The Hollywood Beat

There are two kinds of still photographers at movie premieres. Those “behind the rope” or in the photo pen, as I was last night at the “Scary Movie V” premiere, and a few roaming photographers, usually shooting for the Hollywood trades (Variety and The Hollywood Reporter) or the studio in charge of the film. As you can imagine, the roaming photographers usually have to endure some truly ear-bleeding invective from those behind the line, as there is almost no feasible way not to block at least one photographer at these premieres, no matter where you stand on the carpet.

I’m sympathetic to both kinds of shooters, as I’ve been both a roamer and a behind-the-line guy throughout my career (often during the same week). If you’re on the carpet, your job is to get candid combinations of celebrities, or wide shots of the whole scene that capture the atmosphere of the premiere, i.e. shots that don’t look like they’re being shot from behind the rope, or else what’s the point? If you’re behind the rope, you are somewhat at the mercy of the roaming photographers, since you can’t move. Sometimes the roamers can park themselves right in front of you just as you’re about to nail a key photo you’re been waiting for all night. Thus the screaming insults, or at the very least, cries of persecution. When I’ve had to roam the carpet, I’ve been called names that shouldn’t be printed in any civilized forum by people who on any other day I would consider my friends. It’s just an integral part of this weird job.

When I heard about Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen showing up for the “Scary Movie V” premiere, I knew it would be a night of pure chaos. But my favorite photo of the night was this one with Mike Tyson pretending to bite off Charlie’s ear. As you can see, this happened far away from me at the opposite end of the carpet, and the roamers just swarmed in on the scene like bees. But they left just enough daylight for me to grab one good frame with my zoom lens. And I even kind of like how the foreground photographers (both good friends of mine, by the way) frame the shot and give it some context. But I know I’m in the minority here. If you’re on the carpet, you really ought to invest in a good pair of ear plugs, or else you’re going to walk around with some seriously hurt feelings. The sensitive need not apply!

I’d be the first to admit that this isn’t a great portrait. It’s serviceable and professional, a decent day’s work. But sometimes that’s the best you can do. This was a portrait of “42” stars Harrison Ford and Chadwick Boseman for a story AP was doing on the movie, which chronicles baseball great Jackie Robinson. The press junket was at a location I’d never even heard of, called the Los Angeles Sports Museum. It’s a privately owned compendium of amazing Los Angeles sports memorabilia in a nondescript building in the industrial wasteland section of downtown LA. 

When I walked in, my imagination caught fire. The place was amazing, just rife with ancient jerseys, baseball gloves and bats, team banners, old stadium turnstiles, even a whole room devoted to Jackie Robinson’s career. It was the rare situation where a junket was being held in a truly interesting place. 

Then, of course, photographic reality set in. Virtually everything in the museum was behind thick glass, a photographer’s nightmare because of the certain, pain-in-the-ass reflections. And shooting without lights was out of the question, as the entire museum was bathed in green overhead fluorescent panels. Besides the fact that the publicist warned me not to use any Los Angeles Dodgers memorabilia, as Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, not LA. 

The Jackie Robinson room? Completely taken over by TV stations doing on-camera interviews. So suddenly my options were seriously limited. I found one area with a minimum of behind-glass memorabilia that I thought might work if I angled the lights just so. But then I looked around and couldn’t find a power outlet for miles. I don’t have a portable battery to power my lights, something I’m going to have to take care of soon. My extension cords are long, but even they couldn’t cover this much ground. 

After literally an hour of wracking my brains, I submitted to reality and realized I couldn’t really use this great location. Time was suddenly running short, with Ford and Boseman due to be in front of my camera in 45 minutes. And these portrait shoots, particularly with a legend like Ford, are never more than five minutes so you have got to be completely ready. I ran back to my car and snagged my portable black backdrop from the back seat. I set up a Softlighter II (kind of a half-softbox, half-umbrella concoction that is super-easy to set up) as my main light and an umbrella further behind me for fill. Then, since I was one light stand short, I asked the friendly New York Daily News photographer who had to shoot the fellas after me to hold a gridded light from behind them just to separate their heads and shoulders a little from the black background. 

It is what it is, I guess. The session started off really stiff, so I was happy that I got a little reaction out of them (when I asked the curmudgeonly Ford for a smile, he joked, “surely you can’t be talking to me.”). Sometimes you have to be happy with mere competent handling of a tough situation.

In this line of work, photographers are confronted with a whole lot of awful backgrounds. In 20 years of covering Hollywood I don’t think I’ve ever had a plain, unadorned backdrop at an event. Usually the step-and-repeats are festooned with garish logos or even worse, the names of various sponsors, often placed against bright white so that they ruin the photos as much as possible. It’s one of those annoying things that entertainment photographers bitch and moan about day after day. I’ve literally fantasized about shooting celebrities against a simple red velvet curtain. Maybe it even happened in the good old days of shooting Hollywood. But now, of course, we’re in a branded universe.

The event above was the premiere of the new film “The Host,” and for once the backdrop wasn’t too offensive. It was pretty much just the title of the film repeated every few feet, and the black and blue color scheme was rather attractive, I thought. As cast member Diane Kruger made her way down the carpet, I noticed that she periodically blocked the “S” and made kind of an amusing visual pun in the process. I cropped down to get the “The” out of there and make it even more obvious. If you can’t clean up the cluttered backgrounds, at least you can occasionally have some fun with them. 

Bella Thorne is a good sport. This photo was taken during the 15-year-old “Shake It Up” actress’s visit to Mary McLeod Bethune Middle School in south central LA to celebrate the school’s rising attendance rate. After speaking to the kids, she judged a dance competition and then joined in herself. 

I’ve been on many “teen celeb visits school” gigs over the years, and there’s nothing worse than a celebrity who just goes through the motions. Obviously young performers can get huge heads pretty early these days, and sometimes the overwhelming air of insincerity makes the whole event a farce and a drag. It’s particularly lousy when this happens at a school with a lot of poor kids. 

Thorne was definitely not like that. She got right into it when the dance competition commenced, at one point busting some moves with a particularly awkward young male contestant. I really admired the girl’s rosy vibe and infectious enthusiasm, which I think this photo captures.

The Oscars show requires at least three cameras, as I think I used every lens in my arsenal up there, from gargantuan telephotos on tripods to the widest wide angle lenses. Every once in a while I’d grab my third body and poke my head through a tiny opening in my tripod rig to grab some overall shots of the stage. Some of the production numbers featured simply stunning production design, like this one for Barbara Streisand’s “In Memoriam” tribute to composer Marvin Hamlisch (pictured in the image above the stage). As this was Babs’ big return to the Oscars stage after 36 years, I shot this performance every way I knew how: horizontal, vertical, tight, medium-range. About halfway through the song I briefly took my head away from the telephoto lenses and saw the overall shot with my own two eyes. I then realized there was only one proper way to shoot this — as wide as possible.

Usually at least once per Oscars, something bizarre or unexpected happens during the show, and everyone talks about it the next day. Not in the sense of a surprise winner of a category, but rather a crazy onstage moment like Michael Moore going off on a political tirade after winning Best Documentary, or Adrien Brody seizing the moment (and Halle Berry) after winning Best Actor. 

This year, Jennifer Lawrence provided the water cooler moment by tripping over her dress as she made her way up the steps to the stage to accept Best Actress. I don’t really see this as embarrassing, as she referred to it during her acceptance speech. It’s more of a charming, awkward moment, and it makes Lawrence seem like even more of a regular, down-to-earth gal.

Lawrence had been winning everything during awards season, so I trained my lens on her in the audience before the announcement was made. The gamble paid off, and my lens was luckily pointed in the right place when this happened.  

Another thing I tried to keep an eye on during the Oscars was the audience. It’s way dark down there, and you have to have a steady hand (even on a tripod) because you’re sometimes down to 1/30th of a second shutter speed on a 600mm lens. Even then the exposures could still be pretty dim. But you can get some pretty nice moments during the commercial breaks, so it’s worth a try. 

Anne Hathaway had just come back into the theater after posing for backstage photos following her win for Best Supporting Actress. A bunch of her “Les Miserables” colleagues greeted her with hugs, including director Tom Hooper, shown here. 

One of the great things about shooting the Oscars is that you see some real emotion. Even the most poised and experienced actors like Daniel Day-Lewis lose it a little when they get up onstage and Meryl Streep is handing them the biggest honor of their lives. One of the things I kept on thinking about during the show was how tight I wanted to go when the winner’s name was called off. As the show went on, I decided that going tight with the 600mm was better for males but that the 400mm was better for females because of the whole dress factor. 

This was a photo I was really happy to get because it had the rare combination of huge names and great emotion. It’s one for posterity. Who would argue that these two are currently the greatest actors alive?

Shooting the Oscars show this year was a career highpoint for me. I’m relieved to say it all went remarkably well, as I’ve rarely been more nervous before an assignment. Nervous in a good and justifiable way, as I think there would be something wrong with you if you walked into that day acting like this was just another gig. You’re one of only a handful of photographers who will ever get the opportunity to shoot something that big. It’s like the Super Bowl of entertainment, except it’s actually bigger because the Super Bowl is really only a huge deal in America. The Oscars is international. And if you’re shooting for a wire service, it feels like the entire world is waiting to see those photos minute to minute — your photos. See why I was a little nervous? I’ve shot hundreds of shows over the years, but this is the show of shows. You better not have a bad day.

Weeks of preparation went into the job. I had to arrange to rent Nikon D3S cameras, for one. I still love my Nikon D3 bodies but they are not really competitive with the latest models these days when it comes to high ISO performance (The Oscars stage light is not all that bright). A 600mm f4 was also necessary, as the Oscars show photographers are placed in a projection booth high up in the rear of the first mezzanine of the Dolby Theatre, a long distance away. But you also need a shorter 400mm lens for full-length dress shots and the occasional dance numbers like the one shown above with Channing Tatum and Charlize Theron. So if you need to be using two long lenses, now you’re talking about a rig on an extremely sturdy tripod. A special bar was screwed on top of the tripod, and two Induro gimbal heads were fastened on top of the bar to hold and rotate the massive lenses. Aggggh, I’m getting a headache remembering all of this. But it’s pretty gratifying when all the painstaking preparation and expense pay off. 

With a show of this magnitude, the photographer is tethered to the editors via wireless modules that go into each camera. So in real time my editor could see what I was shooting on her computer screen, and we were talking constantly via headset. Now if the wireless modules had failed for any reason, it would have been pretty calamitous because our technical people could not get into the booth. And I could not leave, not even for a bathroom break. You’re basically locked inside that room until Seth MacFarlane tells his last off-color joke. 

Once the show started, though, I was surprisingly calm. All of the testing and preparations had been done, and now it really was just about shooting the show. All of the equipment was working. And other than impromptu dance routines like the one featured above and the big production numbers for which the Oscars are famous, it is actually one of the easier shows to shoot. As one of the photographers next to me joked, you just point the camera at the people holding the Oscars!

No, I didn’t upload this photo wrong. This is Pink doing her best fruit bat imitation as backup dancers/acrobats support her in mid-air during a very Cirque du Soleil-inspired opening song on her “Truth About Love” tour stop at Staples Center. Come to think of it, this picture is actually just as interesting if you flip it upside-down.

For this concert, the other five photographers and I were put on a riser in the back corner of Staples Center, rather than in the usual position near the soundboard in the center of the audience. After shooting some extremely distant photos of opening band The Hives with my 400mm lens, I resolved to go back to my car before Pink’s set and get out the heavy artillery — a 600mm f4 that I happened to have just rented for Oscars week. But fortunately another photographer stopped me, telling me that the first song featured Pink hanging down from the rafters in all sorts of crazy circus maneuvers. The 600 would be way too tight.

Boy, was she right! I’ve never quite seen an opening song like this. Suspended on wires, Pink was repeatedly dropped down near the bottom of the stage and yanked back up like a human Yo-Yo. It was nearly impossible to follow her even with a 400mm, let alone the tighter 600, so I ended up zone-focusing on the dancers looming above (who were relatively stationary) and waiting for Pink to bounce back up near them. Then the dancers grabbed her and started twisting her up, down and around (all while she sang the song, mind you). That’s when I snapped this photo. I was really glad later on that I had the option of cropping the frame to give it a little more impact. The original frame is a vertical in which you can see the entire bodies of the backup dancers. It’s still a good picture loose, but it definitely jumps out at you more when the upside-down Pink is emphasized and you see just a hint of the guys holding her.

“Tight is right” is an old news photography maxim, and usually I agree. But sometimes it’s good to have options as well.