S1 Ep14: Boots Shelton Focus Puller

[00:00:15] Welcome to Homicide Life On The Set, a podcast about the Emmy Award winning television show, Homicide Life On The Street, with myself, Chris Carr and Susan Ingram. On today's podcast, we're joined by Boots Shelton, who is the focus puller on seasons one to five.

[00:00:37] So hello everybody, welcome back to Homicide Life On The Set. Today we are joined by Boots Shelton, who was the focus puller of seasons one to five on the show. And this is a very interesting interview. Susan, how are you doing?

[00:01:22] Hey, good. How are you? Yeah, we, I think we mentioned that we've, we've mentioned Boots on, I think every, almost every episode, because of, you know, the strategic part of the camera crew he plays, which is, you know, if you don't have a good first to first camera assistant slash focus puller, if it's not in focus, it's no good. So. Indeed. And with a moving camera, that's incredibly hard.

[00:01:47] Incredibly challenging situation that I really don't think has been, has, I mean, I guess it has been, but hasn't been duplicated in other, you know, network, you know, big network shows. I don't think this situation has really been duplicated anywhere. And that kind of challenge for somebody to rise to every day. Not like this, no.

[00:02:06] We're really happy to have Boots. And I think I mentioned also in one of the other episodes, I'm really loving people's origin stories. So I hope you enjoy his origin story of how he even got interested in filmmaking to begin with, which I think is a great, is a great story. Yeah, indeed. Indeed. And just on some other news, The Humicide is now finally coming to the United Kingdom. So it's going to be on Sky TV and on Now TV for streaming. So that's really exciting.

[00:02:36] So we might actually get homicide broadcasting on, I think it's Sky Atlantic is where they showed like Law and Order and other American shows. So we'll be getting homicide on Sky now. So that's quite exciting. And do you know, I have in my brain that it starts on Valentine's Day or was that something else I read recently? Yeah. Valentine's Day. Yay. So yeah. Big heart, big heart, love kiss to homicide for coming on Sky Network on Valentine's Day.

[00:03:02] Yeah. Get your red wine out, your candles, set up a nice meal and your chocolate and then watch homicide. And your pignolis. And your pignolis, yes, definitely. And your coffee. You got to have your coffee if you're watching homicide. Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And some crab if you can do it. That's right. Eat crab that day, you know, with some Old Bay seasoning. That's the way to do it. And some Scrapple and some fried gizzards. And some Scrapple. And you'll have it all together for the Valentine's Day premiere. Yeah. Awesome.

[00:03:31] Indeed. So no, anybody in the UK, yeah, do check that out. That's very exciting news for us over here. And well, let's move into the interview with Boots and we will catch you on the other side. Take care.

[00:04:02] Boots, welcome to the podcast and also welcome to Susan's flat because you're both together today. That's right. Thank you very much. Or should we say apartment? Because in England we say flat, in America you say apartment. Actually in America we say house. It's actually a house. Okay, it's a house. Sorry. Total, total balls up from my... Single family home. And a nice house at that. Yeah. It's been a long time since I've been here. Nice mid-century house. Nice.

[00:04:26] So first of all, Boots, yes. Thank you so much for joining us because we, literally, don't you think, Chris, we have talked about Boots in every episode. People talking about... You and Jim Finney come up the most. You and Jim Finney come up the most. People talking about how the heck were you able to keep everything in focus when everything was moving. So we're really happy to have you here. But also a lot of people talked about your sensibility and your professionalism and all that.

[00:04:55] So let's just go back to the beginning. Where, I know, you came into UMBC, which stands for, people that don't know, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Campus that had a new film program. He came in a couple years after me. But how did you get into cameras specifically and get into the film business and then eventually homicide? It's a long question.

[00:05:21] Well, it could be a long answer, but I'll tell you not. Long answer is good. Not make it too long. I really didn't ever think about being a cameraman or even playing with cameras until I was in high school. I went away to a boarding school. I was sent away to a military school.

[00:05:44] And my junior year, my roommate's parents came to visit one weekend and they brought a little 8mm camera with them. And they said to him, my friend Jim Lang, I said, here, Jim, finish off the roll for us. So Jim, he was a creative person because he had been training classical guitar prior to that.

[00:06:10] And he and I started to think, what can we do with this camera? So we were playing these games where one person would walk behind a column, would cut the camera and replace that person with someone else. And then, oops, not the person would walk out. All these in-camera editing tricks and really just sight gags. Old school, like, silent film tricks they used to do before they had technology, right? That's right. That's right. And that was so much fun. We shot that roll out and I was kind of addicted from that point on.

[00:06:40] So when I graduated and went back home to Baltimore, I had a part-time job and I saved up money and I bought my own Super 8 camera. And I started making my own little movies and bought a little editor that you hand-willed. Really? Mm-hmm. That's cool. And I was making my little- A little cement splicer? I was using tape because the cement wasn't so good for Super 8. It was, you couldn't get a good, it kept breaking basically.

[00:07:08] Um, but I was making movies more to amuse myself than anything. But I would often recruit my younger brother to help me either operate the camera or be on camera and sometimes the neighborhood kids. And then I would show them at parties that my friends would have. And I got known for being the person to bring films to parties. So they started asking me to bring films to parties. And then I started making films for parties. You know, they got to be the purpose of it.

[00:07:36] And I never thought there'd be anything more than that. And then one day, I was looking through the Sunday newspaper and on the entertainment section, there was this big picture of Stan Vanderbeek. Right. I had no idea who that was. But the article was about the film program at UMBC. And I thought, oh, I could go to school for that? So I- Exactly. How cool was that, that we all found that? Yeah. Amazing.

[00:08:04] Stan Vanderbeek was a early, well, not early, experimental animator and filmmaker in the 60s. Probably maybe before that, 50s and 60s or 60s? I think, I think 50s. He went to that Black Mountain College in North Carolina, right? It was a high school. So we had some incredibly interesting professors at UMBC that were sort of like leftover hippies that had really interesting backgrounds. So it was a great program to start in. So when did you just start there?

[00:08:32] The other thing about that is I wasn't aware of this when I saw that in the paper. Sure. But that program at UMBC was part of the fine arts department. And the film program at College Park was part of the radio, television, film. So they taught that as a vocation, whereas at UMBC, film was taught as a form of self-expression. True. So all of the students had a lot of freedom and liberty to make whatever they wanted to make.

[00:09:01] A bunch of crazy art students as opposed to a bunch of professional communication students, right? Exactly, exactly. And it was a very nourishing community, too, from the teachers all the way down to the newest students. It was a great place to be. So when you got out, when did you first start working professionally? And I know you started with a couple of John Waters films. Then how did you get to Homicide?

[00:09:27] Well, I actually started working professionally before I got out of UMBC because I went from being a student to working there as a staff person managing the production center. And I started getting calls to go out and freelance. So I was one of the lucky freelance people. I got to have one foot on the platform and one on the train. Most people have to either find a full-time job or suffer through the slow buildup of freelancing.

[00:09:54] And I had a state job working for the state of Maryland and could use my personal and sick leave and annual leave to go freelance. Well, naturally, as you get more popular and more freelance jobs, you need more time off. So I ended up using all of my leave time and still asking for more and kind of left there under a dark cloud. Uh-oh. Dark cloud in UMBC.

[00:10:22] Just because I was taking off more time than a state employee should, you know. But I started working on commercials and documentaries mostly. And then... And is that how you met Dave Inslee or Richard? Well, we knew Richard from school. Richard managed the production cage before I did. And I met him my first year there. In fact, he was my basic film teacher. Richard says most. Right.

[00:10:52] And if not for him, I probably wouldn't have been a freelance cameraman. I wouldn't have been in the business. He's the one who passed the first job to me. Yeah. Richard Chisholm ended up being an award-winning documentary cinematographer. He's still here in Baltimore. So then what was the link? So what was the first film movie you did? Cry Baby? That was the first one that really got... That was released. I did something... A small one before that with a local commercial producer, production company director.

[00:11:22] And so Cry Baby was John Waters and the cameraman was Dave Inslee. Right. And I met Dave Inslee somehow in the commercial world. And he asked me if I would be the focus puller on Hairspray. Hairspray. And I had no idea what I was doing. Didn't know what I was getting myself into. I kind of came up in a vacuum. There weren't that many productions in Baltimore for me to learn from.

[00:11:48] There was no other focus pullers to train under. So I took this job not really knowing what I was doing, but just kind of figuring out as I went along. And I wasn't that smart, but I was lucky that the job requirements weren't that hard. Hairspray was supposed to look like a 1950s movie and television show.

[00:12:12] So we had a lot of depth of field, a lot of lighting, and that was in a way one of the salvations of doing that job. Yeah, because normally if you're on a commercial or the stuff you did prior, commercial and documentaries, you're shooting it and you're focusing it while you're setting the shot. You're not having somebody pulling focus. So it's different when you get on a movie or a TV show where the cameraman or woman is operating and there's a separate person pulling focus. So you had never even really seen that.

[00:12:42] Before you got on a film, a feature film. Well, maybe a little bit here and there, but not much. Certainly hadn't watched enough of it to feel like I understood it completely. But then I guess it was because Dave asked me to do Hairspray and then later Cry Baby. That kind of set my feet in the cement of the film industry in Baltimore. And I kind of got known for that. There were a few other camera assistants coming up at the time.

[00:13:12] Frank DiMarco and Mike Krebs and a few others. But then I got hired to do B-camera on a movie called Meteor Man, which was a Hollywood film that came to town, shot entirely in Baltimore, directed by Robert Towns. And shot by John Alonzo.

[00:13:36] Shot by John Alonzo, who I had known because one of my favorite movies while I was in school was Harold and Maude. And he had shot that. So that's how I knew the name John Alonzo. So I was kind of excited about that. So I took that job. And that was pretty much a Hollywood movie. A lot of dolly shots, tripod shots. And it was an action movie. It was a, if you will, it was a black Superman movie in a way.

[00:14:06] But on that show, John Alonzo decided as the DP he was going to do the handheld work. He was known for operate, for hand-holding 35mm camera. He was known for that. So if he didn't do it that much on that movie, it's because the director didn't want him to. It wasn't called for. So he used it a little bit. Yeah, it wasn't called for. It was only called for on certain scenes that had a lot of action.

[00:14:36] And he was known for it. And he knew that he could get what he wanted. In the same way that John wanted to operate when he directed, you know. So I'll never forget the first time I saw this happen. There was a big fight scene in the street and a big melee. And John wanted to hand-hold the camera. So they put a thousand-foot mag on it. Oh, jeez. A thousand-foot mag. On the back. Yeah.

[00:15:04] And I don't remember if it was a zoom lens or a prime lens. Probably a prime lens because it was nighttime. Probably a zoom. Yeah. Because it balanced better. So how heavy is that camera, do you think? It's heavy with a thousand-foot mag and a short zoom on it. Yeah. At least 35-plus pounds, I would think. 40 pounds. I think just a thousand-foot roll of film, not even in the magazine, is going to be around 10 pounds. Wow. So then you add the mag and the camera body and the lens.

[00:15:34] So he puts a camera on his shoulder. And Greg Smith, who was the eight-camera focus puller, first assistant, he took the little focus whip, plugged it into the follow focus. And then they called action. And here's John Alonzo, this probably 65, 70-year-old man running around the streets with this camera on his shoulder, whipping it around.

[00:15:59] And Greg Smith, this young athletic guy, right next to him the whole time, never missing a beat, almost like reading his footsteps. And kept his hand on that focus knob and kept it in focus. And I kept thinking, that's a bit showy. That's a bit of a spectacle, you know, to see all this action behind the camera, you know. But it dawned on me that that's how it had to be done. There was no way to do it.

[00:16:25] Greg had to be running around, flying around, and jumping through hoops to keep his hand on that camera. No matter what John Alonzo did, Greg managed to hang onto that camera and keep it in focus. So if not for that, had I not been on Media Man and witnessed that, I don't know if I would have been able to do what I did on Homicide.

[00:16:49] That really showed me how to do what I needed to do on Homicide. So shout out to Greg Smith, who actually I worked with first on Real Men. He was our loader. So he stayed, and that was another John Alonzo film. So he stayed with John, moved up, became the first, and learned how to deal with John's handheld. He loved to do handheld.

[00:17:17] Like, he wanted to do it more than any director ever wanted to do it. So Greg, obviously, too, was thrown into the fire and learned how to do it. So that's really interesting to me that you saw that, which was not a usual thing to see on a Hollywood movie. And so then how soon after that, so then did you get a call from Wayne Ewing? How did that happen? Because you didn't know, Wayne, who shot the first season of Homicide.

[00:17:45] In my memory, I was asked to do Homicide within six months of finishing Meteor Man. It was very close. I also love the fact that you knew Greg. Yeah, cool. Yeah, I had to visit when they were in town. The camera operator, Purnell. Yeah. Yeah, young blood. So it was shortly after Meteor Man that I got the call to do Homicide. And I don't remember going in for an interview.

[00:18:13] I had worked with Wayne Ewing one time before, one night before, on a scene in a restaurant in Baltimore called Sabatino's. Oh, yeah. Barry Levinson was doing a documentary called Diner Guys. In Little Italy, Chris, where we went when you came to visit. It was a very popular restaurant at one time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I somehow got hired to assist Wayne on this Diner Guys thing, which was just 12 guys sitting around a table in a restaurant.

[00:18:42] It wasn't any focus pulling. It was really not stuffy mags at that point. But that's when I met Wayne. And then I guess when he came back to town to do Homicide, maybe I was the only assistant he knew. And was that connect, that was also the connection with Barry and Wayne? I guess how he initially also got on the show. Was that Diner Guys? I know that they had some other connection too.

[00:19:10] I know that Barry was, oh, we tried to figure this out earlier. I know that Wayne was involved in Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson coming up with the concept of the handheld. Because the story that I remember hearing was that Wayne was on set with Barry on some movie in California documenting it. Oh, okay. Doing the behind the scenes film. Behind the scenes or something like that.

[00:19:38] I feel like it was more about a documentary than behind the scenes. Okay. And Barry had asked Wayne to kind of do a little sample reel. What would it look like if we tried to do a narrative? And I think he used some of the actors from the movie who was shooting to, or just had Wayne do a take of a scene, handheld as if it was going to be Homicide. These are all vague recollections. I don't know how accurate they are, but this is the impression I was left with.

[00:20:04] Well, I can say I've seen a video of Clark Johnson and Daniel Baldwin just practicing a scene that Wayne shot during the making of toys, where they run a scene where Pembelton has forgotten to note down which car he's supposed to pick out of the car park. And so they run that scene and they shoot it in that kind of verite style. And on Wayne's website, there's kind of like a, he breaks down the jump cut style and stuff.

[00:20:32] So that, that totally kind of rings true of what you're saying. That, that sounds exactly right then. I didn't know those details, but, but I knew the outline of that story, if you will. I don't remember if Wayne called me in for an interview. I don't know if Finnerty called me in for an interview. I can't remember any of that. Um, so somehow I got hired on to do it. And then, uh, I asked my buddy Tom Lappin to help me.

[00:20:59] And then, uh, our loader was, I think it was Don Grissom. I think it was his last name. Uh, a camera assistant from Washington that Wayne knew. Washington, D.C., yeah. And then tell us about, so the camera package was a little different the first season, correct? And from a different rental house? Well, it was, um, it was an Aton. It was an earlier model of the Aton because the, uh, XTR prod hadn't come out yet. I guess prod meant production.

[00:21:29] Um, we were using just the XTR. And I believe that didn't have the LCD display on the side. It just had three buttons for, for something. I don't know. It's been a long time since I've seen the XTR. But, um, there weren't, uh, enough cameras in Baltimore to supply the show. We had to have at least two in case one failed. We'd have a backup and would have one to pull out on two camera days.

[00:21:56] Um, so we went to Abel CineTech, uh, in Staten Island. Oh, that was, that was owned by, uh, two brothers, Peter and Rich Abel. Great guys. And they serviced us so well. They just jumped in with both feet and got everything up and running for us and really held our hand to get that Aton package together. Because the Aton wasn't considered a production camera. It was considered a documentary camera.

[00:22:23] So they helped us figure out how to get follow focuses and all that stuff together. These days, all of that kind of lightweight equipment is readily available from German companies all the way to Chinese companies and everywhere in between. Everyone's making lightweight accessories. Map boxes, follow focuses, et cetera, et cetera. And back then that wasn't the case. Did Wayne use two handles like John did? So he was just with, with the standard that the camera came with. That's correct. Just the one handle on the side.

[00:22:53] Um, I think we had zoom lenses and prime lenses. I don't remember how Wayne shot. I don't know if he used mostly primes or mostly zooms. All of that's kind of vague. When I think about any of that, I feel like my memory, uh, reverts to what I remember from working with John. Sure. Cause that was a longer time period. Exactly. Yeah. But I went to Satin Island and had a couple of days to prep the camera package and bring

[00:23:22] it back to Baltimore and, and it performed flawlessly for us. It was great. And anytime we had any questions or issues, I'd call Abel. They would send somebody down. There was a guy working there named Ian who was actually from Baltimore. And, uh, so he kind of became my contact there. And I think that also helped. Was it Ian Axelrod? No, what? No, no. I can't think of Ian's last name now. I think he's in LA. He was working at, at Abel City Tech in LA now.

[00:23:50] So were you given any prep by Wayne? Like, like this is going to be different. We're going to be running around, running gun. I know some, cause it was Josh and Joe. Was it Chris that, that, um, that said that they were told, um, to bring a small package and a small truck cause we were going to be moving so fast. And then they showed up the first day and everybody else had five tons except for the Griffith electric truck. And then they eventually got one. But we're, you know, did you get any pointers?

[00:24:17] Like, we're going to be shooting, you know, like almost like war zone, like, you know, documentary photography where you're just following the action. Or did you have a sense of any of that before you got there the first day? That, when you said war zone, that sounds familiar. I remember that I was told we were going to work out of a van. And originally all departments were going to work out of a van. We're all, same van. The same van? The same van.

[00:24:47] The idea was we would pull up with one van and we, maybe we, we wouldn't get out of the van, but we would open the doors, all the doors and all the equipment would come out of the van. And I think they realized very quickly that it was pretty unrealistic. I was going to tell all the actors to come in their, in their own wardrobe or something. Oh man. Yeah. That's what a student film's worked on.

[00:25:09] Well, you know, in a way homicide was not treated, but it was kind of, kind of like a student film. You know, I mean, we cut a lot of corners and, and, uh, innovated and improvised in ways that you would on a student film. I think. Absolutely improvised and created things. Right.

[00:25:33] Um, but early on we realized that we couldn't be working out of a van. I think they tried to do that again on House of Cards later. And we managed, we managed to get the whole camera department in a Sprinter van. House of Cards? Oh my God. That's quite a show to try and do that on. Yeah, really? We had the, the first season, the whole camera package was in an extended Sprinter van. And that included the two peewee dollies. Wow. That lived with the fluid heads on the dollies.

[00:26:03] God, I remember when I was on Murder, She Wrote, our first camera truck was a bread truck. And it was, we called it the, I don't know what we called it, but it was horrible. Was that owned by Cinemobile? No, this was in, well, it was in LA. Cinemobile was in LA. We had to throw, all the stuff we couldn't fit in, it was piled up in the aisle every day. It was horrible. Wow. A Sprinter van. Oh my God. That's how, yeah, that's how it was on House of Cards. So do you remember the first day you showed up on Homicide?

[00:26:31] Did you have your whip ready, like, you know, on your belt? Just like slap it in because you knew that that was going to work? No, I'm sure that was in the set bag, as well as a handful of other things. But I don't remember Wayne and I doing any kind of test where we would sort of dress rehearse the camera and try to figure out what the best configuration is. We probably did, but I think he owned an Aton, so I think he knew what he wanted.

[00:27:00] So he probably told me, well, put the handle on it, put this on, you know, blah, blah, blah, my box, et cetera. And then things had to evolve from there. You know, it was weeks, maybe months before I realized I needed to have a little loop on my belt so I could have that whip with me at all times, instead of having to ask for it or having to run back to the cart to get it or find the set bag and get it on. That had to be... And the extension. Yeah. Two of them.

[00:27:28] And then a tape measure had to always be on my belt. Right. And because we were always moving around through doorways and stuff, I couldn't have a lot of stuff on my belt. My belt and its pouch were very trimmed down, but the few things that I needed were the tape measure and the whip. It was just a very quick technical question. Just it dawned on me that maybe there's some distance that don't know what focus pulling is. So it might be worth very quickly just giving us a breakdown of what focus pulling actually is.

[00:27:57] And like, you know, you talk about distances and measuring. So like, yeah, can you give us a dummy's guide to focus pulling just for anybody who's not familiar with it? Sure. I mean, what the job is. Yeah. Yeah. And what it entails. Or what the actual focus part of the job is. For people that don't understand when we say focus pulling and that somebody is focusing, that's not looking. The person that's operating the camera and looking through is not focusing.

[00:28:26] That's you on the side of the camera with how does that work. That's right. And I think I suspect that traditionally that happened because back in Hollywood, people were using gear heads. And the operators needed their left hand to pan the camera and their right hand to tilt the camera. And if they took one hand off the focus, the lens, they wouldn't be able to pan or tilt. They would have to use one hand. Yeah.

[00:28:49] So I think that maybe where focus pulling started, I could be wrong about that. And maybe that isn't it. Maybe it's because the original cameras weren't reflex cameras. They were range finders.

[00:29:08] So after setting the shot, like they have the old Mitchell rackovers, after setting the shot, they would have to rack the lens back in front of the film so that the film would see what the lens is seeing. And then they had a little range finder on the side of the camera. What did they call it? It wasn't a range finder. Yeah. Because so basically it's an eyepiece that the cameraman is looking through, but that's not what the lens is seeing. It's parallax. Yeah, it's parallax.

[00:29:36] And it gives an approximation of what's in the frame. Right. So that's a good point. Then the camera assistant would have to know the focus because the operator can't pull focus when he's not looking through the lens. Exactly. Yeah. And I think in those range finders, everything looked in focus anyway because of the nature of those optics. Right. So maybe that's why they needed a focus puller, someone who could at least put marks on the ground and have a fighting chance. And then it developed from there.

[00:30:03] So as a focus puller, Boots, basically what you do is in a situation a little more traditional than homicide. So you see the shot and you'll see like the first part or, you know, however the shot is blocked. Somebody's going to be at five feet. Somebody's going to be at 10 feet. Somebody's going to be at 15 feet. They're going to walk out the door. And you have to either.

[00:30:29] Now, in homicide, we weren't allowed to put marks on the floor because we never knew where we were going to be. But so talk about how you would figure out you are focusing at all those distances as the camera's moving around the room. How are you doing that? And what are you doing on the lens so that you know where you are? In the beginning, I wasn't sure what to do. I mean, I knew that there were traditional ways of running the tape out, tape measuring device out and then marking 10 feet, 12 feet, whatnot, whatnot.

[00:30:58] But that didn't really play with homicide because Jean was handheld. The camera's handheld. He's always moving, never stopping in the same place. And the actors weren't required to stop in the same place either. The lighting was general enough they could stop where they wanted. And that was part of the concept was that it would be more organic, if you will. Yeah, traditionally, the actors, as you did a run through, would have tape marks on the floor where they were supposed to land during the scene.

[00:31:25] And then the camera assistant could measure to each person and see where they're going to be. But there was none of that on homicide. Go ahead. Sorry, I'm doing footnotes for you. It's okay. Thank you. So I would end up trying to find little shortcuts or cheat sheets for myself, if you will.

[00:31:44] You know, like I would measure the distance from the far edge of Chris Eddy's desk to the near edge of Ned Beatty's desk because they sat across from each other. And I would never say, okay, so the distance between the outside edges of both desks is going to be nine feet. So if he's back another foot and a half and he's back a half a foot or a foot, then I could quickly try to interpolate the distances.

[00:32:11] I knew how long the desk were, how wide each desk was. I would learn the distance from the front of Giardello's desk to the doorway. So if someone came to the door and knocked and stood in the doorway and I'm back behind Giardello behind his desk, I know there's that distance plus the width of the desk. And then add another two feet for camera, you know, things like that. And sometimes I didn't have the bandwidth to do the math fast enough.

[00:32:37] But if you can rough it in and then clean it up after that. I mean, the whole point is just to get it close. Right. Yeah. And you have a really good eye for distance. You do. You have to have a good eye. Because the camera's moving all over the place. You learn it. Well, you develop it. I remember reading one time there was a camera assistant named Doug Hart out of New York. And he wrote a book called The Camera Assistance Handbook.

[00:33:01] And in that book, he said, whenever you pull out your tape to measure a distance, always guess it first and then see how close you are. And the point of that was that you learn to see the distance. You know, your first time in my life, it's 15 feet away and you pull it out and it's only 10. You know, do that a few times and suddenly you've got a better feeling for what 15 feet is. Right.

[00:33:25] And do you remember with, so also for people out there who don't know this concept, also there's a thing called depth of field. So if the actor's standing there and you have a working with the cameraman who likes to shoot wide open, which means with the lens wide open, leaves you very short depth of focus. Which means if that actor moves a couple inches, they're out of focus.

[00:33:48] Then you might work with another cameraman who shoots at a 3-4 or 5-6, even indoors, you know, pumps the light in. You might have a foot of depth of focus. So if you're missing it a little or the, obviously actors always sort of move around when they're talking, they'll still be in focus. Do you remember the difference between, now I know, I know Alex, who was the third cameraman, liked to shoot darker.

[00:34:16] But do you remember the difference between Jean and Wayne? Was Wayne shooting with wide lenses and a decent F-stop so you could have a decent depth of field? I can't say with any accuracy about that because once again, I can't remember that first season any better than I remember yesterday's clouds at this point. Fair enough. I sense that Wayne probably used a fairly decent stop.

[00:34:46] And Jean did too, relatively speaking. I mean, Jean was interested in getting the shot, not making beautiful photography. To him, it wasn't about getting an Emmy for the photography. It was about capturing the scene and being part of the scene. I mean, he was a cameraman beyond being recognized as a cameraman, I think. And ironically enough, he became well-known for being a great cameraman because of that.

[00:35:16] You know, it's almost like if you try for something, you don't get it. Right. It was like the emotion of the scene is what he really wanted to capture. Exactly. And he used a lot of wide lenses, right? So even on a close-up, he would push in with a wide lens as opposed to using, you know, a tighter lens. That's right. That's right. He would... Our prime lenses were a 9.5, a 12, a 16, and a 25 Zeiss super speeds. They were all for the 16 format.

[00:35:44] And then we had a 50 and I think an 85, which came out of the 35 format packages. But it was the equivalent of the same. We almost never put the 25 millimeter up or anything longer than that. We almost... If we put up a prime lens, it was almost always the 12 and the 16. If he wanted tighter, he would move in. And I think... I don't remember him saying this, but after 30 years of working with lenses,

[00:36:13] I think what he was doing was trying to maintain this sense of what our eyes do when we're in a space. You know, we don't zoom in and exclude everything left and right. Even though I'm... Let's say I'm looking at you on the screen right now and you're perfectly sharp and that's what I'm focused on. I'm very aware that Susan is way over here on my side. And I'm aware that there's a painting on the wall over here. But it's not out of focus. It's just not my... It's not what I'm focusing on, you know.

[00:36:43] I'm well aware of it. And I think that that was... In hindsight, I think that's what Jean was trying to do by moving in as opposed to punching in on going to a longer lens. And some of it maybe too was this concept that we've talked about where the camera initially... And we obviously varied from that concept. But the camera initially was supposed to be sort of another character in the room or another presence in the room.

[00:37:11] Not necessarily something sitting back and observing, but really being in the conversation and in the scene. Right. And so if he was to zoom in, then it would sort of feel like the predator point of view, right? You know, we might as well have gone to the infrared look, you know, and do that kind of thing. Because that's not how we see things. And if he wanted it to... The voyeur. Yeah, exactly.

[00:37:36] And any time you see a handheld long lens shot, at least any time I see a handheld long lens shot, I'm thinking that in the show, that person is being observed by another person. Through a pair of binoculars. Yeah. And a lot of times nowadays, that's not the case. That's just because they needed... They wanted the second camera to steal the shot. And so stylistically, it ends up... They end up with a shot that... And my visual vocabulary means something different, you know?

[00:38:03] I think all this is going to be thrown out the window, this whole visual vocabulary thing where, you know, anything goes. Sadly, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So then between the first and second... So by the second season, you sort of... Did you feel like you sort of had the job dialed in? But then a whole different cameraman comes with a whole different sensibility. Maybe moving more or moving differently.

[00:38:24] Do you remember, you know, if that was a challenge to sort of catch up with Jean's vision of what the show should look like? Or did it feel natural and you'd already sort of dialed in with this moving 60mm camera and did it feel okay?

[00:38:42] Well, by the time Jean came after that first season, I felt confident that I could most of the time keep things in focus for the shooting style we were doing. But when Jean came, I felt very comfortable with him. He was... He moved the camera in an easier way.

[00:39:07] And he also was very demonstrative about what he was doing with the camera, what his concepts were. And he was very generous in sharing his ideas and thoughts, which made it easy for me to, like, quickly feel like we're on the same team. Right. Like good communication. Yeah. I was...

[00:39:32] Not that I had any kind of alarm with Wayne, but with Jean, I was completely disarmed with the new cameraman. It's like, wow, you know, it just felt good. And he was... He was friendly. He liked to joke around. And, of course, I'm very serious about, you know, kind of make sure there's a focus.

[00:39:56] But I was thinking the other day that Jean, he has this disposition, this temperament that we would be doing this intense scene, coming through the hallway and leading the actors. And then they're like, it's a red ball or something, you know, and we're all backpedaling. And we try to get through a door before the actors. And then the boom man hits the threshold. And then I bump into him. And then Jean bumps into me. And the whole scene just collapses, right? It just explodes. And it explodes on itself.

[00:40:27] And at a situation like that, the director would go, that was great. Why did you... You know, the director could be mad. The actors could be mad because they have the intensity. And Jean would just break out laughing, you know? And say, Tres Zemuzel, Tres Zemuzel, you know? He would have this great big smile on his face. Yeah, to him it was kind of fun and funny. Playful. He was very playful. And that really helped a lot because what I learned from that is that it was okay to make a mistake, you know? On the film set, there's so much tension usually.

[00:40:56] And, you know, every minute costs thousands of dollars when you think about all the money that's being spent that day. So you tend to, like, take things too seriously. And Jean was good at breaking that. And I think because of that, it allowed me to be a little bit more... Take more risk or do things that were... What am I trying to say?

[00:41:26] I guess take more risk with the focus or be a little more fancy-free. Looser, right. Looser, yeah. And then with that comes what happens in real life. If you just get in... The rhythm of the world works for you, if that makes any sense, you know? Right, yeah. I like that. Because that show had its own rhythm, for sure. A completely unique... A completely unique rhythm.

[00:41:54] And, like, if you try to force anything in life, you get resistance back. It's sort of like... What do they call that stuff? Superfluids or whatever, you know? Like, when you mix cornstarch with water and if you push on it quickly, it won't give. But if you push slowly, it's like quicksand, you know? It's like... Right. I think life does that to you. When you think about everybody, like you just said, backpedaling, meaning the actors are coming at you. Jean's on the camera. You're pulling focus on the side.

[00:42:24] Lorenzo is behind you with the boom mic or whoever at the time was, you know, on the boom. Chris Kellett, you know, there was many people. Boom operators. And, um, and possibly also, wherever we were, possibly also Josh with the paper lantern. And you're all going backwards at full speed trying to keep everything together. I mean, it really...

[00:42:49] Thank goodness Jean had a sense of humor and was playful. And he was playful because he loved what he... He loved doing it. I mean, he loved the challenge of it and the ridiculousness at some level of what we were doing. We were trying to do. Right. Yeah. That's great. The student film aspect of it, right? Yeah, exactly. You want to talk about the difference then between... So, so Jean was seasons two, three, four. And then what... Five. And five? Mm-hmm. Part of five? And then he started directing?

[00:43:19] All of five. He started directing. He directed one or two episodes in five. And then when he was prepping, Alex would shoot for him. And Alex came in earlier sometimes on the B camera. So he was on the show a little bit here and there. I think Jean was grooming him to take over for him. And then... So what's the difference? Because I hadn't really thought about it until, once again, I'm looking at all the episodes again.

[00:43:46] And it really is noticeable when Alex comes in. It was more of a hard lighter, more of a low light lighter, and more of a close-up shooter. More close-ups. So did you have to... Was it more difficult? Pulling focus with him? Did it change a lot? Did he... I don't even remember. I know he still danced around like Jean did, but maybe not as much. I don't quite...

[00:44:15] I don't actually quite remember. I didn't do a lot of work with Alex. Okay. I did the episodes that Alex would shoot when Jean was prepping. Mm-hmm. And then I didn't do the sixth season, which is when Alex started as the full-time DP. Right, right. I did watch some of those episodes.

[00:44:39] And my memories of working with Alex was that, unlike Jean, Alex liked to go to the longer end of the lens. Mm-hmm. I'm not sure why. Maybe because that would substitute for moving the camera. Maybe it was... For him, it was easier to zoom in instead of walking in because he was shorter. So if he walked in on a taller actor, he'd have to start looking up as well. Right?

[00:45:08] I thought about that. Also, he could maybe work faster because when you start to zoom in and go tell a photo and the background falls out of focus, you don't have to light the background. You don't have to worry about getting the orange cones out of the shot back there. It gives you some freedom because you're eliminating or obscuring things in the frame that may not be... Interesting. Yeah. It compresses it. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah.

[00:45:37] I mean, it's kind of a cheat in a way. Maybe that's not fair to say, but I think in the spirit of what homicide was trying to do, it was kind of a cheat. It was different for sure. And also just the difference in the... Sorry to jump in. Difference in... That was also somewhere in there, the transition in the squad room where they painted the walls dark blue, where they had a little darker background.

[00:46:02] So that also made the show feel a little darker and a little more dramatic as far as the color and the lighting in the squad room. I didn't watch enough of the last two seasons to really catch on to that. So I can't really speak to that look, but I can speak to his style per se because I did spend three or four episodes working with him. And he...

[00:46:28] Sean always felt like he was on springs, like he was always on the balls of his feet, even though he wasn't. It felt like that. You hear that? Hear me tapping? You hear those springs? Yes, he was on spring. Whereas Alex felt more flat-footed, more solid to the earth. So when he would make a move, you would feel the move. Whereas Jean, when he made a move, it would do this. With Alex, in my memory, it was like, you know, that kind of thing. Interesting.

[00:46:58] A more... Maybe not abrupt, but the move had a more decisive start and end to it. More muscular, maybe, as opposed to dancerly. Yeah. Because he was a sort of a muscular guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jean was quite dancely, I think, the way he described himself on that interview, wasn't he? Yeah. Right, right. Well, random question. Was there ever such thing as a sort of typical day? Can you talk us through kind of like what a routine of shooting a day of homicide was like?

[00:47:24] I suppose a typical day would be showing up at whatever location you would be at or the stage. If it was a location, you pretty much knew that anything could happen and you're better off not bringing any expectations. Because... Just unload everything from the truck, too. So...

[00:47:49] And I think that we went to locations, some locations that had never been scouted other than the locations and the director. I don't think Jean went on location scouts on a regular basis. Only when there were difficult lighting situations, I think, would the heads of the department go and scout. I think Josh and Joe mentioned that. If it was going to be a night exterior where they knew they had to light, but sometimes that they would show up if it was a day exterior or, you know, and they hadn't scouted it

[00:48:19] specifically. Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. So you could expect to not know what was going to happen other than that you're going to have the camera out. There were the actors and you would create a scene. And if it was the first day of that episode, you had another wild card thrown in there. A director, you didn't know how they were going to do things. So you really...

[00:48:46] You had to come to that being ready to be flexible and not bring any expectations. I think if you brought expectations, then you could get yourself stuck, you know, or not being happy being there or something. Other than that, a typical day, you know, it was almost a one-camera show, almost exclusively. So you knew what equipment you would be using.

[00:49:15] And we didn't have a lot of equipment, really. We had just that one camera body and a cart of equipment and almost never the tripod came off the cart. So boots. So typical day also would be probably, well, you show up, you get all the camera equipment. You go in and put the camera together and get the camera.

[00:49:38] We used to have a tripod head on a hi-hat, which is a flat piece of wood. That would be on the camera cart. And the camera would always be on that when it wasn't on John's shoulder. Well, when it wasn't on John's shoulder, you were holding it or I was holding it, somebody was holding it. But that would travel on the cart and then was always ready to yank off or change. We would go over there if you wanted to change lens. You put it back on the cart because you didn't want to change the lens while it was on John's shoulder.

[00:50:08] But we might do... Well, the lenses were there, too. Yeah, everything was there. Sure. And then we could clean them out. We could inspect the camera. Yep. Because we're handheld in dirty situations, it was important to always maintain the cleanliness. Yeah, yeah. With compressed air. Did anything ever get stolen? Because we had a film shoot near me the other day with Guy Ritchie and camera equipment got stolen. Just money. We just had money stolen out of the camera truck, I tell you. Yeah, that's... Yeah. That's another episode. But none of the...

[00:50:37] That's for your spy episode. Yeah, that's right. Yes. He who shall remain nameless will remain nameless. Okay. But never equipment. But we were also very aware of our situations where we're in dangerous situations or potential theft situations. And having only one cart made it easy. Yeah. And a typical day would be probably multiple locations and or... Unless we're in the squad room.

[00:51:05] Squad room often was all day in the squad room because we had to... There was always a lot written for the squad room. They would usually... They would normally leave that till the... Did we do... No, we didn't do that at the end of the week. We probably did night exteriors at the end of the week. I was thinking they'd save the squad room for last, but I don't think we necessarily did that. I think they would prioritize it in this order. They would save the night work for the end of the week because we had... Didn't have turnaround issues and we could work later into the night.

[00:51:34] But then the squad rooms and interior locations were saved. Second priority in case there was weather that meant we had to get out of the locations, you know? Like if I save the squad rooms for rain days or something like that. So by putting all that off later in the schedule of that episode, it gave you a little bit of a buffer, a little safety shield there. And then they could flip it if they had to. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, makes sense.

[00:52:04] So speaking of night work, do you remember loving or hating or caring about night work? I don't remember our night work being so bad like it was later in my TV career. Um, because I, first off, I knew that we were only going to do 12 hours no matter what. Jim Finnerty made sure of that.

[00:52:29] Um, secondly, I guess because we had a lot of squad room stuff, we didn't need to shoot a lot. Our night work could be divided up over several nights. We didn't have long nights. There were times when we were out all night till the morning, but I don't remember every Friday night go until daybreak Saturday. No, I think every Friday was more like, well, maybe one or two.

[00:52:58] I remember being done in time for the last drink at the bars. Oh, or they just stay open for us. Well, there was those two. Were any of you Seinfeld fans? Because apparently some episodes would cut at the Seinfeld airing time or something. I never saw anything during those six years because I was never home at night. For sure. One thing I liked about night work, though, was you had time in the morning to do stuff.

[00:53:25] I used to like a noon or a one o'clock call because you could do something in the morning and then get to work in time to eat lunch. Because if they gave us a one o'clock call, they would have lunch on the catering truck for us. What kind of food was there? I just remember burgers. Burgers on night work. Burgers and fries and hot dogs and maybe a chicken sandwich kind of thing. Yeah, that kind of thing. Daily grind. Yeah, daily grind.

[00:53:52] The daily grind was a real blessing for us. Say what you said the other day because I don't remember that about there being a tab over there for us. I do not remember that. It wasn't in the beginning, but I think at some point Jim Finnerty realized how often crew people were disappearing and going across the street to get coffee and coming back with a tray full of coffees for their department members and friends and stuff.

[00:54:20] And then it wasn't announced, but I became aware that there was a PA that Jim Finnerty had given petty cash to. And that PA was told to buy coffees for whoever wanted them. At first, I think it probably started off for the actors, but then crew started asking for coffees. And this PA would go across the street and come back with a big coffee order for whoever had asked for coffees.

[00:54:50] That became almost his full-time job on set when we're at stage. I could understand that. But also the daily grind wasn't that popular, so it was easy to get in and get out with your orders too. Right, right, right. It wasn't packed. Yeah. Do you remember any particularly challenging? I mean, there were many challenging locations, but anything stand out for you? Like, oh my God. Whether it was a scary location or a crappy location or just like difficult for you logistically or moving around in or anything like that?

[00:55:19] I don't remember if this was on Homicide or The Wire. In some ways, those two shows had a lot in common. The locations, for one. The nature of the subject matter. They weren't about the same thing. I mean, I guess The Wire was a little bit about the interpersonal relationships, but not like Homicide.

[00:55:44] The Wire was more about maybe procedure and some of the relationships, but also the relationships between the detectives and the perps or the police and the perps. But so I occasionally remember something, and I'm not sure which show it's from, but I remember we once showed up at a location that was probably at one time a five-car garage in an alley and then later had been converted to a car mechanic's shop and then abandoned.

[00:56:16] And we showed up, we get there, we start setting up the lights, getting the cameras in place. Why not? And everyone realizes they're starting to itch and scratch. And what's going on? So someone asked one of the location's people, or I guess it was art department that was there, and they said, oh yeah, yeah, when we came and prepped this location, it was, the place was full of these feral cats. And we had to get rid of them all.

[00:56:45] So it turns out that the place had been infested with fleas, and we're all getting fleas all over our legs. You know, probably mostly from the knees down, because they were on the floor, and they would jump on you, and it was crazy. So we fumigated it and had to leave for a minute, come back in, and then wait for the fumes to settle, and it didn't smell great, you know. But that was... I bet the actors must have loved that too, for continuity, the flea bit them on the face mid-scene.

[00:57:11] I think they may have been in there for the rehearsals, but I think they had done what they could to get rid of the fleas before we started the scene. But, you know, the crew people have to be in there prepping anyway, and they ask us to stand outside and run their lines. And then there was that one time we were shooting at a row house. I'm not sure where it was, but it was a scene we're shooting inside the row house, and then we needed to go out on the back porch to get a scene or a shot.

[00:57:42] And on the steps of the row house right next to us, 10 feet away, there was this older teenager with gold paint all around his nose and his mouth. And he was holding a bag in a spray paint can, and he looked like living death. He looked terrible. He looked at us, and we looked at him. He looked at us. The look in his eyes was, it was very disheartening to see.

[00:58:09] I mean, you could imagine that he was going nowhere, and he certainly felt that way, you know. It was just, to actually see that. You hear stories about it, and you see it depicted in movies, but to see it in real life, to just stumble across it. While we're running around with our cameras and making movies about ourselves and eating craft service and stuff, there's this guy sitting there with nowhere to go. Huffing paint.

[00:58:36] And that was a big, I think that was a, maybe it still is, and I don't know. But I think that was a bigger thing than, you know, huffing paint. That was pre-crack. I guess so. I think crack became a problem because it was so cheap. Cheap, exactly. That cheap for a quick hit. Yeah, $10. Yeah. But yeah, I remember that.

[00:58:59] And I think the prop guys went over and sort of chatted with the guy, and he was very nice, but it was a very sad, it was definitely a sad scene. I think it was in my memory, we were talking about this the other day, my memory is that it was in Dundalk near one of those giant cemeteries where we shot at a number of times. But I may, you know, it was like, who knows? What the memory was.

[00:59:25] I actually wrote a short story that included that, or I included it in one of the novels I wrote that scene because it was absolutely burned in my memory too. And it's interesting that you brought it up as well as one of the things that stuck out for you. Yeah. Yeah, it was sad. You know, and I think one tends to not remember those things because they're uncomfortable.

[00:59:55] I don't know why that stuck to my mind. And I know on the wire I saw a lot of things that if I work on it, I can remember, you know, late night on a hot summer night. It's too hot. The people sleep all day and then come out and hang out at night because it's cooler. And there's, you know, these single moms hanging out on the steps, chatting with each other, drinking their iced tea or whatever. And their children are barefooted running around in the street with broken glass everywhere.

[01:00:25] You know, it's just they didn't live in places conducive for that. And yet they had no control over it either, you know. Every night if they swept the streets, there would be glass there the next day. Yeah, and it always, and I'd said this in an earlier episode, it always amazed me that 99% of the time people were happy that we were in their neighborhoods, would chat with us and were happy to see us and were happy somebody was paying attention.

[01:00:53] I don't know if that was the case on the wire. It was, it was. I felt like it wasn't. And of course, the company on the wire, our company was much, much bigger. We had a lot of trucks and a lot of people. And we would move into the neighborhood. And because of all the extra eyeballs and our police escorts and whatnot, all the drug dealers would just have to filter away. And it was sort of like watching the ripples go away from a stone in the water.

[01:01:19] And the neighborhood loved us for that because it was a breath, a chance to catch their breath from, you know, the crime that was going on around them. And that was shot in 35, right? That was not a 16 millimeter show. Go ahead, Chris. Anything? How are we doing there? Well, should we talk about the formats a little bit and if Hummercyber shot today?

[01:01:43] Because obviously, so Hummercyber shot 16 millimeter, which is obviously different from a lot of television of that year, or at least high-end television was shot 35 millimeter. And obviously now everything's shot 4K digital or 6K sometimes now. So I suppose, can you talk to us a little bit about the technical aspects of Hummercyber and then what it would be like if you were to shoot Hummercyber today? And really quick on top of that, right?

[01:02:07] It was just about after Hummercyber when things started switching to digital. So it wasn't far after Hummercyber, but things were still shot on film. But that film started to disappear fairly soon after that, I think, the 2000s. I don't think there were many TV shows at all shot on 16 millimeter. I think there were more independent films shot on 16.

[01:02:34] I feel like in my memory, I know of one TV show. I can't think of what it is. But almost all of them were shot on 35. So Homicide was unique like that. And I guess it was a kind of a chance that NBC took to agree to do that. But it definitely made a difference, I think. Yeah. Well, I think you mentioned it being a format of independent films.

[01:03:00] The funny thing with the digital restoration, it does feel like watching a 90s independent movie in a good way when I watch it now. It's definitely giving it a character that other shows don't quite have of that era. Is that because of the camera work and the nature? The camera work, I think it's just the grain and the color and everything. It's something about, I think, the color and just the style of the shooting. Particularly season one.

[01:03:26] Yeah, season one in particular actually really felt like a 90s independent movie in a positive way. I don't mean in a negative. There was something about it. It was like, oh, it's like watching a movie. Whilst when I watched it in the old days, it still felt a bit like TV. Obviously, the 4 Max is now 16-9 versus 4-3 helped with that too. But it was like watching a movie. And the whole 16... I'm sorry, we're interrupting your question. The whole 16-9 thing. We were protecting for 16... We were protecting for widescreen? I don't remember that. We were shooting Super 16.

[01:03:56] Right. Which I don't believe is a true 16-9, but it's close to that. But there was enough edge outside the Super 16 for them to capture. Because it is 16-9 now without cutting the top and the bottom of the frame. I don't know how they would do that. I don't either. We need to get those editors. I think it was shot... Obviously, it was shot 185-1. And obviously, when they put it out to TV, they only grabbed the 4-3 aspect of it. That's right.

[01:04:26] Because there's still stuff... So yeah, on TV, if you don't protect... Because a lot of shows didn't protect the 16-9, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer being one of them. So then you would see equipment creep into the shot a little bit. Because the camera person operator would go, Oh, well, I know I only need this bit of the frame. So it doesn't matter if the boom mic comes in or the gaffer stands there or whatever. They would sacrifice that part of the frame. Yeah. But on Hummer's side, it looked like... I guess because you guys were moving all over the place, you probably didn't have much choice.

[01:04:54] Well, and other than the boom or the... That's true. We always made sure there was nothing bad to be seen. Although I did see a light stand in a Mitchell courthouse bathroom scene. And I don't remember what episode it was in. It was like, oh, there's a light stand. Three Men Adina, you can see the crew in the mirror briefly. Really? And then in the Luther Mahoney episode... We're giving up all the secrets. The Luther Mahoney episode, notice you can see all the earplugs for everybody about to fire the blank gun.

[01:05:23] Even though, weirdly, when you look at it, when I was looking at it, thinking, well, hang on a minute. Because when you see them firing the gun, it is a completely different shot, which to me negated the whole need for earplugs. But I didn't direct that. Interesting. Yeah. I remember... They didn't do a good job coloring those earplugs. Earplugs come in the color of Caucasian flesh, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you put those in an African American, and suddenly they got to be toned down. Yeah.

[01:05:53] I remember them having to go through that. But... So do you remember the first film you did where you walked onto the set, and it was a digital camera instead of film? I don't remember. Because everything I've done in the last 10 years has been digital. Sure. And I was lucky because a lot of my friends were doing digital back before the Alexa came out. My first digital was the Alexa camera.

[01:06:19] And I had friends who were using the D20 and D21 and these other digital cameras, and they were a nightmare. So Aerie kind of made that a much easier pill to swallow. But I don't remember what my first job was. Could it have been House of Cards? Because I'm just looking at your CV now. Nothing strikes me as a digital show unless they used it on Broadwalk Empire. But could be wrong. Boardwalk was film. Yeah. So it might well have been House of Cards.

[01:06:48] Because obviously Fincher shoots everything with a red camera. It might have been... Yeah, that was with the red camera. Jump Street... I think Jump Street might have been digital. Yeah, it could have been Nary LX. That makes sense. Yeah. Not Fade Away was film. Oh, no. Not Fade Away. That was digital also. Premium Rush was film. God's Behaving Badly was... That was digital.

[01:07:21] Okay. And then I did a handful of pilots and things like that. Homicide aside, you've worked on some amazing, amazing things. Martin Scorsese. That'll be a whole other episode. We want to hear about that. Yeah. Yeah. No way. So thinking about the idea of the change to digital and that if somebody wanted to... We heard rumble... I've actually seen this in the public domain. Yeah, deadline.

[01:07:49] Rumblings about a homicide reboot. Do you think it could be done to have the same sensibility? Or is it just not possible now for it to have that same sort of raw feel? Although it doesn't feel as raw from... The peacock restoration is prettier and cleaner somehow. Yeah. Because it was a digital restoration. I was like, right. I think speaking from a very dogmatic point of view, I would say it's not possible.

[01:08:19] It's not possible for several reasons. One is I think everybody wants more equipment on the set now. The cameramen want more tools and toys to play with. And people expect the modern conveniences of production, which would mean like remote heads, wireless focus and zoom controls, the little Movies for floating cameras around

[01:08:48] and having a couple of DSLRs they could plant here and there. That's a Mophie. Mophie is like a toy steadicam that you're holding your arms. Oh, really? Yeah, it's the latest sort of way forward. It comes from gimbals. It's based on a kind of gimbal. It actually comes from the technology they use in helicopters in the back in the day for cameras and helicopters. Right, right. So it's like gyroscope? Gyros and gimbals and ballots, yeah. Yeah.

[01:09:18] But they can be very temperamental and take a lot of time. And it's the kind of thing that someone could buy and have it there on set. But then it's also the kind of toy. I don't think of it as a real tool. And I get a lot of pushback for this, I'm sure. But it's the kind of toy that it's really an owner-operator thing. It's not something you would get from a rental house because they're so temperamental. Yeah.

[01:09:45] They do an annoying move suddenly out of nowhere like that. And it just ruins the shot. And start buzzing or something. Yeah. And you really have to become really good at it and have a lot of playtime with it to get there. And I don't think of it as something you would rent from the rental house and it shows up and then you go with it. Like a Steadicam.

[01:10:07] I mean, you almost – I don't know of any rental company that rents a Steadicam because it's a specialty where the operator has to really tune it and figure that out. Have it set up for themselves. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So you'd need a specialist to kind of come in and do those shots. Yeah. So I think people expect all of these things to be on set now. They want one of every lens available.

[01:10:32] And all of this comes with the expense of being weighted down and having so much equipment that you've got to hide and keep out of the shot. It slows you down. It requires choices. Yeah. The TV shows that I've been working on recently have a minimum of five carts, sometimes six or seven carts for the camera department. You're kidding. And we're not talking about little mag liners. We're talking about Rubbermaids or even larger backstage carts.

[01:11:02] Six carts? One cart – at least one cart for lenses only. We have a lens cart. They have six second assistants? Sometimes we have more carts than people. So when we show up in the morning, we have to decide which carts go first, who pushes them. You have a cart. There's always one cart for batteries only. Two carts was enough to handle as a second. Well, on Homicide, we only had one, you know. Well, unless we had the B camera and then we had a second one.

[01:11:30] Is that because DPs just want to be ready for any particular – any scenario that could be thrown at them? Is that kind of what it is? Because I've noticed that on music videos I've worked on. It's that and it's also – I mean, yeah, they want to be ready for whatever the director throws at them. But also I think that directors and producers kind of are expecting more too. They're saying, let's carry a remote head. That way we don't have to worry about renting one when we day play it, you know.

[01:11:59] So you just end up with the whole collection of stuff. And I feel like that – you get weighted down with that. Like, for example, on Homicide, I think we had eight batteries. And our batteries were – I don't know. They were 10 inches long and two inches wide. Maybe 10 inches. Maybe eight inches. And maybe four inches thick. There was eight of those. And it would fit onto the camera.

[01:12:29] It was small enough that it clipped onto the camera. Nowadays, you get – when I order a package for TV, it's 30 dionic batteries. 30 batteries. Eight or 10 block batteries for the camera. And the camera has to have one dionic, one block battery all the time because if the block battery dies, the dionic is the backup. And then you don't crash and corrupt a file. You don't lose a take in theory. Oh, because it's digital. Yeah, that's temporary. Wow.

[01:12:57] And you're burning through battery so much faster because you have the monitors on board. The cameras burn really hot. The viewfinder, the transmitter, the monitors. Right. The viewfinder is electronic. None of that stuff was electronic back then except for the transmitter. Right, right. And then you have your wireless hand units. They require their batteries. And then there's – you're putting batteries on the focus monitor.

[01:13:24] You're putting batteries on the receivers for the video transmitter. Damn. If the camera department's in charge of the director's monitors, you've got to put batteries – Once again, technology not making life easier. No, it really isn't. I mean, it's – Because, yeah, I think – Because in theory, smaller cameras, you should be able to do more with less but obviously not. Well, that's what I was going to ask. So I've seen digital cameras, you know, like let's say it's a shot behind the scenes of some recent film.

[01:13:52] And the camera is still big. It's like the digital camera with the big lens and I guess the large – what is it? Like the – you know, where the guts of the camera is, much of that is our drive, right? Or those – We record the cards now. It's all the cards. So anyway – and then the guts of the camera. But it's still a pretty fairly large camera.

[01:14:17] But – and you mentioned this too, Chris, and I knew when I watched the film that the creator was shot on a phone, right? No, no, no. It wasn't on a phone. It was on a Sony FX3. A little tiny – A little tiny thing. Which is a consumer camera a little bit bigger than actually the camera I'm staring at over here. So like GoPro a little bit – It's a sort of DSLR size camera. Like a regular – I would call it a regular camera. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[01:14:41] So between those two, if somebody said let's shoot homicide and try to make it close, what would you think you would choose? Let's say if you were the DP and you had to do it digitally. To get it as close as possible, what would you pick? Or would you just say, I'm not doing that? It's not possible. Just shoot it on film though. Yeah. Can we get it at time? I would just – I would say, let me know when it airs. I want to see how it turns out. Exactly.

[01:15:12] Exactly. I don't know what I would pick. There's so much technology changing constantly. But the problem is – and I don't know if this is because of the way the sensors are designed in digital cameras. But with film, if you're panning – well, it works the same.

[01:15:35] Well, if you're not crystal sharp on digital, even at a 2.8 or a 4 stop, you can tell that the eyes aren't in focus. You can tell that the ears are in focus, but the eyes aren't in focus. Yes. And I think that's the nature of the sensor. The fact that each of those pixels, the photo sites, if you will, on the sensor never change from frame to frame. So it looks – you can really tell if something's not sharp.

[01:16:02] With film, you had the equivalent of the photo site or the pixel or the receptor was a grain of silver. And that grain of silver moved constantly from frame to frame. It was never in the same spot. So I think that gave a more organic feeling. Even though you could make something crystal very sharp, you could see the ping of light in the eyes until it's focused,

[01:16:27] it didn't reproduce focus the same way that a digital camera does. More forgiving. I think we were talking about that the other day. And with a digital camera, you can go panning. You can pan from left to right or right to left and have the focus somewhat close to where it needs to be. But as soon as that camera stops on the person's face and nothing's moving, you can tell it's out of focus. You can really see it. That's very true.

[01:16:55] I think that's what made me realize that maybe it was a moving grain that helps you with focus in film, you know. So are you pulling focus as you would traditionally or is it a different – I tried. I tried. I tried. On that show, Not Fade Away, the one that Igle Breald shot and David Chase directed, that was an early digital job.

[01:17:23] I tried to pull focus by standing by the camera. And I managed to get away with it for the most part. But I learned quickly that you really need to be standing in front of a monitor because when everything settles and the camera stops moving, you're going to see that it's out of focus. And looking at marks on the floor and marks on the lens don't matter. So then you're having – then you have a remote focus you're using now.

[01:17:51] And I'm standing sometimes in another room looking at a 13- or 16-inch monitor trying to focus that way. So it's really – as my friend – That sounds horrible. As my friend Chris Solano says, we're just focus monkeys. You can train a monkey to do what we're doing now, you know. I find even through my DSLR sometimes you can't actually tell if it's the ear or eye in focus. It's really nice. You have to use autofocus a lot more than I'd like to because it's so hard.

[01:18:19] So whilst it's a proper reflex viewfinder, you could tell. And so I think we talked about this the other day and I think I didn't really get it. Are the digital cameras actually doing some of the focus and you're adjusting or are you doing all the focus? No. I don't think any of the professional cameras are focusing for you at this point. That may come but it's not there yet. Because it's too laggy.

[01:18:45] There are some products being made. Preston Cinema Engineering makes something called a Light Ranger that can grab the focus for you and track it using infrared light. It's an incredible tool. It's really, really helped focus pullers in the digital world. But once again, if you try to rely completely on the autofocus that it gives you, you're going to get caught off guard.

[01:19:14] Because it can't discern between the nose and the ear. Well, exactly. And it can't make decisions when to drop to the background to follow the dialogue. Right, right, right. Of course. Yeah. It has its very specific applications and it can be really, really good at that. But it's still just a patch for that, you know. Yeah. The only cameras that are good at it are the Sonys at the moment where they do this sort of eye detect thing. But obviously for drama, that's a whole different matter.

[01:19:43] But for podcasting and like run and gun stuff, they're pretty good for that these days. For talking heads and things, yeah. Yeah, for that kind of stuff, it's fine. But for drama, no. No, it's a different thing altogether. Right. We still don't have computers or machines that can decide when to change focus to the next person talking and, you know, or change for dramatic purposes or whatever, you know.

[01:20:07] But I think another aspect of what would make shooting homicide on digital so hard is that as the focus puller being right there on set, right next to the cameraman and right in front of the actors, I'm perceiving things that aren't verbal necessarily. I'm listening to the dialogue. I can hear the cameraman telling me when he wants me to change something.

[01:20:35] But I'm also picking up the body language of the cameraman and of the actors. And so I can use my intuition and instincts, if you will, to make decisions about the focus and how to play the focus. With digital, if I'm stuck looking at a monitor, even in the same room, I can't take my eyes off that monitor. Yeah.

[01:21:02] I don't have that proximity to the actors and the cameraman. And I definitely don't pick up the vibe of it, you know, the energy they're putting out. So you would lose that, I think. And I don't know of any digital camera that would allow you to stand next to the cameraman and really nail the focus the way it needs to be done.

[01:21:25] At some point, someone must have written an article in Mini DV Magazine or something about, if you want your video to look like film, you've got to shoot wide open. And so everyone's embraced that. Everybody wants no depth of field. They want the background to be blurred. And we don't see that way, you know. That's not how our eyes work. But now that's become the standard.

[01:21:51] Even with professional cameramen that have trained and know better, they still want to shoot everything wide open. And because of that... Yeah, so they're shooting wide open, you've got very shallow depth of field, basically. Yeah, and you wouldn't stand a chance if you were choosing to be next to the camera right there with the actors, no matter how big the monitor is. And then that means you have to have a monitor on the camera, you know. And I don't know.

[01:22:20] I just don't think it would work. Unless a cameraman said, yeah, well, my plan is to shoot this whole thing at a 5.6, night exteriors included, which is doable because the ASAs on these cameras go so high, you could shoot a night exterior at a 5.6. You might stand a fighting chance. And if you chose to stay with the wider lenses, the 12s, the 16s, and that range, then maybe you could pull that off.

[01:22:47] But I really think you'd have to be committed to making it work. And there's probably other reasons, but I can only speak to the focus and the technical ends. Not very helpful. So I can only speak to this from a focus standpoint. Right, right, right. Sure. Because that's my strong point. But there's probably other reasons why trying to do Homicide again in the same way wouldn't work if it was digital. Have you seen The Bear, which is a Disney show?

[01:23:17] And it might be shot in film. I'm not 100% sure. But it's the show that I feel has the spirit of the look of Homicide, but not exactly. Have you seen that? Yeah. I haven't either. If you watch The Bear, it's nowhere near exactly the same as Homicide. Or even The Bear and Succession were shot in film. So I don't know about The Bear. Does Kodak, I guess, still sell film? Yeah, they do. They do. They do. They even sponsor films. And there's still places to get it developed in New York?

[01:23:45] Kodak opened a lab in Manhattan or in Brooklyn. At least as of pre-COVID. I don't know if it's still there now. But I was thinking, one other thought about that equipment and trying to shoot Homicide again. And if you shot digital, you would need a cart for batteries, no matter how you looked at it. You would need your cart for camera. Maybe your lenses. You could choose a small set of lenses that you could get all on one cart.

[01:24:14] But think about Homicide. We had a Magliner Junior, a cart that's three feet long. No, not three feet. Had a top and bottom shelf. Wasn't three feet. Well, if you count the handles. No, three feet long. No, it was not three feet long. It was longer than three feet. Okay. Let's say it was four feet long, two shelves. And that was the entire camera package. I don't think you could do that with digital. You would need a second one of those just to have enough chargers to charge the batteries you need.

[01:24:46] But yeah. Check out the bear when you get a chance. It's shot on the Arri Alexa LF, apparently. That's the large sensor, large format sensor. Yeah. Yeah. It's not exactly like Homicide, but it's got a very nice handheld documentary vibe to it. And they do a pretty good job of catching the focus with it. But they might do a billion takes to get it. I don't know. It's obviously a much bigger budget. What is that on? It's on Disney. Disney Plus. Yes.

[01:25:12] But the bear, when I was watching the bear, I thought this is sort of- Is it documentary? It's in the spirit of that homicide book. It's not exactly the same. It's supposed to be a comedy, but apparently there was a big fight at the Emmys. Oh, it's not a comedy. Because it was in the comedy category and everybody said it's not a comedy. No, no, no. Is it an hour? It shouldn't be. Is it an hour? No. I think they're about half an hour. They're about half an hour. But there's a really good episode, the Christmas episode season two.

[01:25:40] I've forgotten the name of the episode, but it's this Christmas episode in particular, where it's mainly around a dinner table. It's just like, wow. I was really blown away by it. So it's- I don't know if I could get it without paying for it. Hey, Disney Plus, give me some free access. Well, actually, sometimes there are deals you can get with your phone provider. Yeah, and sometimes you can get it free for a week or something. I think you'll get free Apple TV of your Mac now, Apple Boots. Is that right? Oh, cool. Cool. Yeah.

[01:26:09] For about three months, I think. I'm waiting to do a free month of Disney, because if he signed up, he'll get the first month free. Oh, there you go. I want to watch the Beatle documentaries that Peter Jackson did. It's supposed to be great. And I don't want to watch them alone, so I'm kind of waiting to find someone who wants to sit down and watch them with me. And I'll binge them all one night, because I'm- Well, there we are. You two. Watch Disney and then watch the bear. And then the bear. Yeah, watch the Beatles and then the bear. And the Beatles and bears. Look, if we could sit at lunch for seven hours, we could sit through that.

[01:26:40] So Boots, the show's now 30 years old, and it's obviously come back onto streaming. We're streaming for the first time on Peacock in the US, and we're waiting for it to come to the UK at the moment. Why do you think Humicide has retained interest? And do you feel it still feels relevant today? Do you feel it still stands the test of time? Well, I was surprised to hear that there was so much talk about homicide.

[01:27:08] I guess I didn't have my finger on the pulse of that. I know Sue had mentioned the podcast thing, and then I realized, I found out that Kyle and Reed had a podcast, and now I'm hearing from you guys that they've re-digitized it or re-presented it. I knew at the time it was kind of unique television because they were trying to reproduce it or

[01:27:36] copy it with other networks in different formats. But I don't know how to answer your question because I wasn't aware of that until just recently. Yeah, it wasn't available. It was not available on DVD. And actually, and I'd like to look this up sometime. Right after it went off, it was on court TV. And I don't know if it was weekly or every night.

[01:28:03] You know how sometimes when it gets on a secondary station, they show it every night at a certain time. I don't know when and how long did they show all seven seasons in a year and a half by showing it every night. I don't know about that. But then after that, it was not available for 20 plus years until if you wanted to get the DVD set or go to your library and get it. That's where I started watching it again. And then we started the podcast in March.

[01:28:31] And then it actually didn't start streaming until July. But there certainly are a set of rabid, dedicated fans still out there. Um, so yeah, so that was, that's good to know that there were still people interested in it. It'll be interesting to see what kind of if, if peak. I don't know how you find those things out. What kind of audience it's picking up? Yeah, it's difficult to say because I don't feel Peacock are pushing it as much as they could be.

[01:29:01] Um, or NBC. I feel like they could be pushing it a lot more. I felt like the release was still quite soft. Um, and, and, um, and I feel like at the moment on Peacock, it's just sort of become one of many other classic shows like, um, oh my goodness. Um, well, you've obviously got all the law and orders on there, but the old one and the new one. Cagney and Lacey. I don't know if that's on NBC. Well, no. Um, there's another one. There's a gangster one. Um, goodness. I've forgotten the name of it. Wise Guy. Wise Guy. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:29:29] Like 80s shows that are kind of classics. And I, um, and it's a shame. I feel like it's a shame they haven't pushed it more, but maybe they will later on. It's getting a pretty good rating. I noticed it was like 90 something percent rating on, you know, when you look at a show, it'll tell you like what percentage of rating people are rating it. I guess by five stars or four stars. Maybe it make, maybe it makes sense that these shows are having a resurgence because now there's

[01:29:57] more channels that need more, more programming and it's cheaper to bring these out of the closet than it is to make more. And, uh, you know, there was a time when, what, there was HBO, there was, um, uh, what is that other one? Um, there were a couple of cable channels that would show movies, uh, Showtime and, and a handful. But then all the other, all the studios and everyone else decided that they wanted their

[01:30:26] own channels and they took all their materials back from these, these, uh, more universal ones. And now everyone has to fill up their, their time with, with programs. So. But I still think it absolutely holds together 30 years later, the way it looks and also the subject matter and how good the writing was really, um, it doesn't feel dated when you watch it now. So you'll have to watch some. You would think the network would understand that and realize that.

[01:30:55] Um, but they're, they're making, they're making decisions on completely different reasons than what the viewer thinks or anything. Well, I've been told crime procedures at the moment are quite big, um, which is interesting. Um, timing. Apparently they're the big, most reliable genre of TV at the moment. Um, and so, um, from what I read in deadline where somebody briefly mentioned there's a consideration of a homicide reboot. Um, I wonder if it's the procedural aspect that will get explored more and less of the

[01:31:25] character stuff, but you know, that's a whole different thing. Yeah, because it wasn't much of a procedural. It was really way more of delving into their personalities. That was really the canvas that everything else is being painted on. Yeah, exactly. This is interesting. So that would be a challenge. Well, do you have any kind of, um, favorite memories from your experience on the show, whether it be, um, related to the filming or dealing with the cast or crew or is there

[01:31:52] anything is good when you think about homicide sort of stands out to you still to this day? Um, something that I think about a lot, especially when I'm working around other actors or in a, a situation where I get to see an actor do a really brilliant thing. I think about that episode that took place entirely in the box. I don't remember the name of that. Three men, the Dina probably. Right, right.

[01:32:22] And, um, I think that whole episode, we might've had one scene that wasn't shot in that box or maybe not in the squadron, but almost entirely in the box. And it was Andre intensive. He had a lot to learn and a lot was put on him. I think, uh, Kyle's character, if I remember right, was kind of playing cool, but Andre was

[01:32:46] the one who was the, the cop who was going to get emotional and try to rain heavy on the, on the perpetrator. Right. And, um, I remember being in there standing next to Jean, probably four feet away from, from Andre and watching him do a eight or 10 page dialogue, you know, um, and just, just

[01:33:11] go at it, you know, and when you let him go, he would, he would perform Shakespeare for you. You know, he really would, would go at it hard. And, uh, and after each take, the director would come in, give him notes and, uh, Andre would then ramp up the intensity for the next scene or the next take, you know, and it would get stronger and stronger. And I'm standing there going, this is incredible.

[01:33:33] And I was, I was feeling his energy and emotion wash over me in a way that I had never felt before. It was, um, it was more, it was more than watching theater. It was really immersive and profound in a way, you know? Uh, so when that aired, I was, um, I was so excited.

[01:33:59] I probably had told my wife about that experience anyway, but you know, months later when it aired, I was excited to show her that, that episode and those scenes. And it was, it was kind of disheartening to see how they had chopped it up in the editing to cut away to Kyle and to the perpetrator. And all of that intensity that Andre had put in there had been, had been mitigated or

[01:34:29] neutered in a way. I mean, it was still intense. Still, I would say. And, and I think that anyone. Others wouldn't think it wasn't, it was definitely still intense. Anyone who watched the final product only probably would feel what I felt when I was there watching him do it, but I was so let down. And then I, that made me realize that that probably happens to a lot of crew people when they get to see something like that, or it happens, what do the actors think?

[01:34:57] You know, I mean, Andre was pouring his heart into that. Every take was more and more intense. I had that experience on West Wing when they came to DC. There was that scene when Martin Sheen is in the National Cathedral and he's swearing at God. Oh yeah. Yeah. I was the focus puller on that. And we were on a, we were on a dolly backing down the main nave and I'm five feet away from him and he's doing that thing and just so intense. And at the end of it, I felt I was ready to cry.

[01:35:27] You know, it was so good. And, and yeah, moments like that, you realize that a lot of people don't ever get to experience that. I'd agree with that. That made me think about, and not to jump in out of homicide, but that made me think of a scene in the scene toward the end of Scarface where Pacino's being, you know, invaded, you

[01:35:54] know, by like 30 guys with machine guns and he's trying to figure out what to do. And he's in his office and he tries to talk into the intercom and he tries to pick it up and he can't hold it. And it's like flying around in his hands and he's getting angrier and more like freaked out. And being in the room with that, because it wasn't rehearsed that way. It was his intensity of emotion. That made me think of that when you said that, it was like, oh wow.

[01:36:21] It's like totally blew your way to be in the same room with that happening to see the actor going there, you know, going very deep. Yeah. They let the scene take them further. Yeah, exactly. Kind of reminds me, it was making me think of when we were talking with Nick Gomez about his philosophy of these continuous takes with no editing. In the old days, he used to feel it was dishonest to edit. And there is some power in the continuous single take of something that captures kind of what

[01:36:50] you're sort of saying and describing there. Well, it could have been in this case with Andre that maybe the subsequent takes were too intense. And so they had to cut back to some earlier takes and whatnot. I mean, they could have done the jump cuts. We weren't afraid of that. But I really felt like the viewers had been cheated out of something really, really special. And you mentioned, Chris, wasn't that the scene you mentioned where that was one of the triple cuts or double cuts where he's ripping the pictures down off the wall because they're

[01:37:20] so disgusted at the end and they didn't get Moses' gun to give a confession or anything? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was intense. Yeah. It's like the repetition of something sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And then I was reminding Sue of this the other day that Clark Johnson, probably the most gracious man on earth and one of my living heroes. Most of my heroes are dead, but Clark is one of my living heroes. Get him on the podcast. Yes.

[01:37:51] He would do it. I badgered him. I think we might be on the podcast. And he would have a lot of good things to say. He's, oh yeah, that would be great. There were times in multiple seasons on a day when he wasn't working, he would bring high school kids from the local drama classes to set and spend several hours walking them around, showing them, letting them watch us shoot, standing behind Video Village, giving back

[01:38:21] to the community. I'd never seen an actor do that ever. Never, ever. That's brilliant. I saw Gary Marshall do something similar, but not nearly on the basis where it was digging his deep. I have a picture of Clark with one of the kids when we were shooting over in Sandtown, Winchester,

[01:38:48] one of the kids that was hanging out with us on the set. And he was really being very, you know, sort of loving and inclusive with the kid. But it's a really cute picture. I have to dig that up. Well, one other very random question. You probably know what's coming up, but Baltimore's famous for food, et cetera. What kept you, you know, any favorite dishes that you had during the shooting of Homicide or other shows you work on in Baltimore that stand out for you?

[01:39:18] I heard that question come up on several of the podcasts and I didn't think that I was going to get asked that. I don't know. It just didn't enter my mind. So I don't have a prepared answer for that. That's all right. And I don't know if I even have an answer for that because I loved the cappuccinos that the Daily Grind made. They just made a really good cappuccino and it set the standard for me. And it's hard sometimes to find a cappuccino that meets my expectations

[01:39:46] based on my memories of those, but I could drink them all day long. They were great. Yeah. And we needed them all day long. Yeah. Yeah. Especially knowing they were available and made it, made them more tempting to get, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And I think beats a good cappuccino, so it's good. Yeah. I can't even remember. I have to think sometimes about like, where, where did we go? Where, cause we obviously ate when we were, when we were on the set,

[01:40:10] when we were at, at the rec pier in our regular squad room sets, we would go to lunch in Fell's Point every day. And I can't even sort of remember like where we would go. I can't either. I can only remember Cafe Open and that was only later on. That was, yeah. But we didn't have enough time to go to a regular restaurant. So we must have gotten subs. I remember like we would ask like, what do you want for lunch? And I guess the loader would go out and maybe pick up some subs or-

[01:40:40] Well, Bop Pizza was around. That's right. We would go there. Right, right, right, right, right. I don't know if that's still there. They're not, no. Yeah, we would go, that was close. They had chocolate pizza. That was good. And probably Jimmy's because Jimmy's was good and it would carry out. Yeah, Jimmy's definitely. And this is Jimmy's, the coffee shop in Fell's Point, not Jimmy's famous seafood in Dundalk. No, no. Bill Porter, an old sound man. Original Jimmy's. Bill Porter said, the only place you can get a cold beer for breakfast in Fell's Point.

[01:41:09] For breakfast. Exactly. And I guess, I don't know, did the Daily Grind have, have sandwiches? Yeah, but they were always pre-wrapped and they were kind of mealy or mushy or something. I didn't- Cooper's, I guess. Not cappuccino quality. Maybe we went to Cooper's. I know when we were on location, we would sometimes grab, for some reason I'm thinking like Di Pasquale's or one of the Italian places in Highland Town.

[01:41:37] I remember the back room. I think I mentioned that in another episode. Yeah, you did mention that. And I guess the Broadway market, maybe there was stuff in the Broadway market we could go pick up food, I think, from. Yeah. I think we went to the market a lot, yeah. But one of the things that I remember being, getting a chuckle out of, the extras. There was, I found out that if you played,

[01:42:03] if you were an extra and you played a dead person, you got paid more than an extra who was walking around. More for the day? More for the day, yeah. And you got to go home early. As soon as your scene was done, you were done. You got to go home early, where all the other extras had to stay in holding and then suffer for the rest of the day. But then it was explained to me that the reason was because you couldn't be an extra for the rest of the season because you were dead. That's a one-shot deal. That's so funny. No pun intended, one-shot deal.

[01:42:33] It's something you don't think about. He has a murder book. He has a photographic book of a bunch of the dead bodies. I was like, but the thing that's funny- I'm hoping from the show, not from real life. Is many of them- Mostly from one season, but I think it might- Right. And many of them are in the middle of being prepped, and so they have their eyes open, right? It's pretty funny. It's like, oh yeah. And they're laying in blood. Right. I had forgotten how much blood we used until I saw those shots.

[01:43:00] Remember that time we were outside of that bar in Midtown, and there's a big murder scene in the middle of this five-way intersection, and Andre kind of flipped out as part of his character against, lashed out at the extras that were policemen on the scene saying, get out of my blood, because he would take ownership of the murder scene. That was his

[01:43:28] character. But in reality, it was probably myself and Jean and the sound man walking all through the blood, making foot tracks of the blood, but get out of my blood, and looking at the actors. I remember that. And I remember him doing it more than once. I remember him being very intense on the scene. It became an ongoing thing. I don't know how often it made to the final cut. Oh, boy. That was a good one. I remember that. I definitely feel like it's been in an episode. It seems familiar. Hopefully it made the original.

[01:43:56] Oh, it absolutely was. No, it was in the episode. And I want to say it might have been up near like City Cafe, up in that area. Yes, exactly. Yeah, like off Cathedral Street. It was right outside of that, what was that bar called? I can't remember. It was a bar that was half a flight down, just east, west of Charles Street, but I can't think of it. The other thing about the extras in the squad room was probably elsewhere too, but because

[01:44:21] our transmitter on the camera was a VHF transmitter, which meant that it transmitted to a regular television set that had a VHF receiver. Oh, cool. And we could be shooting in someone's house and the owner could be upstairs if they knew to turn what channels turned to. They could be watching what we were doing downstairs. So it was, you know, they were illegal because it was, you know, broadcast. I mean, we're

[01:44:46] stepping on commercial channels, but it was low frequency enough that we never really got exposed that way. Until now. Until now. And now all of my transmitters are destroyed because a truck ran over them when I was working on Tuck Everlasting. Anyway, these extras, when they learned that they could watch it on TVs,

[01:45:11] they all went out and they ended up buying little Sony Watchmans, little two-inch television sets. Oh, yes, yes. And they would carry them with them. And if you watch the background people in some of these squad room scenes, you'll see them walking through the set, holding their police cap in their hand, looking into their cap. No. Their monitors, their little Watchmans are in their cap. So they could see, they would just decide and devise how they could best be seen on camera. You know, the AD, the VH is saying,

[01:45:40] you go through here and go through here. And they would invent a reason to hesitate or, you know, make a little deviation to be on camera longer. It was kind of fun to watch. That's so funny. I have to look for that. I don't remember that. Okay. Oh, that's cool. And then I had some notes about Jean. I don't know if you want to hear what... Yeah. What was it like with Jean then? Well, I got to say, Jean, he was more than a cameraman for me. You know, he really became

[01:46:08] a good friend. And even though we never socialized, when we went our separate ways, I really felt like I had lost a friend. You know, someone who I'd learned a lot from, not just about camera stuff, but about being professional and how to keep a sense of humor and keep things light.

[01:46:31] You know, it was his French sensibilities really were... It was a gift to the show, you know, to see what he brought to it, you know. He had disposition to not take it too seriously and yet still work as hard as he did, you know,

[01:46:51] and take it to the nth degree. He would piss the actors off sometimes and he'd be shooting and then something would happen in the frame he didn't like, whether it was something he did or someone jumped the gun or a background extra looked at the lens. He would make a click sound and the actor closest to the camera would stop and turn and, what? What's that? Oh, nothing. Nothing. Just keep going.

[01:47:17] Or he would say, yeah. He would whisper under his breath, ça suffit, ça suffit. You know, when he was upset about something, ça suffit. Or Très Amisant was a big one. Right. Très Amisant, I remember that. Très Amisant, right? Because it was Très Amisant for sure. Little thing. Okay. What else did I write about him? And then when he came to direct, the first time he directed, I was so proud of him because we had these directors and

[01:47:47] some of the directors were very accomplished. And I think that a director who really knows what they're doing can show up and kind of shoot from the hip with a TV show, especially if it's established and the actors kind of know what they're going to do. In fact, it's probably the better way to do it instead of trying to get into headlocks with the actors. But then we had some directors that would just show up and kind of phone it in, too.

[01:48:16] But when Jean showed up his first day directing, he showed up and he pulled this big, thick pack of index cards out of his top pocket and said, I'm ready. I'm ready. You know, and I was so proud of him. I thought, my God, he did his homework. He really wants to make this work. You know, and I was impressed with that. And he would strike them off. He would say, got that, got that, got that. You know, I don't need this. I got this instead.

[01:48:41] And I think it really, it gave the crew a lot of confidence that we're going to make it through the days. Yeah. His whole storyboard, he had the whole day storyboarded out. Yeah. Anything you want to mention that you're doing now or not? Oh, I had this thought about the Aton. This came to me when I was driving back from Delaware yesterday. I was thinking, the Aton was, holding the Aton was like having a cat lay across your shoulder. Right?

[01:49:10] And holding the Arri SR was more like having a two by four in your shoulder. And I don't mean to disrespect the SR because I always thought that was the camera I was going to buy if I ever bought a camera until I worked with the Aton. And then I realized that the Aton, for a lot of reasons, was a better camera than the SR.

[01:49:34] But it was great that we chose that camera to work with because it just, it wouldn't have been the same show. So reliable. Yeah. And so quiet. I mean, just, yeah. And so easy to work with. It was, yeah, it was a terrific camera. Well, that was the, both that camera and the Eclair, which is also from France, were both the kind of French new wave cameras. Same designer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because at uni, I've used, we used the Eclair, the Aton and the Arri.

[01:50:03] And I get what you're saying about the Arri. It's like a two by four. Do we have, we had an Eclair at UMBC, didn't we? Didn't we? Um, no. Why do I feel like we had one? Well, the Eclair made two cameras. They made the NPR, which was the head. That's the one that D.A. Pennebaker used and Al Maisel used in those early documentaries. And it was okay for handholding. It was better than handholding the 16BL, Arri BL. But it was still a heavy, bulky camera. See, I think we had one of those. And the BL.

[01:50:33] And then there was an, the, uh. And the Boullier. The Eclair ACL was the second one. Yeah. And the ACL, the way I understand it, and that could be white off the mark here, was that the ACL was designed by the same guy that designed the Aton. Hmm. He designed the ACL for Eclair and then went off and made his own and made huge improvements on that. I still have my Aton manual. Nice. Well, I think that's about it.

[01:51:03] Any final thoughts, Boots? This has been terrific. Thank you for digging deep. Well, there are other things that I could say, but I don't know. I mean. Well, is there anything missing from what you wanted to say at all that you feel like we should say? Well, I'll say that he has 20 pages of stuff. Wow. We've knocked a lot of it out. And a lot of it I've decided is just not relevant either, you know. But, um. You would ask about early memories at one point.

[01:51:27] And my first memories of that, of working on homicide, the first day, first two days, first week, I would drive home every night thinking, my God, I'm fired. I'm going to show up tomorrow and I'm going to say go home. I just, I really felt like I wasn't getting it. I wasn't making it work. Mm-hmm. And I don't know why. I mean, of course, no one saw dailies. None of the crew saw dailies. But every day I just felt like, well, it didn't happen. It didn't happen.

[01:51:58] You know, and I would drive home at night thinking I was going to get fired. Just being so depressed about it, you know, to the point where, should I just quit before they fired me? And you made it through all nine episodes. Yeah. Yeah. And then sometime towards the end of that first week, Jim Finnerty walked across the set in the morning and said, he said, I was watching the dailies. You've got a rabbi. And we were trying to figure out the other day what he meant.

[01:52:25] Did he mean an overlord or somebody that was watching out for you? And he said that to me. Or somebody that's going to rescue you. On multiple occasions, he would come up and say that to me. And I never could figure out if he was saying, well, I saw what you did. I saw what you can do. I believe in you. I got your back. Yeah. Or he was saying, I don't know how you do it. There must be a guardian angel of focus. And that's your rabbi. I don't know what he ever meant.

[01:52:55] And I'll never know because he's not around anymore, bless his heart. But I always remember him saying, you got a rabbi. You know, in his Brooklyn accent. Right. Well, and that's a good place to end. You have a rabbi, Boots. But I like this. Somebody watching out for you and a guardian angel. I think both of them, maybe. Yeah. In a way, maybe they're both the same. Right. You know? Like he's your guardian. Right. He's got my back no matter what happens later.

[01:53:25] But the guardian focus angel had my back before it happened or something like that. In any case, he was on your team. A past and a future. You were on his team. Yeah, yeah. That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Boots. Wonderful to have you on. My pleasure. As we said at the top of the show, you know, you and Jim Finnessy have been spoken of the most, I think. And, you know, your focus work is outstanding on homicide. And it's not an easy job at all.

[01:53:54] Not an easy job with what you had to deal with with the cameras whipping around like that. But my hat's off to you, man. You did amazing work. The master. Well, I got lucky that I was on Meterman and got to watch Greg Smith pull focus with John Alonzo. And I got lucky that I had worked with some Panavision equipment. And based on that, I had a chance to modify our camera package that we used. You know, at that time, Panavision was the only company putting focus marks on both sides

[01:54:24] of the lens. So you could stand on either side of the camera and work. Zeiss, Cook, everybody else, just the operator side. The other side was sometimes marked, but it was metric. And also John used, John Alonzo used two handles when he had held. So that was, that became a standard on homicide too. Yeah. But then we took that croisal double-sided follow focus and figured out how to make that

[01:54:54] work so we could get marks on both sides. We ended up buying two focus marking discs for each lens. And then every time we changed a lens, we have to change the focus disc and then calibrate that to the lens. So no matter what side of the camera was on, I could see. And there were big numbers. And the discs we had to write on with Sharpies. Right. To write the... Yeah, because you want to reuse them. And then once or twice a year, a season would have to refresh them because they would start to wear out. Yeah.

[01:55:24] Amazing. Or you'd pull focus quick and you'd hear, right? And you'd hear the gears jump. Oh, shit. Now everything's off. The gears jump. Right. Oh, my God. But it allowed me to get out of John's way and let him do what he wanted. There were times when we'd be in the box or some small room and he would want it to go all the way hard left to the wall into the corner. And I'm between him and the corner. And he'd get out of my way. And I'd have to like duck down under the lens and come up on the other side and work over there. And then suddenly he'd go back the other way and I'd have to duck down.

[01:55:53] So it was a lot of ducking and dodging. Exactly. And that focus whip made a huge difference because I could actually hold on to the focus whip and he could go under me and I could have the whip over on this side or behind him. Or almost get behind. I could be standing behind him using the focus whip and looking at the other side knowing that those marks are relevant too. Right. That's right. How are you doing that? It was some crazy dancing. But I don't know if I could have done it with anyone but John.

[01:56:23] You know, first off, he was very good at what he did and he was very predictable. And once I learned his style, he did things based on what he saw and that made sense to me. And also he had the temperament, you know, that allowed me to be hovering all over him while he's trying to shoot and do something to difficulty. Never got cross with me. You know, I can imagine that someone who's having a hard time operating, you know, and

[01:56:52] then has someone breathing down their neck, get off me. You know, you'd imagine that, but he had that nice European temperament and never minded anyone crowding in him. And, you know, he kind of made filmmaking a contact sport. All right. Oh, fantastic. Well, thanks again. That has been awesome. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yay.

[01:57:31] So that was Boots and wow, what a chat that was. I really enjoyed that. It was, he had a really nice energy about him and it was just a very fun conversation, probably a bit looser, but in the spirit of homicide, it was a bit of a looser conversation than maybe some of our other ones. But yeah, you said in the intro about his fascinating kind of origin story and, you know, he was talking about Steve Vanderbeek at UNBC and how film was sort of taught as a form of expression

[01:57:59] rather than just being sort of about narrative. And that was really interesting. Right. Actually, it's Stan Vanderbeek. Oh, was it Stan Vanderbeek? Stan Vanderbeek. Yeah. And we had quite the motley crew of 1950s and 60s experimental filmmakers as teachers at UNBC. And one of the things I remember, he didn't mention it, but one of the things I remember Stan was experimenting with, which was amazing to watch, but hard to reproduce at large scale.

[01:58:29] So it never went much farther. He had a steam machine. So it was a rod, maybe two feet long that had holes in the top and he would pump steam through it and then he would project images on the steam. Oh, how cool. And it made a three dimension. It almost looked like a... It looked like Princess Leia in the hologram in Star Wars. It looked like a hologram. It looked like a hologram. It looks three dimensional. I remember at the time thinking that he was a nut job and when he turned it on in class

[01:58:57] and he had a film of a white running horse and it blew me away. So those are the kind of things that they encouraged us to think out of the box. So that was fun being at UNBC. And I did love the very early origin where he said he was in... I don't think it was when he was in... It wasn't college. It was military school when his roommate's parents came with an eight millimeter camera.

[01:59:27] And at that point, whether it was eight or super eight, I'm not sure. I remember what he said. Because when I was growing up, we had both. We had an eight millimeter camera and then later super eight. And the parents handed the camera to his roommate and said, finish out the role. And that was the impetus of him. He and his roommate started to make these funny little, you know, in-camera special effect jokes. Somebody walks behind a tree or a post and somebody else...

[01:59:54] You cut the camera and the other person goes back there and roll the camera and the other person comes out and it looks like they changed, you know, in the middle with very little, you know, very little technical, no special effects, no CGI, right? Just in camera cuts, which is what they used to do in silent films. And then he started taking the films to parties and then, you know, and he started making them specifically for the parties and became known as the guy who brings the films to the party.

[02:00:22] But I love the fact that he had no inclination prior to that and how sometimes people get hooked on an idea or a craft, whether it's filmmaking or anything, that can be completely happenstance. Like what would have happened to Boots at his life if those parents had finished the rollout before they got there and didn't bring the camera? You know, would he have been spurred by something else?

[02:00:50] Like for me, if somebody hadn't taught a film class in high school, would I have not gone down that path? You know, I don't know. It's kind of weird to think about that, to think of those kinds of happenstance things. Yeah, yeah. The sliding doors thing. Yeah, exactly. I also loved, and the ties that he and I had before we even met, that he had worked with John Alonzo and Meteor Man here in Baltimore. At that point,

[02:01:18] I had quit the business in LA and come back here and was not in the business at that point, and had worked with Alonzo for years in Los Angeles, probably eight years on a number of features. And for him to work with him here, and then for also to be the first assistant was the guy who was a loader with me, but for him to witness Alonzo with a handheld and watching Greg Smith having to

[02:01:41] keep up pulling focus while Alonzo's running around, you know, outside the set, whatever the scene was. Um, and that ideation prepared him for that idea of how to do that, which he'd never really seen before, is what backstopped him and helped him to know what to do once he got to homicide. And, um, it was also interesting his comments about like that first season of Homicide and how

[02:02:08] the show was treated more like, as he said, a student film, uh, in which there was a lot more kind of improvisation around how scenes were shot. I found that really fascinating and how also most of the, um, crew could work out of one van. It was bonkers. It boggled my mind when they said that. It boggled my mind enough when they said, when Josh and Joe, the, the key, the gaffer and the key grip said that the initial idea for the,

[02:02:35] was to show up in a van and jump out and shoot and go, but you know, but, but the, for the camera crew, but the idea that they thought everybody was going to be in one van, um, is, is, you know, but you know, Hey, they were thinking out of the box. So they were going there, right. They were going there with their ideas. Um, and so we ended up with maybe not a complete full compliment that, you know, is gigantic of the amount of like, you know, trucks that you

[02:03:00] would on a gigantic feature. Nevertheless, we still ended up with basically a full compliment of, um, you know, the box trucks and you know, the large trucks for, for camera grip and electric and sound and, and the trailers, which they didn't use very often, but we did have a section of trailers and we did have some mobile bathrooms when we went on location. Yeah. The other thing that was interesting as well was, um, was how there was a kind of culture of embracing mistakes, which allowed

[02:03:28] then, um, people to take more creative risks. And he, he used the phrase, the rhythm of the world works for you. Uh, and if you try and force anything in life, you get resistance and it's so true. And it's really, no, it was really great to hear that. Yeah. And that, and that perhaps, you know, at the moment when we're shooting, it's not frowned upon to try something that's never been done. And then of course, with like, I think, um, Jean talked about loving to do the Dutch tilts

[02:03:57] until Tom Montana said enough with the Dutch tilts, but it was something that he tried that he'd like to do that he thought, you know, added some punch to the scene or added some, some focus, maybe to use the wrong word, um, to whatever the scene was about. Um, and, and often that off kilter, um, sensibility is used in filmmaking to, to, to make the audience feel off kilter along with what is off kilter that's happening in the action or that, you know, the dramatic tension of the,

[02:04:26] of whatever the narrative is. I also did want to tell people who do have some technical, um, background, but might not know about the difference between 16 millimeter and 35 millimeter lenses that when he's talking about Jean shooting it with a 9.5 lens or 12 or 16 or 25 millimeter lens, if you're only used to looking through your 35 millimeter, um, still camera, those would sound

[02:04:53] super, super wide, but those actually translate to 35 millimeter as like an 18, a 24, a 32 and a 50. So a 25 and 16 millimeter, um, 16 millimeter filmmaking, uh, translates to about a 50 millimeter in 35 millimeter filmmaking. So what he was saying that was Jean rarely went to the 25 and that's as far, as close as he went in. And usually that's thought of as sort of a, a portrait size, um, you know,

[02:05:21] a portrait, you know, technically like, like, uh, not a closeup lens, um, like a 50 or an 85 would be, but I wanted people to understand it wasn't like super duper, like, you know, you know, fisheye lenses because that those numbers do translate to 35 as twice that, twice that size or twice that length, I guess you would say. Yeah. And, uh, and it was a couple of technical things that came up.

[02:05:46] Um, so we had peewee dollies and focus whips. It might be worth just mentioning, um, what a peewee dolly is and a focus whip, just in case anybody wasn't sure about what those were. Yeah. The peewee dollies he was only talking about in, in reference to, uh, was it house of cards and they had two peewee dollies, a peewee dolly is a small dolly. So if you don't know what a dolly is, a dolly is a

[02:06:07] very heavy metal device with four wheels that has a boom or a part that will, that can go up and down to change the height of the camera. Uh, and so you could have a super, a large dolly or a small dolly and a small dolly are called peewees. They're very small and are much more compact and, uh, uh, usually use when you want to get into tight spaces. Um, so that's all it means. It just means a small,

[02:06:37] a small apparatus that moves the camera on wheels. Yeah. It is a smooth motion. Uh, it's like a bit like being on a train track. Well, you would put you, yeah, you would put it either on rails like a track, or you could also put what often was, was if you're, if you're moving around a room and you don't want to be on a straight line or a curved line of the, the, the manufactured track, then what would happen in feature filmmaking that I worked on was you'd put down what's called

[02:07:05] masonite, which is a very flat, smooth, heavy boards. Um, but thin and make a really smooth surface for it to move around on. Um, peewee dollies also might've had more that they're, that the wheels may have been more, um, mobile. I think they're rubbery. Yeah. They're rubbing, but also are they more on gimbals where they can spin around and move in any direction or are they

[02:07:30] just set? No, the peewee, I think the peewee you can, cause you could use them on a regular floor without rails of memory. So yeah, they use them a lot on TV here. Yeah. And you could use a big one without rails, but you'd have to put down that nice smooth floor. And then the focus whip basically is so picture having a knob, uh, that you're holding on the camera. There's, there's a knob on the camera where you pull, pull focus or change or move back and forth to change the distance so that

[02:07:59] you keep people in focus. If you need to stand a foot away from the camera or two feet away from the camera or almost behind the camera operator, there's then a very heavy, and I hate to call it a cable cause that sounds like it would be droopy, but very thick cable that, that locks into the focus knob on the camera and then has a knob on the other end so that you can stand apart from the camera

[02:08:25] and pull focus that way. And so sometimes we would hook more than one together. You might have two, two hooked together so he could get basically behind John or Alex. Um, or like he said at one point, having to go underneath the camera on the other side. I don't think he held onto the whip at that point. I think he must've taken it with him and pulled it out and taken it with him, but it's a way for you to be able to focus. You're still attached to the camera though. It's not remote. Um, just for a way

[02:08:52] for you to be, uh, separated a bit and not right on the camera. And then when you're not using it, he had a loop on his belt. You'd have it in your belt, like a, like a saber, right? Like that thing out and slab it in there. Um, that was very cool. That was very cool. And I was also very interested, um, obviously with his thoughts on about if you try to make homicide today, he felt that it wouldn't work so well if the show was shot digitally due to the way focus works. And also on top of that,

[02:09:22] he feels that a lot of, um, crews today are very large and there's a lot of expectation of a certain visual standard that requires a lot more equipment to hand, which means more trucks and, and so on. So it'd be very hard to make a show that's as nimble as homicide was, um, unless people embrace that. And, and, uh, so no, it was very interesting, especially the whole digital thing, because, uh, a lot of people assume digital's inherently better than film

[02:09:48] because it's digital, but, uh, and also they think you can correct a lot more in post, but when it comes to focus as the one thing you can't really correct if it's out of focus, that's it. Um, I mean, there are some very specialist stills cameras where you can play around after the fact, but they're still, they're still very experimental. So, and they're definitely not being used in film and TV at this point. Yeah. And it, it actually blew me away when he said, um, standard now when he works on digital

[02:10:15] shows and he, he works on, he worked on a lot of large productions. Really big ones. Yeah. Six or seven carts full of equipment. That just blew one, one cart just for these large scale batteries. You know, I mean, we would have a couple of block batteries and then for backup, but well, we never use those cause we were moving around all the time. We might have a block battery if we were on the dolly, which we never were. So, you know, we had these little

[02:10:44] small, I wouldn't even call it a brick, half the size of a brick, a third, two thirds of the size of a brick that went, that fit into the, um, into the blimp, which was the heavily padded cover that went over the camera and there was a pocket in the back and they just went in and out of there. Um, but I had, I mean, I, I, I still, I mentioned this to somebody I saw the other day. I still have nightmares. I have film industry nightmares. Um, still 30 years later where you're,

[02:11:12] you can't find the film, you can't find the batteries, you can't find whatever. When he said six or seven carts full of equipment and one cart just for the batteries, I felt like I was having one of those nightmares. Cause I thought there there's all, as a second assistant, there's always this tension of like, where am I setting up? Is there some, I need someplace I have to be able

[02:11:40] to keep it? Um, but I started having, I almost started having PTSD just listening to him talk about the number of carts and, and, and just thinking about how the hell are you keeping that number of batteries charged and ready, um, while you're shooting them. And then the idea of having to have a giant backup battery in case the battery you're shooting with fails and corrupts the entire

[02:12:08] file. Now, if you're shooting with film and the battery dies, the camera just stops. It doesn't corrupt the five minutes of film that's already on there. It just stops. You plug another battery in and you start at that frame, like literally at that same frame and like, you know, say, get, you know, get ready to go again. Let's, you know, let's go again. Roll, you know? So those, that, that just, it just like gave me a stomach ache thinking about that.

[02:12:33] Oh yeah. Yeah. Cameras are computers now. It's a bit like, um, if you had an external hard drive and I don't recommend you do this, but if you had an external hard drive, just pulled it out of your computer, that would probably corrupt the drive. Um, you know, unless it's a SSD drive. Um, so no, they're very delicate. Um, I mean, they're not better than they were, but, um, you know, cause they shoot onto memory cards and things now. So I think things are not as bad as it was maybe 10 years ago in the early days of red and stuff, but, uh, and red being one type of digital

[02:13:03] camera cause then you've also got the Arri Alexa, which is very popular. Um, and so, yeah, so it's, it's no fascinating. And then, and then he mentioned all the things like, well, um, when we were shooting electronically on the camera, basically the readout on the camera was electronic. So, you know, it could tell you how many feet you shot. Um, and then the transmitter we had on the camera was electronic and it was plugged into a battery and that was it. And he went through this long list

[02:13:32] of all the components that have to be fed with electricity or batteries for, you know, a large scale digital camera, um, you know, for that kind of production. So it, it, it is that, I think I said, you know, one more example of how technology makes life more difficult, not easier because you think of the freedom that John had, you know, to run around wherever, you know, um, you know, with

[02:14:02] boots hanging on and we, we had our little trail, our little parade of people behind him with the microphone and everything, but everybody had, you know, was, was self-contained, right? They, they had battery belts, you know, the sound guy had a battery belt on and the, and, and Josh with his paper lantern had a battery belt on and everybody was just running along. So I, not that, not that, um, well, I was happy to get out of the business at that time, but I got out of the business, um,

[02:14:31] literally on the cusp of digital filmmaking. I never worked in digital film. Um, and, and it came on very, very quickly, you know, at the turn of the millennium and, you know, year 2000 is when things started to happen. I remember going down to visit somebody on a set was the first time I'd ever seen a red camera. And, um, Oh, that would be later than 2000, the reds 2007 that came out,

[02:14:58] I think 2005, 2007. Yeah. So the early, yeah. So it was maybe a couple of years after, after homicide, but still, um, you know, never having, never having worked in, in digital. Yeah. Yeah. Cause mini, mini DV was, yeah, 2007 the red came out. So mini DV, um, which is the digital tapes. Um, so no, I don't think any real proper shows, I say proper, I think comedy used

[02:15:24] mini DV and I think obviously, uh, reality TV is mini DV. Um, and then there was the odd movie, like, um, 28 days later was the first film shot in mini DV. Um, but that was still quite rare, uh, cause mini DV was more of a kind of amateur stroke documentary format. Um, but when red came along, it was David Fincher embraced red. Um, and he was one of the first directors, I think,

[02:15:50] to use it on, um, well, certainly the social network was one of them. Was that the first film with the red? I don't know. And I also thought one of the early films with the red was, um, um, Johnny Depp's public enemies. I think that cause I remember that was Sony, that's Sony, that was Sony. Um, cause I remember sitting in the theater and, and it was one of those situations where he's running through a cornfield and the digital couldn't keep up with, you know,

[02:16:14] you got that fluttery, that fluttery thing with the camera moving sideways action, which I think has been solved now by some, you know, probably computer thing, but, um, was, was very happy looking at going, this is not as good as film. It's not as good as film. Yeah, yeah, no, totally. In fact, one of the first productions to use digital was Robbery Homicide by Michael Mann in the early 2000s, but they were using a Sony camera and then something called the Thompson Viper

[02:16:40] came out, which was then used on Collateral and partly on Miami Vice, the movie. Um, and then, yeah, so it was, it was sort of the Thompson Viper was the in digital camera from about 2003 to about seven. Wow. I've never heard of that. And then the Red came along. Um, and then the Arri D21 came along in the 2010s. Here we go. Um, and then the Arri Alexa, I think, came out and around about 2013, 14. So it's, it's sort of evolved and definitely got better. And I'm going

[02:17:09] to sound really stupid, but, um, what did, did Panavision develop and what did they call theirs or did they not? Well, Panavision, Panavision is a funnier one. So Panavision did create something called the, I think it was called the Genesis, um, that I think was made with Sony because now Panavision really just use Sony. Panavision just make lenses now. They don't really make cameras anymore. They kind of just work with red and make specialist Panavision branded cameras with red.

[02:17:35] Um, and the odd one was Sony. Um, but no Panavision don't really have their own digital camera currently, um, as of this area, which is sad, uh, but they, they do have fantastic lenses. Um, and they, you know, they're still used a lot for their lenses. Um, to this day. Yeah. And I, I might, I don't remember if I told this story on, on air or to you off air where, and I'm going to give a shout out to Bill Gray, who was another camera assistant in the area.

[02:18:00] I worked with a little bit and at some point, and I think I tried to get him to find this picture and I don't know that he remembered or it was years ago, uh, a photograph of a crate full of Panavision. And they were probably all X's or gold, uh, which were gray. Then the platinums,

[02:18:24] I think were white sort of beige, beige color. But I remember seeing that picture and it made me cry. It just was like, because they were so prized. Those cameras are snout. They were, and it made, maybe they were just the boxes and all the guts had been taken out of them. You know, the, the, the, um, the, you know, the, the innards, um, the movement and all the beautiful way it pulled the film through the camera. Um, but that was at the end of an era for sure.

[02:18:51] Yeah, totally. They're the Rolls Royce of cameras, many respects. Have you ever seen the movie Drive? No. Got Ryan Gosling in it. There we go. Um, so Drive's a really interesting film because they've got this, it's all about this stunt man who, who's a driver for organized crime. There's a really great scene where they're filming him on the film set and they kind of pan across all these, they pan across and show this, uh, Panavision camera. And it's interesting because the film

[02:19:18] shot digitally is almost like one, one format acknowledging another. It's quite a cool little moment. Or that's what people would think of that look, that camera is what people would think of when they saw a camera. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very iconic, you know? And, um, so no, no, really, really great. And, um, it drives a very good film actually. Uh, worth checking out if you've not seen it. Very visually cool film. And it was, yeah, it was shot with an Arri Alexa. So my apologies. The Arri Alexa came out in 2010,

[02:19:45] maybe a bit earlier. And then it was something called the Arri D21, which was the camera before the Arri Alexa. Alexa, could you talk to it? Alexa, load yourself. Alexa, turn on. So funny. Alexa, stop listening to me. And there's another one called the Amira. So they've got another one called the Amira, which is the documentary camera. And I was years ago working with a model called Amira. It's like, are you using the camera? The same name as me. It's quite funny. Right. I have a friend whose daughter's name. Yeah. Yeah. So Amira and Alexa, but yeah. Yeah.

[02:20:13] So I was just, I was just thinking when I came into the business as a trainee, um, and went to every major studio, uh, I specifically remember, and it happened at every major studio. As I was coming in, the studio system was, was gone, was falling apart where you had these gigantic camera departments where all the cameras and all the film and everything came out of that big sort of warehouse space. All the loading rooms

[02:20:39] where the film was reloaded, they would, they would have, um, either tractors or guys on bicycles that would go pick the film up from each soundstage and take it back to the loading room to be loaded. When I was coming in, all that was being dismantled for, in the favor of a rental truck. So you'd have a five ton camera truck, mostly usually from Panavision. You would prep all the cameras outside of the studio at Panavision,

[02:21:03] all the equipment, all the film, all the everything. And then the truck would be parked outside of the soundstage. And that's where you would load the film. So I'm working at Universal Studios as a trainee and we're dismantling, we're dismantling the camera department, including the old BNCs, um, which were the, you know, the, the early standard, uh, that had the pellicle, the way that they saw that, that they looked through

[02:21:29] the camera was a pellicle, which was a half mirrored, a half mirrored piece of glass, which is what, anyway, that's so hard to explain. I'm not sure I even understand it, but they also had a department of camera technicians where the cameras would go at the end of the night, where they would clean the pellicle, they would clean the movement, they would do all these things. And I remember, um, we went in there to meet some of the technicians that were there that were about to all lose their jobs. And there

[02:21:54] was only a few of them left and they all had a roll of toilet paper under their desks. And it was, I think Charmin, it was one of the, the brands, and that's what they used to clean the pellicles with. They had found that that was the softest thing that wouldn't scratch the half silver, um, the half silver glass mirror that was used in the old BNCs. That was before the spinning mirror, um, which became, you know, which became the standard so that you could see through the lens.

[02:22:21] Um, you know, anyway, not just like we were talking the other day about the reflex. Yeah. Parallax and reflex. So parallax is, um, we have a viewfinder that approximates what you're seeing whilst, um, reflexes where you actually see through the mirror. So you're kind of seeing what the camera sees just in case I'm unsure of what those two are. And so I learned, they taught me how to carry a camera on my shoulder. Um, when I was working

[02:22:45] at Universal Studios camera department, but the camera was an old BNC and which was a heavy old cast, basically almost like cast iron. It probably wasn't cast iron on a set of wooden tripod sticks, um, to learn the trick of where the balance point is. Um, you know, so that you can pick the camera up on your shoulder and walk across, you know, as I had to later across the, uh, Monument Valley

[02:23:10] for the return to Lonesome Dove. But, um, but so that, so, so I came in when camera departments were disappearing because there's this huge change in the industry. And then I go out as film is becoming obsolete. Um, okay, I'm going to cry now. So just a thought and you can cut all that out. No, no, no, no. Well, uh, well, is there anything else you want to add? Cause I think

[02:23:36] we'll, we'll wrap up and that was a, no, that was great. No, it was really good episode. So thank you boots for your time on the show. Really enjoyed chatting with you and I hope everybody enjoyed the, the interview. I thought it was very interesting and, uh, hopefully give us a new perspective on, on homicide from the, uh, yeah, from the camera department. Yeah. And thanks to boots for, um, really thinking ahead of time about what he wanted to talk about and being really prepared.

[02:24:01] So yeah, we did a really deep dive on everything and I think it'll be really entertaining. And for people that are not super technical, just hang with it because it's really interesting. One minor amusing note. Um, we cut all the references out, but boots had notes and notes and notes on paper with him and we, we cut all the noises out, but it was, it was, he was very well prepared. Bless him. So yeah. Thank you boots. Yeah. He did a great job. So next month is our one year anniversary of this podcast,

[02:24:29] which is an amazing milestone for us. And so we're going to create a special episode just to celebrate the one year anniversary. So please tune in for that next month. Right. Well, thank you very much everybody for listening. Don't forget to follow us on all the social media channels. We are on X blue sky Instagram, and we're just homicide pod. Oh, we're also on threads as well. We're on threads as well. So we're homicide pod on all the social media platforms. So, yeah, do follow us there and we will catch you on the next one. Take care. Yes. See you then.