TVlinks

Last night was another night of Academy Awards. Red Carpet dreams and Filmic Fantasies. For me it was the 43rd consecutive year I have not won an Oscar. I guess my infant years should not be counted, but I was here, so they count.

It’s funny how things don’t seem to matter unless there are accolades, awards and trophies.

Take The Wizard of Oz for instance. (This is my favorite childhood movie). My favorite character is the Wizard himself.  Do you know his name? I mean his real name. Probably not. He actually played five different characters in The Wizard of Oz, one of the most popular movies in cinema history, yet few know his identity.

Now that’s Magic.

He won no Oscars, but I’ll always remember his words;

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

This has been a mantra for all the workers behind the camera. Those of us who toil behind the scenes,  just off screen, just beyond the edge of the TV. Just beyond the reach of Fame.

Thank goodness.

I can’t imagine having paparazzi hiding in the bushes, waiting to take a picture of me, hoping to make thousands if my underwear is askew. Or the gossip pages endlessly surmising if my marriage is caving in, if my spouse and I are cheating, until we finally do because so many assume it’s true.

No Fame, please. Toto, stay away from the curtain. 

One of my shots, which was the opening shot for Sesame Street for about ten years was estimated to have been seen a billion times across ninety countries. A couple years ago, I had a shot in a Super Bowl commercial. I’m told that that’s another billion or so. My work plays endlessly on cable, day and night, yet my incognito has remained intact.  Even in my family pictures, I only show up in about one out of a hundred images (because I’m usually the cameraman at home, too).

The only image I’m in that has gotten much notice is the one at the top of this page. Luckily there’s other people in the shot, so maybe no one will notice me.

I thought my obscurity was resilient, like an old friend that had my back.  I could walk the streets unnoticed. Go grocery shopping, spend time with the famlily at the beach, all in full public view. But just when my assumption was that my Oscar-less state would afford me a degree of unfame, it hit me. Searching on some movie trivia after the Academy Awards, I stumbled upon myself. Someone had entered me into the IMDB.

The IMDB!

Must I now check the bushes for paparazzi each night, before retiring? Are there Mamarazzi’s to go with the Paparazzi’s? Oh, my. Who should I call to avoid the fickle finger of Fame?

Why Francis Wupperman, of course!

Who?

Ah, the Magic… 

I love Opposites. And I hate them too.

What are Opposites? I would define Opposites as two contrary conditions that co-exist simultaneously. Hot and cold, for instance. You can’t have one without the other, as they are relative, and by their differences, they define each other.

If cold didn’t exist, we wouldn’t know that hot is Hot. Big and small, light and dark, good and evil…all Opposites.

And Opposites are always at War.

Heat warms cold, cold cools heat.

Water wets dry, dry evaporates wetness.

You get the picture…

So it should not be surprising that the film and television business is under constant strain from the War of Opposites. I first started noticing this in the late 1980’s. The resolution and clarity of motion picture filmstocks was improving dramatically. New and better cameras, lenses and lighting systems were being introduced. Yet the popular thing to do was to shoot in Super 8mm to get that grainy, scratchy look of amateur film.

We made lots of commercials, music videos, even segments of series television shows in Super 8. Don’t get me wrong, I started out with Super 8 and loved it. But just as I got far enough in my career to swagger up to a Panavision camera, suddenly the clients wanted a Bolex.

Go figure.

Think the War is over? Not by a long shot. How many of us have a nice shiny High Defintion TV, yet spend much of our time watching low-res videos on YouTube. A friend  of mine has one of those giant flat screen TVs. It’s bigger than the one Captain Kirk used to pilot the Enterprise on Star Trek. Yet my friend will sit right in front of this widescreen marvel, and tap at his little cell phone for hours, staring into the tiny screen.

I’m no exception. I have over 200 cable channels, yet rarely watch TV. At least not on a television, I do watch TV a lot on my computer. (Yes, it’s  a teeny tiny screen).

So it was with great interest, that I heard about the movie that David Lynch was working on, Inland Empire. He was using a Sony PD-150, which is a mid-range camera. It’s certainly not a high end lensing tool like George Lucas uses. The movie sounds interesting. I plan on seeing it. But his use of a lower end camera, rather than say Imax or one of the HD rigs, heralded something else.

Something predictable.

You see, the War of Opposites isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It provides a framework, a predictablity that we can count on. If a leading edge filmmaker like David Lynch is shooting low-res, then that means something high-res is coming.

And sure enough it is here, with the Red 4K camera. This new HD camera can shoot at 60fps with an image that is 4520 X 2540 pixels. It’s hard to imagine how large and deep an image that is. It’s so big, one could zoom in and examine a single one of an actor’s eyelashes.

I can’t wait to do that, while I’m looking at YouTube on my cellphone.