American Cinematographer
October 2004


Sex Friends and Rock 'n' Roll Rivals

A Comedy of Eros
by Rachael K. Bosley

Baltimore housewife Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) is fed up. Her spineless husband, Vaughn (Chris Isaak), is whining about his "marital needs," and her extraordinary top-heavy daughter, Caprice (Selma Blair), also known as the local strip-club sensation "Ursula Udders," has been placed under house arrest after three convictions for indecent exposure. Everywhere she turns, Sylvia sees her respectable neighborhood of Harford Road becoming less so, and she is disgusted by the sexual boldness on display.

But after she sustains a mild concussion in an accident and is "revived" by sexual healer Ray Ray (Johnny Knoxville) things take a radical turn: Sylvia transforms into a sex addict and discovers she has plenty of peers in the town's netherworld. Their quest, says Ray Ray, is to "discover a brand-new sex act...a day of carnal rapture," and Sylvia is the long-awaited "12th Apostle" who will show them the way.

It's just another day in John Water's Baltimore, and the picture is A Dirty Shame. For director of photography Steve Gainer, ASC, the frenetic comedy posed a unique set of demands, many of which pertained to lighting more than a dozen key characters in practical locations that were good for the story, but seldom ideal for cinematography. On top of that, he recalls, "it was a 45-day shoot and a $15-million budget when I signed on, but by the time I landed in Baltimore, it was down to 30 days and $9 million - and I didn't even think 45 days would be enough." With a smile, he adds, "But we actually came in on time and under budget!

"This movie required more energy than any picture I've ever done simply because of the logistics," he continues. "There are so many characters running in so many directions and doing so many things at the same time. We were shooting in Baltimore in late autumn and the story calls for a lot of day exteriors, so with very few exceptions, all of the 'day interiors' were shot at night. And we had a fairly small crew, we had seven [grips] and seven [electricians], and on certain days we had a small rigging crew running ahead of us. That would be a huge crew on some movies, but when you have to light for 30 characters, it isn't."

The filmmakers formulated their strategy during four weeks of preproduction that involved Waters, Gainer, first AD Shelly Ziegler and script supervisor Christine Moore. Gainer says one of Ziegler's prep methods was so valuable, he plans to use it on future projects: "Vincent Peranio, our production designer, made scale models of every location, and then we used little people from O-gauge [model] train sets to block out every scene. Sometimes I even put my little DV camera down there and zoomed in so I could kind of frame up. This method enabled us to previsualize the scenes so thoroughly that once we arrived at a location, we almost never had to vary from what we'd set up - and on a movie with a 30-day schedule, any change in the way you're planning to shoot something is a killer.


It was like rehearsing with actors in the actual location, except that they didn't have to talk or pee, which was really nice!" he adds, laughing. "I have my own set of 'little people' now, and it's going to be my prep method from now on."

Despite the thorough prep, however, Gainer and Ziegler knew what they were up against when the producers insisted upon 12-hour days. "Shelley knew, as I did, that this picture would've been extremely difficult to pull off in 45 days, never mind 30," says the cinematographer. "So she and I went to the producers about two weeks before principal photography began and said that because of the locations and actor availability, several days were not going to be 12-hour days. Because we let them know that in advance, they were prepared for it, and overtime on those days wasn't a big issue. It goes to show how important communication is in this line of work."

Although multi-character, dialogue-heavy scenes add time to a shooting schedule, Gainer points out that Waters' method minimizes the time spent refining actors' work. "Most of the time, we were out of there after two takes. John feeds off of the actors to an extent, but by the time we get to the set he knows how he wants it to go. When an actor had a question, the answer was often, 'Do what's in the script.' We didn't divert from the script more than a couple of times."

"John really schooled me in comedy," he continues, noting that A Dirty Shame is the first comedy on his resume. "He stressed the points where there needed to be beats to hammer the jokes home. Some of that was in my subconscious because of seeing film comedies throughout my life, but you really do have to work at comedy to make it funny. And after you've been at it for 15 or 20 hours, the pulse still has to be just right!"

Gainer shot A Dirty Shame using Arri 535Bs and Cooke S4 prime lenses provided by local rental house Chesapeake Camera. He filmed the entire picture on Fuji Super-F 500T 8572, which he rated at ISO 250 "to give myself a bit of protection." He explains, "The Cooke S4s are about T2 wide open, and although other lenses are significantly faster, there's something about the combination of Fuji film and S4s that I really love, the image quality is just soft enough that I don't feel I need to use any filtration, except for a Polarizer now and then. I tend to avoid filtration, probably because of all the music videos I've shot, but with film stocks and lenses what they are today, a totally clean image can look harsh. The Fuji-and-S4 combination makes the image look like there's 1/8 Pro-Mist in front of the lens."

Gainer was permitted to bring one of his regular crewmembers to Baltimore, and he chose first AC Shereen Saleh. "I've worked with Shereen on my last three films," he says. "She's quiet - something all first ACs should strive to be - and she listens very closely. I can be over at the monitor discussing something with the director, and when I get back to the camera she's already put that lens on, which is wonderful. And her focus skills are unsurpassed; her ability to judge distance is absolutely eerie, and a great deal of that comes from the many years she spent working for [cinematographer] John Aronson on low-budget movies. The first AC is the least-thanked position in the world - if the image is sharp no one says anything, but if it's buzzed you get eaten alive."

One show-stopping scene in A Dirty Shame begins with Sylvia and Vaughn visiting Vaughn's mother in a retirement home, where the residents are enjoying a round of "The Hokey-Pokey." Sylvia and Vaughn join the circle, but then Sylvia, uncontrollably aroused, turns the innocent dance steps into a bump-and-grind that sends the residents fleeing in horror. Gainer shot much of the action from a dolly spinning around in the middle of the circle; he mounted the camera on an underslung Cartoni/Lamda two-axis Pan & Tilt Head and used a 10mm lens to maximize the moment. "John wanted to be able to go all the way around the room, and I suggested using a 10mm lens so we could see everything," he recalls. "The Cartoni/Lamda head allowed me to get [the camera] right at ground level, and because of the 360-degree floor-to-ceiling view, the lighting ended up being almost documentary-style. I swapped out the existing flourescents in the ceiling for color-correct tubes and mounted an Image 80 on the dolly to put some light on the actors' faces, and that's really all I could do. It doesn't look like we were spinning that fast because the lens was so wide, but we were flying."

That evening, Sylvia prepares to go out on the town by filching sexy lingerie from a neighbor's backyard clothesline. The Steadicam sequence required careful rehearsal because "on the day of the shoot, we lost the location we'd scouted and had to move to another set of yards," recalls Gainer. "I had to crosslight the action from about 100 feet away because some neighbors gave us permission to use their yards, but others didn't. The move begins with Sylvia coming over the fence, and then the camera closes in on her, she comes to the clothesline, we circle around her, she moves a few feet away, we circle back around her and then we go up some steps. So the camera had to cross her key light twice. Working out the move was a matter of placing Tracey the right distance from the light and rehearsing thoroughly. Tracey was great - it was about 30 degrees, and everything was wet because it had just rained - and our Steadicam operator, Jerry Holloway, was fantastic. He did it over and over again and was tight every time, and the 535 is about the heaviest camera you can put on a Steadicam."

Different lighting challenges were posed by the convenience store where Sylvia, Vaughn and Sylvia's mother, Big Ethel (Suzanne Shepherd), work. "That location had about 20 practical flourescents, and we added 15 or 20 to those to bring the stop up to T5.6," says Gainer. "I did that because there were a lot of daylight scenes that required the camera to look back at the front door, and there were all kinds of [sunlight] kicks hitting windshields and bumpers of cars parked close by. We couldn't control a lot of that, so I built up the stop inside to help out; I was often seeing a T11 or T16 outside, and even though it was a lot hotter than the T5.6 inside, [the difference] was still reasonable.

"At first I didn't gel the windows and doors with NDs. Instead, I thought I'd use a big double, a 20-by, to soften the image. But of course, as the sun moved, it ultimately hit the net, so halfway through the first day we put some NDs on the windows - lesson learned! Shelley was so prepared that we could shoot something else at a moment's notice while we fixed what was wrong.

"Some lighting techniques I'd used before didn't work on this show. For instance, I've advocated using large tungsten lights and color-correcting them for daylight because I've had flicker and cold-strike problems with HMIs. But we discovered in the first day's dailies that November light in Baltimore is far cooler than even tungsten units gelled Full Blue. We ended up gelling the lights Full Blue plus 1/4 Blue - 5/4 Blue. That brought our 24K tungstens down to about 10K, and I found myself wishing I had some 18K HMIs!"

After one day of 35mm dailies, the filmmakers were given DVD dailies which were "horrible, worse than VHS!" Gainer says emphatically. They do the transfer at a low bit rate or variable bit rate so they can rush them out, and the image is horribly pixelated. It's almost impossible to judge anything by them. If you're stuck with digital dailies, MiniDV is far better."

At press time, Gainer was color-timing A Dirty Shame at Deluxe Laboratory, where he was planning to use Fuji F-CI 8502 for the IP and IN and Fuji F-CP 3510 for release prints. Although New Line/Fine Line mandates Fuji negatives and release prints, Gainer notes that "for whatever reason, the labs are extremely reluctant to use Fuji intermediate stocks, even if you have a Fuji neg and are going to a Fuji print. But I've pushed them to do it - I tested every combination that existed when I worked at Paramount's lab, and I knew it wasn't impossible. The result looks spectacular."

Gainer can't say whether another comedy is on the horizon, but he says working with Waters is an experience he would love to repeat. "John is one of a kind. He plays a bit of a character, and he is that character in some ways, but there's a great deal more depth to the well than is visible from the surface. He's very well versed in photography and art, and he knows films through and through. Even during the shoot, he'd bop out on weekends to see movies. I was either in meetings or in a coma, and he was out at the movies. That's a filmmaker.

A Dirty Shame photos by James Bridges, courtesy of Fine Line Features.
Gainer photo at bottom of page by Richard Crudo, ASC.


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