Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/760821
22 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: (CLOCKWISE, BOTTOM LEFT) PHOTOFEST (2); ELIZABETH MORRIS/IFC; DGA ARCHIVES; RHYS THOMAS E P I S O D E » T H E E Y E D O E S N ' T L I E S O U R C E » THE THIN BLUE LINE (1988) Errol Morris' ground- breaking mix of crime scene re-creation and probing interviews got a man o death row. Over two days of fi lm- ing their homage, with Hader and Armisen as orange-jump-suited prisoners, the direc- tors had to keep track of an evolving, impro- vised timeline. "We'd let them wander a bit. We'd do an interview, someone would say something funny, then we'd have to make sure it's consistent when we did the next one. It kept snowballing." This time around, the duo's tech- nical research made for some cosmic luck. Morris and Saturday Night Live employ the same rental house, so it had the exact 50mm Zeiss super-speed lens- es Morris utilized. "We put it on our camera and it was like, wow, there's no question they used these," says Buono. Then there was the woman they hired to do courtroom illus- trations, based on her similar-looking website examples. "We sent her the script, and she said, 'That's funny, I was the illustrator on that trial,'" recalls Buono. "That was an insane coincidence. We realized what a weird meta-experiment this was becoming." PAYING HOMAGE | CONTINUED It all starts with re- search, since before a script is even written the directors know the look they're after. In this case, it was the black- and-white harshness of lonely door-to-door salesmen, as originally captured by the Maysles. "I found out the light they used, and bought two of them on eBay," says Buono. "They looked like mini car headlights, and they were scorching hot. But we bounced it o the ceiling and something magical happened. It looked like Salesman." Whether filming in mo- tel rooms or living rooms, they stuck most- E P I S O D E » G LO B E S M E N S O U R C E » S A L E S M A N ( 1 9 6 9 ) ly to the brothers' one- camera aesthetic (Albert filmed, David recorded sound), which meant no coverage. "We had to be a little bit behind the ac- tion," says Thomas. "The camera can't be on Fred before he says a line. We had to react to hearing it." Later, in post, using the texturing tool LiveGrain, they made the footage look old, but not too old. "It's a fine line of making it look like the Criterion version, so they would have cleaned it up a lit- tle bit, but there were scratches they couldn't get rid of," says Buono, adding, "it's that geeky world we play in." FOCUS In 1964, the stu- dios feared that allowing a "Direc- tor's Cut" would mean increased post-production costs and were unwilling to negotiate further with the Guild. To break the stalemate, Frank Capra ingeniously proposed that if a director held up post-production, the DGA, at its own expense, would fl y in one of 12 top-notch directors to fi nish the job. That action removed the producers' objections and the Guild secured the Director's Cut as part of a landmark Bill of Creative Rights, which has since grown and been codifi ed into the Creative Rights Handbook. GUILD MILESTONE 1964 Establishing Director's Cut