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54 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: (TOP TO BOTTOM) NETFLIX; COURTESY OF MICHAEL BONFIGLIO; ANDREW THOMAS CLIFTON that Bonfiglio ultimately found untenable. At the back of the house, on a dolly, was a "poor man's jib," to make the viewer feel as though he was in the room"—an effect Bonfiglio felt was important. If Jerry Before Seinfeld could only be done at The Comic Strip, Dave Chappelle had just as powerful a motivation to shoot his Netflix special, The Age of Spin, at the Hollywood Palladium. It was the site of Richard Pryor's seminal 1982 concert movie Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip. Michael Bonfiglio, right, takes a less-is-more approach in his work with Jerry Seinfeld (above); Shannon Hartman, below, shares a laugh with comedian Roy Wood Jr.; Stan Lathan (opposite below) has worked repeatedly with Dave Chappelle. He points to some lasting advice he got from Ben Stiller: When shooting comedy, "Just let the person work within the frame. No camera tricks, no great camera moves. It's about connecting with the audience on that joke." Robinson watched Haddish work for weeks; he also went back to certain seminal comedy specials, including the 1987 concert movie Eddie Murphy: Raw. "Although there was so many amazing visual things there, you kind of set that up with your production designer, with your ward- robe, your costuming, and it all comes from a real place because the comics are themselves," explains Robinson. "From Raw we remember Eddie wearing that suit. I didn't remember what the stage looked like. It was very simple." Robinson shot From the Hood to Hollywood! at the Ebony Repertory Theatre in Los Angeles with seven cam- eras, but he and Haddish "had a long talk" about staging. "We just wanted it to feel, for lack of a better word, beauti- ful. Her special tackled a lot of harsh imagery." It's not just that Haddish jokingly thanks everyone who paid taxes in California between 1990 and 1999 for getting her here, it's that she's framed by a silver, rococo- ish curtain and opulent, low-hanging chandeliers. Seinfeld the Storyteller Michael Bonfiglio (Jerry Before Seinfeld) also subscribes to the less-is-more approach. "One of the beauties of standup comedy," he says, "is that one person standing on a stage can transfix an audience. I think the more bells and whistles you put on that, the more you're getting away from that art form. People have done some very innova- tive things in the form, but I don't know if it always works." Bonfiglio didn't know Seinfeld—not personally, anyway—before directing him in Jerry Before Seinfeld. Having signed a reported $100 million deal with Netflix, Seinfeld wanted to use his first Netflix special to revisit all the material he wrote as a young comic in the 1970s, leading up to his debut on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1981. Bonfiglio was a somewhat unlikely candidate for the project. His work includes From the Ashes, a feature-length documentary about the American divide on coal's future as an energy source. But the director had also begun collaborating with Judd Apatow on a docu- mentary about the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers (May It Last, released this year), and Apatow recommended Bonfiglio to Seinfeld. Tonally, Seinfeld was intent on avoiding overt nostalgia or any- thing to do with the sitcom that made him famous. "I really encour- aged him to be more of a storyteller in this one than just joke-joke- joke," Bonfiglio recalls. "The special is incredibly dense with jokes, but it's all kind of couched in him telling a story. He never talked about, 'When I was a child in the '60s.' He came up with that new material, and then used that as a framework for the old jokes." The nexus of Seinfeld's world was The Comic Strip on the Upper East Side. While an ideal locale for the special, the club itself present- ed Bonfiglio with his biggest directorial challenge: a low-ceilinged room with his lone character up against a static brick wall. To give the visuals some depth, Bonfiglio and his DP, Sam Levy, managed to strategically place five cameras in the room, including a handheld