Aces of the Camera — Tony Gaudio (1942) 🇺🇸
Aces of the Camera XV: Tony Gaudio, A.S.C.
by Walter Blanchard
Thirty years ago the Biograph Company — then America’s foremost producing organization — sent a troupe of its best actors, directors and technicians out to California, where they could keep on making movies outdoors throughout the sunny California winter. Somewhere along their route west — Albuquerque, I think it was — these movie-making tourists lined themselves up along the station platform and had their picture taken.
Prints of that old picture still exist. In them, you can recognize such early-day favorites as the Gish sisters, Henry B. Walthall, and others. And standing importantly in the middle of the group is a distinguished-looking gentleman with a white pique vest and a pair of truly impressive, flowing black moustaches. A most important member of the troupe he was, too, for as the captions will tell you, he was Gaetano Gaudio, Biograph’s ace cameraman, with whom rested the responsibility of capturing on celluloid the results of the forthcoming winter’s work.
That was thirty years ago. But today, if you should visit the set at Warner Bros, where Ann Sheridan and Dennis Morgan are making “Shadow of Their Wings,” you would find that the Director of Photography is this same “Tony” Gaudio, A.S.C, who now, as then, is rated as one of the industry’s greatest cinematographers. He’s one of the best known and best loved figures in the industry. He has to his credit over 1,000 successfully photographed productions, ranging from the split-reel 500-foot “features” of the early days to modern multi-reel super-epics like “Anthony Adverse,” with which not so long ago he won the Academy Award.
To him, that backlog of experience is one of the greatest assets any cinematographer can have. “Every day that you’re shooting pictures,” he says, “you run into new problems. But if you’ve been in the business a long time, and made lots of pictures, you’ll find that most of these problems are only new on the surface. When you get down inside — to the essentials — you’ll usually find there’s at least a family resemblance to some problem you met and licked in a picture years ago.
“But don’t get it wrong: I don’t mean that if you come up against a problem in a modern picture you should try to solve it by doing exactly what you did ten or twenty years ago. Too many things have changed since then — and the cinematographer, just like anybody else, has got to be in step with the times. I do mean, though, that you’ll do your job more efficiently if you can look back into your memory and find that resemblance. You know what you did then: now, to meet a similar situation, you take the basic idea of what you did then, and dress it up in modern clothes so that it works out well with modem materials and methods, and especially with modern ideas. That way, you take a short-cut that saves you trouble, and saves the company a lot of time and expense.
“Sometimes, when a cinematographer brings one of those old ideas up-to-date, they can hit modern audiences with all the force of a new idea. That’s what happened, I think, with Gregg Toland’s ‘pan-focus.’ A lot of us had for some years been slowly working away from the heavily diffused and rather artificially-lighted effects that used to be the style a dozen or so years ago, and trying to find something more realistic and modern. In “Citizen Kane” Gregg had a picture that practically dared everyone concerned to be daring and break away from tradition. So Gregg turned to some basic principles that were almost as old as photography itself, and modified them to work with modern materials and to be in line with modern ideas. The result was something that seemed radically new to a lot of people.
“But it isn’t only in big, spectacular things like that that experience pays. It is valuable every day in all sorts of little, routine details, too. For example, suppose the studio asks me to make a test of some new girl they’ve signed. Maybe today’s audiences will look at her first according to how she resembles — or doesn’t resemble — today’s favorites like Bette Davis, or Ann Sheridan or Olivia De Havilland. If I tried to photograph her with that sort of thought in mind, I’d probably try to make her look like a pale carbon copy of one of those girls. Instead, I try to look at her for herself, and analyze her features. Maybe I see that she’s got some features that resemble those of somebody I photographed years ago. If it’s a good feature, I know how I brought it out before; if it’s a bad feature, I know how I subdued it. I do something similar this time, and then maybe instead of having an uninteresting imitation Bette Davis, the industry has a new star with a personality in her own right.”
Tony Gaudio has always been one of the most consistently progressive members of the camera profession. One of the very earliest members of the A.S.C., and the Society’s fourth President, he has taken an active part in all of that organization’s technical researches, such as those which smoothed the introduction of panchromatic film, Mazda lighting and modern make-up. And he has always found time to work out private ideas for the advancement of cinematography, as well.
One of those inventions is in daily use today any time anyone looks through the focusing microscope of a Mitchell camera, for Tony invented it. Twenty years ago, when you focused a professional camera you viewed your image either on the film itself or on a removable ground-glass focusing screen. In either event, if you had a good camera, you probably viewed this image through a simple, low-powered magnifying-glass, which still gave you an image which was upside-down and turned around left for right as well.
But Tony thought there ought to be a better way of lining up a shot. How much easier it would be, he felt, if you could see your image right side up and laterally correct, and also rather highly magnified! What’s more, he felt that a system of lenses could be worked out which would do it. He kept after the idea, working in close collaboration with the Mitchell engineers and with the Bausch & Lomb opticians. Finally, after many months of experimentation, a focusing optical system of that type was actually perfected. For the first time in the history of cinematography, one could look into a camera and see — magnified some 10 diameters — the actual image cast by his lens, right-side-up and laterally correct. By a turn of a small control, the vital center-area of the image could be scanned, with the magnification almost doubled. Universally employed today, this system was a revolutionary refinement in cinematography when it was introduced.
Gaudio was also among the first cinematographers to experiment successfully with the idea of photographing exterior night-scenes in the daytime, with filters. In the face of an almost universal chorus of “it can’t be done,” he tried it on an important production — one of many he filmed with Norma Talmadge — and not only succeeded, but saved his producer some $25,000 over the cost of actual night shooting!
More recently, he has pioneered such modern techniques as the use of “Dinky Inkies,” and “precision lighting,” using spotlights almost to the exclusion of floodlighting units. He devised one of the most practical systems known for testing character make-ups. He was one of the first cinematographers to experiment with the use of fluorescent lamps for lighting close-ups.
One sometimes hears people both within and outside the industry wonder if men like Gaudio, who have been so many years at the peak of their profession, don’t sometimes tend to get into a rut, since success has removed the incentive which spurred them on their upward climb. Tony Gaudio can answer that, in his own case, at least.
“Not so many years ago,” he tells you, “Tony Gaudio was the big-shot cameraman. They gave him big pictures like “Hell’s Angels.” Then the word got around that Tony Gaudio’s eyes had gone back on him — and right away, Tony Gaudio became an ex-big-shot cameraman. For two years, no one in Hollywood would give him a job. Then one day Johnny Arnold, out at MGM, gave him a picture, and right after that, Warner Brothers said they’d try him on one. And ever since then, every time I start a picture I have a little talk with myself. ‘Tony,’ I tell myself, ‘in this business they say a man’s no better than his last picture. You go in there and make this one the best picture Tony Gaudio ever photographed! You show them whether Tony Gaudio is good or not!’”
And Tony Gaudio has “showed them” with remarkable consistency. One of those pictures — “Anthony Adverse” — brought him an Academy Award for the year’s best cinematography. Others —like “Juarez,” “Robin Hood,” and “The Letter,” — have year after year been nominees and strong contenders for the “Oscars” in both black-and-white and color. Even on program-picture assignments, he invests a picture with an indefinable touch that makes one feel he’s looking at something a bit better than any program film has any right to be. No matter what the assignment. it isn’t in Gaudio’s make-up to “walk through” the photographing of a single scene.
Which is probably why, after nearly forty years of photography, and over a thousand pictures, the credit “Director of Photography, Tony Gaudio, A.S.C.,” is a pretty certain guarantee to any camera-minded moviegoer that what he’s about to see will be photographically outstanding.
End.
[a to d]
—
see also entries of the Aces of the Camera series
Collection: American Cinematographer March 1942