Aces of the Camera — George J. Folsey (1942) 🇺🇸
Aces of the Camera XVII: George J. Folsey, A.S.C.
by Walter Blanchard
George J. Folsey, A.S.C., is the perfect embodiment of the old axiom that “cinematographers are born, not made.” So far as he can recollect, not one of his family had ever had any inclination toward photography, or even so much as owned a dollar “Brownie.” He, himself, had never had any photographic leanings. But when, at the age of fourteen, he had his first glimpse of the details of a studio cinematographer’s daily work, something clicked inside him and said “That’s it!” Today, he is acknowledged as one of the industry’s foremost specialists in glamor cinematography; at a time when the pressure of production speed-ups tends greatly toward standardized camerawork and lighting, he is one of the few who manages to retain a strongly distinctive style. You can walk in on the middle of any one of his pictures and before three scenes have flashed across the scene, say to yourself with confidence, “George Folsey must have photographed this.”
Looking back at things, George Folsey finds a good deal of humor in the way he started into the business. “Believe it or not,” he says, “I’d been working in the studio for fully half a day before I knew what kind of a business I was in! That sounds as though I was the original Joe Dope, but it really wasn’t quite as bad as all that.
“Here’s how it happened. I’d been working as an office-boy for a New York magazine publishing firm, but somehow the work didn’t suit me. I wasn’t afraid of hard work — but nothing about the publishing business managed to capture my imagination. Finally one morning I just decided there wasn’t any future for me in that work. So I quit. Just like that.
“I went back to the Y. M. C. A. Bureau through which I had gotten the job, and told them I didn’t like it, that they should send me out on something else. They dug into their files and told me they’d just had a call for an office-boy from the Lasky Feature Play Company. That didn’t mean anything to me, but it sounded like a job, so off I went to the address they gave me.
“When I reached the place, the chap in charge of the office insisted that even though it was afternoon, I get to work right then, rather than start in the morning. I didn’t particularly want to, but finally I was persuaded. I remember it was one of those hot, sleepy New York summer afternoons, and I didn’t have very much to do. I hadn’t the slightest idea about what my new employers did, and nothing happened to enlighten me.
“The next morning I reported for work as scheduled. A few minutes later, I almost fell out of my chair: through the door and past me into the dark recesses of the building walked Marguerite Clarke! A minute or so later, in came Carlyle Blackwell — Mary Pickford — Louise Huff — John Barrymore — Harold Lockwood — all the movie stars I’d admired at the neighborhood nickelodeon! And I discovered they actually worked there —! I decided I was going to like that job — and hold it no matter what!
“In this, I met some opposition from the family. Not that they disapproved particularly of the movies, but the job paid two dollars a week less than my previous one, and they couldn’t see any future in it.
“But I stuck. The more I saw of the picture business, the more I wanted to be a part of it. There was such infinite variety to everything about it — even for me, a lowly, fourteen-year-old office-boy. One of my most frequent tasks was to go out at noon-time and bring in sandwiches for Jesse Lasky’s lunch — not to mention many a cocktail for John Barrymore. At other times, I’d have to take messages in to people on the stage. What a thrill that was — to prowl around that huge, echoing loft where in one corner I might] find a company shooting a Western, in another, a troupe doing a ‘society drama,’ and in another, still another group filming a romantic costume drama — all on one stage.
“Many’s the time when a harassed assistant director would rush out into the office and press me into service when some troupe inside suddenly needed a kid to play an office-boy, a bell-hop, an elevator-boy or maybe just a fresh kid. And I still remember how grown-up I felt when one afternoon they told me off to take a taxi and escort Louise Huff — one of the reigning lovelies of 1914 — to her Long Island home!
“I so earnestly wanted to make good with the Lasky Company that I tried to learn everything possible about what I was doing. I won’t say I literally followed the example of the Admiralty Lord in ‘Pinafore,’ and ‘cleaned the windows and swept the floor, and polished up the handle of the big front door’ — but I came as close to it as possible. I learned how to run the elevator (as well as errands!), to operate the switchboard, and everything else I could think of to make myself indispensable.
“Finally there came an opportunity to go permanently out on the set as assistant to one of the cameramen. Assistant cameramen were a very new luxury in those pioneer days. Originally, the cameraman had to do all the work; but one day one of the Lasky ‘aces’ had an accident, and couldn’t carry his camera. So he asked for — and got — an assistant. Soon, all the others demanded assistants, too, on the grounds that if he had one, they deserved one, too.
“Anyway, there I was, a full-fledged assistant cameraman. It was my first introduction to photography, and somehow I took to it instinctively. I’d hate to say how may nights I stayed at the studio helping my boss — or any other cameraman who happened to be working late — shoot titles, develop stills, make prints, check and repair cameras, and so on. I started making pictures on my own hook, too; bought a big 4x5 plate camera, and photographed everything I could think of — landscapes, portraits, still-lifes, and everything else — developing and printing my own pictures, and bringing the results to the various cameramen with whom I might be working for criticism.
“Oddly enough, that picture-making was the first thing that gave me any real standing in my own family. Up to then, I was just a kid brother, and treated as a sort of necessary evil. I couldn’t do anything in particular; I wasn’t particularly athletic (I was rather bookish, instead) so I wasn’t particularly good at games, and I was both too young and too busy to have many social graces. But the fact that I could take good pictures (at least what seemed good ones then!) set me apart as someone who could really do something distinctive. And what a mystery I made of my work in the darkroom to my long-suffering family and friends!
“Anyway, I became a really good assistant cameraman. At least, for 1915 I was a good assistant: when I look at the intricate job my assistant has today, making intricate follow-focus shots and being wholly responsible for the focus, making out complicated camera-reports, and maintaining one of today’s much more complicated cameras, I’m not so sure that the assistant cameraman I was back in 1915 could cut the mustard on a 1942 set! Yet we had have one problem the average modern assistant doesn’t have ta consider: we often had to keep magazines containing film upon which we were making intricate multiple-exposure shots, with ten or a dozen precisely-matched takes on a single strip of negative, segregated until the last take was shot. I couldn’t have been too bad, for I assisted some of the best men in the industry, including Arthur Miller, A.S.C., Al Liguori, and half-a-dozen other men whose names — tops then — are now forgotten.
“Finally, after about four years as an assistant, I was promoted to the then new position of second cameraman.
“I lasted less than two weeks on that job!
“The First Cameraman on that picture was a lean, cadaverous Frenchman, with the most sorrowful face I have ever seen. In comparison to him, John Carradine would look fat and well fed. He always went about enveloped in a long, flopping overcoat and an equally amazing temperament. Suddenly, right in the middle of the picture, he decided that he was going to go back to France immediately — and raise violets!
“There was the picture, less than half finished, and minus a First Cameraman. Trustingly, they came to me and asked if I thought I could finish it! With the confidence of a brash eighteen-year-old I said yes — and stepped into the most difficult assignment I have ever had.
“For it wasn’t just an ordinary picture. The star, Alice Brady, played a dual role — and a difficult one. She not only had to talk to herself in the two characterizations, but to walk in all around herself, shake hands with herself, and even pin jewelry on herself. Today’s great standbys — process photography and optical printing — weren’t even invented yet, so I had to do the whole thing in the camera.
“Probably because I didn’t know any better, I worked out a comparatively simple method of doing these scenes. Instead of using elaborate mattes, I used lighting: I did many of the takes on a set completely upholstered in black velvet, and kept this from photographing by simply keeping all light away from it, and concentrated solely on my actors. Using this for some takes, and an identical, normal set for the others, I managed to get what the script called for.
“For the rest, I guess I was lucky. I’d learned pretty well what was then known about photographing sets and people — and I was particularly in luck with my star, for Miss Brady was in love, and I don’t think anyone could have made her photograph badly, she was so radiantly happy. At any rate, she was pleased with what I did, and so were the director and producer. I was a full-fledged First Cameraman from that day on.
“Since then, I’ve carried on, trying all the time to learn as much as I could from every source possible. One thing, for instance, has helped me in particular: the study of the technique of the great masters of painting. In motion pictures, you’re working in a different medium, of course; you can call it an art, or not, as you prefer, but it’s still visual storytelling, with the great addition of visual motion, both of viewpoint and of action. Yet you can still learn immensely by studying the lightings and compositions of the various great names of painting. Most of them, too, were trying to tell stories visually; and they had the time and the patience to analyze what they were doing more closely than most of us do today.
“As an example, take the picture I’m doing now. (We began it as ‘Tulip Time,’ but I think the present title is ‘Seven Sisters.’) It’s a Dutch story, about a family of seven girls. With the locale and atmosphere of Holland to portray, I naturally turned for inspiration to a Dutch painter — Vermeer. But only for a key to my visual treatment; slavishly copying his paintings would be wrong, for he dealt with a different period, and had a different story to tell than I.
Yet his work could — and did — guide me in my attempts to get over the visual impression of the Dutch scene.
“But don’t jump to the conclusion that I feel I’ve completely hit the mark I was aiming for in working this way. I haven’t; maybe I’ve peppered it around the outer edges here and there, but in this picture — as in most others — I’m painfully conscious how far short I fall of the goal I’m aiming at. If one out of every thousand people who see the picture can recognize even a trace of the Vermeer influence, I’ll be happy — and surprised.
“I suppose that is an inherent weak point in the way we all have to make pictures today; we have to ‘be commercial,’ with all the accent on speed that this implies. In addition, making movies is never a one-man job, but an intensely collective one, with innumerable people on and off’ the set injecting their own ideas, personalities and temperaments into every scene. It’s all but impossible to turn out really perfect creative, artistic work in a Times Square atmosphere with eight or ten people badgering you with sixteen or twenty loud-voiced hints, suggestions and demands at every turn of the camera. All the really great examples of cinematography, direction and acting have resulted from a rare and intangible combination of story, personalities and downright inspiration that somehow transforms the troupe momentarily from a mere group of individuals into a completely cooperative unit, working like one man to realize something that can only be defined as an inspirational ideal.
“As far as cinematography goes, I think it is a prime essential that the cinematographer approach his work in a spirit of complete honesty. If you like a thing, say so; if you don’t, be equally frank about saying no. In the same way, if you can do something, don’t hesitate to say so — and don’t be any more hesitant to admit you can’t do it if you feel you can’t. As an example, if you are assigned to photograph a star, and find you can’t do as good a job of bringing out that star’s beauty or personality as some other cinematographer, for heaven’s sake, say so! If you try to carry out the assignment regardless, by optimism or brute force, everyone’s bound to suffer: your star’s appearance and the picture will suffer from inferior presentation — and you’ll suffer, too, because you turn out what other folks, at least, will regard as inferior work. Whereas if you have the courage to step aside and admit somebody else can do that particular job better than you can, everybody will benefit: the star will look better, the picture will probably be better, and your associates will think the better of you because you’ve had the guts to be on the level about your own work.
“Many amateurs have asked me how to get glamorous lighting-effects in their own home movies. To my mind, it’s just a matter of applying common-sense, spiced with a bit of artistic feeling, to the problem of lighting.
“In a close shot of a person — man or woman — the first step is the key-light. Most amateurs don’t diffuse their lighting enough; and a well-diffused key-light (which gives the effect of soft light coming from a source of large physical dimensions) nearly always gives the most flattering effect.
“Move this light around your subject, moving it from side to side and up and down until you find the angle from which it gives the most appealing result. That’s the place for your key-light. The rest of the lighting — filler-light to relieve the shadows, ‘kickers’ to produce interesting little highlight accents on hair, eyes, and so on — will just naturally fall into place once you’ve found the right key-light treatment.
“Don’t forget the use of shadows. You can mask off part of the key-light to produce interesting shadows on the subject’s face, using the highlight to accentuate the best features, and soft shadows to subordinate other features. Decorative shadow-patterns on the backwall are just as important; but they must be perfectly coordinated with the lighting on the subject, so that the whole effect of the lighting is believable. Above all, remember to keep all the lighting — highlights and shadows alike — soft. If you analyze any glamor close-up on the professional screen, you’ll see that half the secret, at least, is maintaining a flattering softness throughout the lighting, no matter how much or how little optical diffusion may be used on the camera.”
End.
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Collection: American Cinematographer April 1942
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see other entries of the Aces of the Camera series