Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538423
1 2 I D G A M O N T H L Y Before the song starts, Gene walks along the sidewalk to a vamp written by Roger Edens. It was an example of what we used to call 'sneaking in' the mu- sic. There was no orchestra. It wasn't in a rehearsal hall. You had to make the audience not realize there was music happening, because it's not real, it's not life, it doesn't relate to what's happening in the world we live in. It's the hardest moment in my experience, that moment when the artist goes from the way we live−talking−to the point where they start to sing. It's really delicate, so you have to 'sneak' it in. You can't think of a camera angle before you know what you're doing. You work out the choreography, then you wonder what the best way to show it is. Here, he's singing, 'Come on with the rain, I've a smile on my face.' I moved in on his face so you can see the smile, and the rain. When you're shooting rain, it has to be backlit, or you may not see it very well. There have been a lot of stories about how we put milk in the water so you could see the rain. It's not true. You have to put the light behind the rain so that the raindrops show. If you put the light in front of the rain, with no light behind it, the rain disappears. 3 5 Only once in my entire life have I filmed a song performed live, because it was almost impossible to lip-sync back, and that was only a song, not a dance. But the best solution is to pre-record it, like we did here, and play it back. The way it works is you rehearse your ass off till you get it as good as you can, and then record the sound and music, then sing it, then put the playback on when you're going to shoot it so the artist can lip-sync to the track. It's harder if you try it the other way, because if you have the orchestra on set, you've got to post-sync. You've got to match the takes. So the best of the worst of problems is to pre-record. 4 In order not to give Gene pneumonia−because that was a consideration−we would do the take, he'd be drenched wet in a wool suit, and then he would take off the suit and dry out. Then we'd get ready and relight for another shot, if we got the shot we needed. Chances are we did get it, so he'd have an hour and a half, two hours before he'd be due. We must have had two or three suits, and we had a warm room to hang them in to dry. 6 We decided he'd flirt a little bit with a picture of a girl to show he's happy, so we put that display in. This was all on MGM's backlot. Gene and I hated sets because we wanted to do it in reality. So the problem was making it as close to life as you could, and not make it look like the fake fronts of buildings. The lot was literally outside, but we shot it in the daytime. We had to put a tarpaulin over it to make it dark, and then light it as though you were shooting at night. So we were shooting at night, but it was our night, not God's night. And because it was a hot summer in L.A., working with rain inside a black tent made it hotter than hell. 7 We could only do a couple of takes for each shot. Gene and I didn't really have any disagreements about the takes. Nowadays, everything is printed, so you see it all. But in those days, you were only allowed to print two takes, and only photograph five. This was wartime and after that. You had to be sure it was right. We'd do rehearsals before we rolled film, and the artist wouldn't perform quite as hard, because he or she didn't want to be exhausted. It wasn't a small crew, either, because everything had to be done manually. Panning the camera, tilting it, pushing the boom. There was no remote-controlled anything. 8 Continued from page 11 — Director Stanley Donen recalls how he and Gene Kelly created one of the most iconic scenes in film history.