La
Prima Café on Broadway in Providence is a small place
with big windows. Light from the outside changes the
inside forms of chairs, tables, faces, and paintings
on the walls just as the jazz which the owner, Phil,
plays changes one’s inner soundtrack, the context of
what one sees.
I
am late for my appointment but earlier than Brian
Heller, foremost among the names of cinematographers
and Directors of Photography s in New England. He
has been around for a long time and enjoys a
reputation as a “great guy to work with.” His
credits include over one hundred films, the most
recent film of the Farrelly Brothers, FEVER PITCH as
well as ASSASSINATION TANGO, ERASER, SIGNS, and, those
forgotten, but amazing documentaries and films about
and by Trinity Repertory Theater filmed during the
“controversial years” of the 1960’s with
avatar director, Adrian Hall. Brian is also famous for
his aerial photography and hanging out of helicopters.
Here
he is, walking through the glass door. I haven’t
seen him in years. He looks around. He swivels and
faces me. The handshake. Gentle, a bit ursine.
“It’s
been a long time,” I say.
“Yes,
it has.”
I
find a favorite table with my back to the large window
(not typical, for an Italian from Providence) and he
sits facing me. Rather, he doesn’t face me. He
looks out the big window, as if my face is a diagonal.
“I’m
out of chicken,” Phil says. “We had a rush
today.”
“Then,
I’ll have a salad, with plop of eggplant and one
meatball,” I say.
“I’ll
try the Carbonara,” Brian says.
The
light behind me is having a field day with Brian’s
face, friendly and Santa-like, circled by a white-blue
coma of hair. With a solid shoulders and beard, he
looks like a warrior monk right out of the Crusades.
But it is his eyes which strike me: two biopsies of
sky, stolen blue.
We
talk about old times, about “Leo’s” bar where we
artistic types spent our grants and hard earned money
and for the next hour I must ask him about fifty
times, “Do you know so and so?” or, “Do you
remember?” and, not to my surprise, he does.
I
tell him that I just got back from Turkey and Greece.
“On
Delos,” I say, “the light was amazing, as if the
sky grazed the top of my head.”
“I
know exactly what you mean,” he says. “After you
see it, you know the meaning of Mediterranean blue. In
fact, I did some work for the high speed ferries lines
operating from the Piraeus to the Aegean islands.
They're just a bigger jet-ski. But I know what you
mean about the light.”
He
looks out the window.
Heller
means “brighter” in German, I think.
“So,
how did you get started?” I ask, not knowing how to
begin and the ball begins to roll, gently from
question to answer.
He
tells me how he got started in film when in the Air
Force as an assistant camera man where he got on-the
job training. It was during the Viet Nam War and he
decided that he was not going to wait to be drafted
into the army and enlisted instead. He was born in New
York City, right in Manhattan...
“How
did you end up in Providence?” I ask.
“I
followed my wife here. She was at Brown. That was
thirty years ago.”
In
the no-man’s land between ordering and the arrival
of our dishes, I ask, “So, do you think that with
all of these films being shot here, the
“Brotherhood” series, the upcoming film about
Cianci, this Hollywood coming to Providence, is it
really going to change things?”
“It’s
too early to tell,” he says. “What I’ve
noticed with these situations is that it’s not the
incentives which attract filmmakers to a place, but
the penalties which prevent them from coming. If there
are no financial penalties, that makes a difference.
Take New York City, for instance. It’s more
expensive to shoot in than LA. Space, the cost of
practically everything and parking is tough. In LA,
there are eighteen lanes on a highway, the weather’s
perfect and everyone understands what goes into a
film. No one is going to complain because they’ve
lost their favorite parking spot for an afternoon so a
crew can shoot.”
“Yes,
I agree. Steve Feinberg, Commissioner for Film and
Television is doing a great job fanning the flame,”
I say, “but the spunk was already there…”
The
plates hover, and then descend onto the table. Time to
eat. From now on, words will have to follow the
lead of chewing and swallowing
I
didn’t know it before we sat down that Brian is one
of the owners of Boston Camera, a camera rental
company, as well as a Director of Photography. He has
worked on over a hundred films, fifty percent for
which he has done aerial work, no doubt thanks to his
time in the Air Force, including 2nd unit work in Mel
Gibson’s film, SIGNS. Some of the work is scary, as
the chase scene in ERASER.
“There
must have been a hundred stunt cars involved in this
scene on FDR drive, in Manhattan, right under the
Brooklyn Bridge. Fifty in front of the point car and
fifty behind. I need a pad…”
He
takes my pad and begins to draw a diagram.
“The
police cars behind us slowed down traffic, and there
wasn’t too much, at three in the morning. Each car
was numbered and the director had the sequence
choreographed so cars were running between the chase
cars in a pattern, I was in the camera car and just
started shooting, holding on for dear life.”
 |
|
Brian
Heller shooting for FEVER PITCH at the Red Sox
Victory Parade and Celebration in Boston and at
Fenway Park upon winning the World Series of
Baseball . Some of Heller’s footage was used
for the end credits in the movie.
Photos by Jan Burgess. |
The
food is great. Phil, the owner, should be somebody’s
mother. But it’s time for another journalistic
moment.
I
have to ask this. “Excuse me. What is your favorite
film made in the past ten years?”
He
puts down his fork and looks straight at me.
“MILLION
DOLLAR BABY,” he says. “GLADIATOR was a
favorite.”
“Of
course, you, having grown up during the 50’s would
know one of my favorite films, DEMETRIUS AND THE
GLADIATORS.”
“Of
course, on the Million Dollar Movie.”
“With
Jay Robinson as Caligula, sick, twisted piece of
evil...”
“Exactly.”
“Do
you like Fellini?” I ask.
“Of
course. You know, when my wife and I went to Rome for
the first time, I understood Fellini right away. On
every street corner, every place I looked, I saw a
shot right out of one of his movies. He was human; he
had a light touch…”
“Yes,
he was serious about absurdity …”
“And
it’s all around, in Italy. I’ll tell you one thing
that happened that takes the cake. My wife and I were
on a bus in Rome and all of a sudden we hit this guy
on a motorbike. The bus driver pulls over and tells
everybody to stay seated and shuts the door to the bus
and locks it. I don’t know if that was protocol, but
the next thing you know another bus pulls over and our
driver starts talking to that driver but nobody pays
attention to the poor guy in the street. Then another
bus pulls over and that driver gets out. By that time,
everybody on our bus starts complaining because it’s
getting hot, but our driver starts yelling at us to be
quiet and the guy in the street finally gets up all by
himself and staggers away. You had to be there.”
I
don’t get the chance to ask him about his experience
as the eye of the director, an external, “visual
mechanism ” compared to the “inner vision” of
the director, as did the Graeae sisters of
mythology who had to pass and share one eye among them
to see. The DP is that eye, I would have said, but we
talk instead about the state of literature and art
and I blurt out how my
wife always says that the only jolting advance in
the arts in the past half century was popular
music in the 1960’s, Hendrix, the Doors,
“You
might be right,” he says. “I have a friend of mine
who bemoans the decline of American culture. No, I
say, it’s the decline of the Modern American Novel
you’re mourning, with its self-centered, ‘it’s
all about me’ attitude. I hate that…”
Our
plates are empty. Coffee time. Heller is serious about
a cup of coffee.
The
light changes. We switch to the present state of
affairs, more appropriate to the darker image of
coffee.
“You
know,” he says, “the technology in the film
business is changing so rapidly, with video
technology, HD, whatever medium that will be invented,
but it’s all the same. It’s about what works
visually, telling, advancing the story. You know the
easiest thing in the world is to take a beautiful
scene and just stay on it, to stop the story in its
tracks, as an actor would by stealing a scene. For
instance, the film, THE CRUCIBLE. There were too many
big name actors, Daniel Day Lewis, Wynona Ryder. It
ruined what was so simple, so powerful. It should have
been more anonymous. Let the story tell itself. The
play itself is a brilliant stage play…”
During
the course of our meeting, he brings up Trinity
Repertory Theater and the work he did there with its
Director, Adrian Hall, whose productions rattled the
traditional box of set design, interpretation, and
energy into a shocking birth of vision during the
1960’s. He is passionate about it, recognizing those
years and experience as once-in-a-lifetime
opportunities, as his trip to India as camera man when
he followed the troupe there to make a documentary
about them.
“Every
American should go there, once,” he says, “and
when they get back home, they will kiss the ground
they’re on. I was struck by the sea of
humanity…
Working
with Adrian was exceptional. Those days, those actors.
Adrian could get things out of those actors that they
didn’t realize they even had. A lot of actors who
have gone through Trinity have been fairly successful,
maybe not number one, but that’s an accident of
birth. You know, sometimes it’s difficult to go to
that theater now. The place is too full of ghosts.”
“Ghosts?”
“Oh,
yes. Davey Jones. Ed Hall. Richard Kneeland. Richard
Cavanaugh, amazing people, amazing actors, all
gone…”
I
know what he is talking about. I saw those
performances many years ago. They changed your
molecules forever. But I keep my mouth shut about the
things I’m thinking. How watered down everything
seems to be…
“What
is your take on the state of movies today?” I ask.
“I
have to give you the standard answer: the decisions on
movies today are made by committee, by accountants, by
market analysts, just as politics are determined by
polling. Instead of making more of the same films,
those guys should concentrate on giving us, the
viewer, an experience which we normally wouldn’t
have. But the market is directed to the lowest common
denominator, 15 year old boys. And that doesn’t
appeal to me. The solution is to make films smaller,
better. Right now, the next one is just like the last
one. The PASSION, however, now, that was different and
that’s giving Hollywood a lot to think about…”
Now,
I’m self conscious. Somebody whacked my jukebox.
“Oh,”
I say. “I’m not here to talk about film. I’m
here to talk about you…”
“Oh,”
he says, and he folds his hands as the needle gets put
back on that inner record going around.’
The
light, like our mood, changes in the glass box we are
in. Brian, changes, too. He speaks to me now face to
face with an intensity of a scholar and by my
questioning, I learn that he has a CV as thick as an
anvil, having majored in Theater and English, how
Henry James is his favorite author in English, how he
has contempt for modern American writers who are
preciously self-absorbed writing about themselves and
that James never wrote about himself the way they do,
about how tired he is of Woody Allen and his neurotic,
self-absorption…
“I
agree,” I jump in. “You know, I would like to do a
re-make of MIDNIGHT EXPRESS with him as the American
in a Turkish prison…”
“I’ll
have another coffee.”
That’s
what comes through about the guy in front of me, a
solid sincerity and lack of anything which smacks of
hot air and Léger
de bouche so familiar with Hollywood. After all,
he is a local to Providence, having been here thirty
years, a small pool of a place where if one pees in
it, everybody will know and one will have to either
get out and find some other pool, or go to a big city
where there’s a bigger pool to pee in. Hollywood,
for example.
I
ask, “With all of these independent films you’re
working on, haven’t you ever wanted to do one
yourself? Doing what you do, is like being the bass
player of a band. Haven’t you ever wanted to play
lead guitar.”
He
looks long and hard at me as if about to play a
pantomime riff.
“Maybe
once,” he says, but not now. Making an independent
film has to be one of the most difficult things you
can do in your life, as difficult as running for
political office. Because it’s getting other people
to do things for you and that can be extremely
difficult. I remember one film I did. It was this
guy’s first film and he worked hard on it. We were
just about to shoot it here, in Rhode Island, when
September 11th happened. No one could travel. No one
could get in or out of the state and this guy was in a
bad way. We shot it anyway. To date the film has won
many awards.”
I
tell him how I just recently aborted a film I was
about to produce. How I realized, almost at the
last minute, that the person I was about to hire was
like a cab driver who didn’t really know how to
drive, and that I would be stuck in the back seat with
the meter running, paying for the trip anyway, as that
person erred and was taking me to places where I
didn’t want to go, certainly not to my destination,
that I would be paying for that running meter all
that time…”
“Good
analogy,” he says. “How did you find out?”
“I
watched this person eat. How one eats tells
wonders.”
“That’s
because you’re a writer. You’re always observing,
always analyzing.”
“But
you do, too, I’ve been watching you looking out the
window a lot as we are sitting here…”
He
looks at me and says as easy as pitching a card,
“But
I’m just looking at a picture. I’m not analyzing.
You would be analyzing.”
The
light changes again. It’s getting a bit cloudy
outside.
“What
time is it?” I ask.
“Jesus,
it’s five to five!”
I’m
surprised, too, at the three hours that have gone by
as we hurriedly say good bye and he disappears through
the glass door, beyond the glass window through which
he has been watching the moving pictures for the past
three hours.
Vin
Fraioli, born in Providence, is an author of numerous
articles and the book, “Change of View.” He still
lives in Rhode Island with his wife and two kids when
not traveling around the world giving lectures and
concerts as a classical guitarist. He is also a
sometimes actor.
