheat on some of his lighting setups. He notes, "We didn't have room to put a backing behind some of the window treatments used on the side of the Klingon hall, so we just put bleached muslin along the sides. Behind the muslin, I placed [red-gelled fluorescent lamps and tweenie fixtures] on the floor. It was the only thing we could do [to give the set a sense of color], because we didn't have an exterior to work with."
The cameraman says that the biggest technical hurdle of the episode's seven-day shoot was maintaining a sense of cohesion between the various Klingon areas: the Hall of Warriors, a prison, and a battle cruiser bridge. West illuminated the bridge by aiming warm light through patterned ceiling grids and onto the shadowy, smoke-strewn set. Continuity concerns were further complicated by the action-heavy episode's kinetic camera work. Typically, West prefers to employ wide lenses on DS9 to make use of the station's alien architecture, but this episode's dramatics required him to combine quick-cutting tight shots with wide, sweeping masters. One such master required making 50 Klingon extras appear to be three times their actual number. West explains, "We created an intricate split-screen effect; we did one-third of the shot at a time with a locked-off camera, and then the visual effects people composited the shots. We also did some bluescreen work, and maintaining that continuity shooting characters in front of a bluescreen with firelight effects and still keeping the integrity of the background plate consistent was difficult."
— Andrew O. Thompson
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