The Trial (1962)

Peter's Nite
Salad, Pizza, Chocolate Tote

Films and Filming, 1962: "The Trial of Orson Welles" by Enrique Martinez via Wellesnet:

The old d'Orsay station, fallen into decay with the passing of time, with its enormous and dirty vault, its modern-style lamps, its twisted staircases, and its vastness truly represents the all-powerful endemic laws which sow the seeds of terror and death amongst the men who live within its shade without knowing the sun-light and infinite horizons which extend beyond the enomrous and filthy walls which surround them. All this of course is part of Welles' special baroque manner in which symbolism abounds without, however, at any point touching on that of Fellini, for example. Everything is twisted, exuberant, cosmic - the enomrous bed of the lawyer with its dragons and tapestry, the mirrors, the archives, the office files, the lamp shades that drop dust.

And what about Orson Welles, the director? The impression that he makes in person correspsonds exactly to the legend that has grown up around him. Big, strong and stout, deep voiced and with his enormous cigar, walking along in the midst of technicians, cables and half-assembled sets, he gives the impression of a lion shut in behind the bars of his cage.

He makes the actors rehearse a good deal. He takes them into a corner away from everyone else for an hour. Orson talks to them, repeats him aims, tells them what he expects of them even down to the tone of voice. It is not a question of seeing whether the actors have learnt the script by heart. It is a question of introducing them to the atmosphere of the scene, the character of the role and its reality. Sometimes an hour is not long enough and Welles rehearses for four, six or even ten hours. (I do not know whether it is usual with him but while I was there shooting was held up for two days because Welles was rehearsing with Romy Schneider and Tony Perkins for a whole day, from noon till seven in the evening.) The actor plays a very important part in Welles' system of direction and on this account the attention that he dedicates to his players is very great.

Once he is satisfied with an actor's work, Welles goes on to rehearse the camera movements and speed. Examining the set up he modifies what has been planned, changing the direction and intensity of the lights. Once all this has been arranged to his satisfaction, he rehearses two or three times the placing of the actors and then rapidly prepares to shoot. His voice can be heard for miles around. 'Motor-action' (the word action is pronounced in a very special way-half American, half French). Rarely does Welles take a scene more than two or three times. Generally the first take is alright. He repeats it in case of an accident during the developing of the film. At times, of course, there is an exception. On one occasion he had to repeat a very simple scene 13 times. Not because the camera movement was difficult or because the actor's script was tricky. No. Simply because Orson Welles was in good spirits. Every time that Perkins began to speak his lines, Welles made faces and funny gestures to make him laugh. And, inevitably, Perkins laughed. And Welles' guffaws made the arc lights above the set dance.

Certainly these high spirits did not prevent him from being disagreeable with everybody not connected to the film. For example, myself. Each time he caught sight of me he ordered the studio manager to throw me out. This of course could not be done as I had special authorization from the producer to be there. However I was at least made to retreat and hide behind some unused part of the set. Generally Welles only spoke to his direction crew and actors and with his daughter who from time to time came to see him at work.

In spite of giving himself the airs of genius, and in spite of his enormous cigars and his ox-like strength, Orson Welles seemed to me to reveal a side of himself that full of timidity, excessively sensitive and even fearful. The simple presence of a stranger made him nervous. If an actor put forward his point of view, Welles became pensive. In fact I am not at all surprised that he has wanted to work on a film adaptation of The Trial. I believe that Kafka and Welles have many points of contact. They both feel terrified of our modern civilization whose vicious tentacles are taking mankind in their grip. And this impression is confirmed by people who know Welles and have heard him talk at length.

Kevin Hagopian:

Welles had come to know the cul-de-sac world of Joseph K quite well by 1962, when the film, after three years of debilitating deal-making, was finally shooting on the streets of Zagreb, Yugoslavia.

After his producers ran short of money, The Trial became another of Welles' "touring productions," a Flying Dutchman of a film whose actors traveled around the world with Welles while he sought financing and locations. After Zagreb, Welles alighted in Paris, where he fumed about the ambitious, studio-shot film The Trial was to have been; now, it was forced, like Joseph K himself, out into the streets. Still awake as dawn broke one morning, Welles noticed a huge, abandoned train station, the Gare D'Orsay. Journalist William Chappell wrote of Welles' inspired inspiration:

By 7:30 he had explored the lunatic edifice, vast as a cathedral: the great vulgar corpse of a building in a shroud of dust and damp, surrounded and held together by a maze of ruined rooms, stairways and corridors. He had discovered Kafka's world, with the genuine texture of pity and terror on its dark and scabrous walls, real claustrophobia in its mournful rooms; and also intricacies of shape and perspective on a scale that would have taken months and cost fortunes to build.

For a man who had once, in more whimsical days, said, "A motion picture studio is the biggest train set a boy ever had," Welles now reenvisioned the shattered old station as the studio his backers had failed to find for him. He found small, cubicle-sized spaces in the station, suitable for intimate moments in Joseph K.'s life, and had these redesigned as bedrooms and offices. In other scenes, the remains of the station's Art Nouveau decor exudes a strange air of the festive gone rancid. His cinematographer, Edmond Richard, used reflected light to capture a dry, flat tone in Joseph's world.

It's customary to imagine Kafka's world as sleek and efficient, its terror arising from its sheer functionality. By shooting in the ancient train station, Welles created another view of the bureaucracy entirely. Here, the regime is a once-glorious structure, gilded and proud, designed to express the grandeur of its motives. Over the years, though, the dreams that were once to be served by the grand engineering symbolized by the train station have grown dusty, even forgotten. The glass is broken, the furniture battered. Mice have chewed the draperies. Now, it is only the machinery that still works, kept well-lubricated as the ornamentation grows rusty and decrepit.

Laughably Obtuse Bosley Crowther NY Times review from 1963:

Whatever Franz Kafka was laboriously attempting to say about the tyranny of modern social systems in his novel, "The Trial" is still thoroughly fuzzy and hard to fathom in the film Orson Welles has finally made from the 40-year-old novel. "The Trial" opened at the Guild and the new R.K.O. 23d Street Theatre yesterday.

Evidently it is something quite horrisic about the brutal, relentless way in which the law as a social institution reaches out and enmeshes men in its complex and calculating clutches until it crushes them to death.

Huw Wheldon 1962 BBC interview with Welles via Wellesnet:

WHELDON: You shot a lot of the film in Paris, at an abandoned railway station, the Gare d'Orsay.

WELLES: Yes, there's a very strange story about that. We shot for two weeks in Paris with the plan of going immediately to Yugoslavia where our sets would be ready. On Saturday evening at 6 o'clock, the news came that the sets not only weren't ready, but the construction on them hadn't even begun. Now, there were no sets, nor were there any studios available to build sets in Paris. It was Saturday and on Monday we we're to be shooting in Zagreb! We had to cancel everything, and apparently to close down the picture. I was living at the Hotel Meurice on the Tuilleries, pacing up and down in my bedroom, looking out of the window. Now I'm not such a fool as to not take the moon very seriously, and I saw the moon from my window, very large, what we call in America a harvest moon. Then, miraculously there were two of them. Two moons, like a sign from heaven! On each of the moons there were numbers and I realized that they were the clock faces of the Gare d'Orsay. I remembered that the Gare d'Orsay was empty, so at 5 in the morning I went downstairs, got in a cab, crossed the city and entered this empty railway station where I discovered the world of Kafka. The offices of the advocate, the law court offices, the corridors-- a kind of Jules Verne modernism that seems to me quite in the taste of Kafka. There it all was, and by 8 in the morning I was able to announce that we could shoot for seven weeks there. If you look at many of the scenes in the movie that were shot there, you will notice that not only is it a very beautiful location, but it is full of sorrow, the kind of sorrow that only accumulates in a railway station where people wait. I know this sounds terribly mystical, but really a railway station is a haunted place. And the story is all about people waiting, waiting, waiting for their papers to be filled. It is full of the hopelessness of the struggle against bureaucracy. Waiting for a paper to be filled is like waiting for a train, and it's also a place of refugees. People were sent to Nazi prisons from there, Algerians were gathered there, so it's a place of great sorrow. Of course, my film has a lot of sorrow too, so the location infused a lot of realism into the film.

WHELDON: Did using the Gare d'Orsay change your conception of the film?

WELLES: Yes, I had planned a completely different film that was based on the absence of sets. The production, as I had sketched it, comprised sets that gradually disappeared. The number of realistic elements were to become fewer and fewer and the public would become aware of it, to the point where the scene would be reduced to free space as if everything had dissolved. The gigantic nature of the sets I used is, in part, due to the fact that we used this vast abandoned railway station. It was an immense set.

WHELDON: How do you feel about THE TRIAL? Have you pulled it off?

WELLES: You know, this morning when I arrived on the train, I ran into Peter Ustinov and his new film, BILLY BUDD has just opened. I said to him, "how do you feel about your film, do you like it?" He said, "I don't like it, I'm proud of it!" I wish that I had his assurance and his reason for assurance, for I'm sure that is the right spirit in which to reply. I feel an immense gratitude for the opportunity to make it, and I can tell you that during the making of it, not with the cutting, because that's a terrible chore, but with the actual shooting of it, that was the happiest period of my entire life. So say what you like, but THE TRIAL is the best film I have ever made.

Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, Der (1920)

Stuart's Nite
Koo Koo Roo chicken and salad hits the spot

Cathy Gelbin on the Golem:

The term "Golem" first appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Psalm 139:16 it connotes a shapeless mass, perhaps an embryo, while a derivative of the root in Isaiah 49:21 refers to female infertility.[1] Medieval Jewish mystics adopted the term to describe an artificial man created via Cabbalistic ritual.

A Polish-Jewish folk-tale tradition centered around the creation of a Golem arose around 1600 and made its way into German literary Romanticism two hundred years later.[2] Writing in the age of Jewish emancipation, Christian authors such as Achim von Arnim, ETA Hoffmann and others used the Golem to reflect the common perception of Jews as uncanny and corrupt. A second Jewish folk-tale tradition attributing the making of a Golem to the sixteenth-century Rabbi Löw of Prague developed around 1750. This tradition came to dominate the German literary imagination at the end of the nineteenth century and has informed most Golem renditions since.
...
Anti-Jewish stereotypes also mark the portrayal of Miriam as the dark and seductive Jewish woman, while Christian women at the court shy away from the Golem's advances. Even more strongly, the blonde girls at the end of the film signify innocence and virginity, though the apple implies the danger of temptation emanating from all femininity.

Yet the polarity between the images of Jewish and Christian women is blatant. Outside the ghetto walls, the Golem sees a mother and child bringing flowers to a statue of the Virgin Mary and her baby Jesus. Significantly, the name of the Christian Madonna represents the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Miriam.

The Jewish woman thus exemplifies the destructive allure of the female sex unless restrained by Christian chastity, domesticity and maternity. The soulless Golem equally contrasts with the naturalised image of mother and child who are bathed in light and aligned with the Christian world. This construction evokes the claim by Tertullian that "the soul is by nature Christian," an assertion still cited in the Twentieth Century.[18]

Whether intended or not, however, the juxtaposition between the motherless Golem and the Christian Messiah also reopens the question of the latter's unclear paternal origins. The visual association between both figures implicitly parodies the assertion of Christianity as "natural," a term hardly descriptive of the immaculate conception.

The film is a free download here.

BBC on Wegner and Golum:

The German actor and director Paul Wegener (1874 - 1948) made many films, but he's particularly remembered for his three films centred around the Jewish legend of the Golem1. He first heard about it while working in Prague on his film The Student of Prague in 1913, and shortly afterwards he set to work making a new film inspired by the legend.

According to the legend of Golem, the Emperor Rudolph II was about to issue an edict against the Jews of Prague. Rabbi Judah Low Ben Bezalel2, one of the ghetto's elders, created a Golem, a clay statue brought to life by magic, to defend the Jews from the pogrom. The legend has several variants, differing in detail. Sometimes the Golem is brought to life by a magic word written on his forehead; erase the word, and he ceases to live. Other versions mention a hot ball placed in the Golem's skull, or a tablet with the name of God written on it put in the Golem's mouth. In Wegener's films the Golem is brought to life by a shem, a 'Star of David' pendant concealing a piece of paper with the magic word on it. Remove the shem, and the Golem is rendered inert.

Wegener played the Golem himself in all three films. At over six feet tall, with an expressive face, he was well-suited for the part. He continued to make films and perform on stage throughout his life, even when Germany was under Nazi rule. However, he was plagued with ill health, and he collapsed on stage a few days before his death, a trouper to the end.

Film Monthly:

THE GOLEM is a film of great power, as hypnotic as a German Expressionist vision of life as a waking dream. The dim light and looming shadow were photographed by Karl Freund, who also shot two German Expressionist masterpieces: Fritz Lang's Metropolis and F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh. Freund later emigrated to America and eventually became the head cameraman for I Love Lucy.

Hans Poelzig's stylized sets convey the claustrophobia of ghetto life, with curved stone walls and sharply pointed roofs. The two sets of circular stairs the characters climb down to enter the rabbi's study look like the twin chambers of a human heart.

However, THE GOLEM is not really a German Expressionist story; it is more a combination of Jewish mysticism and fairy tale. Director Wegener portrays the supernatural elements of the story without irony or psychological explanation, as if we were truly in medieval Prague, when people would have believed that an amulet and an incantation could bring a clay figure to life.

Production designer & architect Hans Poelzig via Wikipedia:

Hans Poelzig (April 30, 1869 Berlin - June 14, 1936 Berlin) was a German architect, painter, and set designer active in the Weimar years.

After finishing his architectural eduation around the turn of the century, Poelzig designed many industrial buildings. For an industrial fair in 1911, he designed the Upper Silesia Tower in Posen 51.2 m tall, which later became the water tower. He was eventually appointed city architect of Dresden in 1916.

Poelzig was also known for his distinctive 1919 interior redesign of the Berlin Grosses Schauspielhaus for Weimar impressario Max Reinhardt, and for his vast architectural set designs for the 1925 UFA film production of The Golem. (Poelzig mentored Edgar Ulmer on that film; when Ulmer directed the 1934 film noir Universal Studios production of "The Black Cat", he returned the favor by naming the architect-Satanic-high-priest villain character "Hjarmal Poelzig", played by Boris Karloff.)

With his Weimar architect contemporaries like Bruno Taut and Ernst May, Poelzig's work developed through Expressionism and the New Objectivity in the mid-1920s before arriving at a more conventional, economical style. In the 1920s he ran the "Studio Poelzig" in partnershp with his wife Marlene. Poelzig also designed the 1929 Broadcasting House in the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg, a landmark of architecture, Cold War history, and engineering history.

Poelzig's single best-known building is the enormous and legendary I.G. Farben Building, completed in 1931 as the administration building for IG Farben in Frankfurt am Main, now known as the Poelzig Building at Goethe University. In March 1945 the building was occupied by American Allied forces under Eisenhower, became his headquarters, and remained in American hands until 1995. Some of his designs that were never built included one for the Palace of the Soviets and one for the League of Nations headquarters at Geneva.

Poelzig died in Berlin in June 1936, shortly before his planned departure for Ankara.

In Cold Blood (1967)

Nora's Nite
Pasta with meat sauce, salad, cookies

1967 Bosley Crowther review in the New York Times:

Why did two who had originally intended robbery, and who had not committed murder before, suddenly come to the point of slaughtering four innocent persons in cold blood? And what does this single explosion of violence indicate as to society's pitiable vulnerability to the kooks that are loose in the land?

This pervasive concern with the natures and the backgrounds of the two young men who commit the murders and are therefore the symbols of the forces of evil in this dramatic scan accounts for the considerable alteration that Mr. Brooks has made in the substance and structure of Mr. Capote's book.

With a proper disregard for the extraneous, he has dropped out much of the detail of life in the community of Holcomb that Mr. Capote so patiently inscribed, and he has swiftly introduced his two marauders and brought them to the driveway of the Clutter home on that fateful night.

Then, with a rip in the sequence that is characteristic of the nervous style of the film—it is done with frequent flashbacks and fragmentations of continuity—he cuts to the interior of the Clutter home on the morning after the crime and the discovery of the bodies by the housemaid (but unseen by the camera), to her shrieking horror.

Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly:

Brooks’ expository screenplay doffs its cap to the intersection of the two Americas Capote saw in the case — one decent and God-fearing (in the movie, the ill-fated Clutter family are naively presented as total innocents), the other psychopathic and deceitful — and dutifully hints at a homoerotic bond between the killers. But there’s little sign of Capote’s worldly irony or his mandarin prose, in part because he is weakly represented in the film by a journalist (“You’re not here to write news,” John Forsythe’s detective observes acidly) who’s no more than a standard noir iconoclast, and straight as a die too. For all its conventional psychodrama, In Cold Blood is primarily memorable for the fine acting of Robert Blake (he’s the one with qualms!) as the schizoid Perry Smith and, in particular, Scott Wilson, who’s just terrific as Dick Hickock, at once an all-American boy and a pure outsider and therefore the one who most interested Capote. I enjoyed Bennett Miller’s Capote, but I wonder what it says about our current cultural obsessions that today we are more fascinated by a celebrity journalist than by a pair of murderers willing to kill for no compelling reason.

From the first part of In Cold Blood (via The New Yorker):

Like Mr. Clutter, the young man breakfasting in a cafe called the Little Jewel never drank coffee. He preferred root beer. Three aspirin, cold root beer, and a chain of Pall Mall cigarettes—that was his notion of a proper “chow-down.” Sipping and smoking, he studied a map spread on the counter before him—a Phillips 66 map of Mexico—but it was difficult to concentrate, for he was expecting a friend, and the friend was late. He looked out a window at the silent small-town street, a street he had never seen until yesterday. Still no sign of Dick. But he was sure to show up; after all, the purpose of their meeting was Dick’s idea, his “score.” And when it was settled—Mexico. The map was ragged, so thumbed that it had grown as supple as a piece of chamois. Around the corner, in his room at the hotel where he was staying, were hundreds more like it—worn maps of every state in the Union, every Canadian province, every South American country—for the young man was an incessant conceiver of voyages, not a few of which he had actually taken: to Alaska, to Hawaii and Japan, to Hong Kong. Now, thanks to a letter, an invitation to a “score,” here he was with all his worldly belongings: one cardboard suitcase, a guitar, and two big boxes of books and maps and songs, poems and old letters, weighing a quarter of a ton. (Dick’s face when he saw those boxes! “Christ, Perry. You carry that junk everywhere? “ And Perry had said, “What junk? One of them books cost me thirty bucks.”) Here he was in little Olathe, Kansas. Kind of funny, if you thought about it; imagine being back in Kansas, when only four months ago he had sworn, first to the state Parole Board, then to himself, that he would never set foot within its boundaries again. Well, it wasn’t for long.

1967 Roger Ebert interview with Robert Blake:

Although most film stars spend their days talking about themselves, their dogs, wives, next pictures, favorite recipes and hidden genius, Blake spent the weekend talking about "In Cold Blood" and its producer-director, Richard Brooks.

"Listen," he said, "you don't know what this guy went through for me. He kept telling them he wanted to cast me as Perry Smith and Scott Wilson as Dick Hickock. And the front office kept saying sure, sure, now get Paul Newman on the phone. Brooks had to fight every inch of the way."

Blake talks softly, with pauses between his sentences, as if testing every word for truth. He is a compact, intense man of 32 and bears a startling resemblance to the man who walked into the Clutter home near Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959 and shotgunned four people to death. After that murder, of course, Truman Capote flew to Kansas and began the research that led to "In Cold Blood."

"This was a big book with a lot of money riding on it," Blake said. "It cost a big pile just to buy the rights. And so naturally the studio wanted Brooks to protect their investment, You know, hire established box-office stars, shoot in color, all that jazz.

"But brooks didn't want it that way. To begin with, he insisted on black and white. And he was right. It would have ruined this film to shoot it in color. Every second had to seem real - and, you know, the funny thing is that black and white always seems more real than color."

He stopped for a moment to regain his train of thought. "Oh, yeah. So black and white was the first thing. Then Brooks said he wanted to shoot in Kansas, on location at the scene of the crime, right there in Holcomb and in the Clutter house.

"I remember he said at the time that it might make trouble if he went to Kansas. But look at it this way, he said. If we shot it in Nebraska, people would say, 'Isn't that just like Hollywood? It happens in Kansas and they shoot it in Nebraska.'"

Blake sipped a double Jack Daniels on the rocks - his usual order - and smiled.

"And then the third thing was, he felt the actors had to be unknown. Especially the killers. It would be a sacrilege to have Marlon Brando creeping around the Clutter house. So he held out for Scott and myself, even though we meant nothing, absolutely nothing, on the marquee. I really respect that."

American Masters on Truman Capote:

Born in New Orleans in 1924, Capote was abandoned by his mother and raised by his elderly aunts and cousins in Monroeville, Alabama. As a child he lived a solitary and lonely existence, turning to writing for solace. Of his early days Capote related, "I began writing really sort of seriously when I was about eleven. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it."

In his mid-teens, Capote was sent to New York to live with his mother and her new husband. Disoriented by life in the city, he dropped out of school, and at age seventeen, got a job with THE NEW YORKER magazine. Within a few years he was writing regularly for an assortment of publications. One of his stories, "Miriam," attracted the attention of publisher Bennett Cerf, who signed the young writer to a contract with Random House. Capote's first book, OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS, was published in 1948. OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS received instant notoriety for its fine prose, its frank discussion of homosexual themes, and, perhaps most of all, for its erotically suggestive cover photograph of Capote himself.

With literary success came social celebrity. The young writer was lionized by the high society elite, and was seen at the best parties, clubs, and restaurants. He answered accusations of frivolousness by claiming he was researching a future book. His short novel, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S (1958), took much of its inspiration from these experiences. With the publication of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S and the subsequent hit film staring Audrey Hepburn, Capote's popularity and place among the upper crust was assured. His ambition, however, was to be great as well as popular, and so he began work on a new experimental project that he imagined would revolutionize the field of journalism.

In 1959, Capote set about creating a new literary genre -- the non-fiction novel. IN COLD BLOOD (1966), the book that most consider his masterpiece, is the story of the 1959 murder of the four members of a Kansas farming family, the Clutters. Capote left his jet-set friends and went to Kansas to delve into the small-town life and record the process by which they coped with this loss. During his stay, the two murderers were caught, and Capote began an involved interview with both. For six years, he became enmeshed in the lives of both the killers and the townspeople, taking thousands of pages of notes. Of IN COLD BLOOD, Capote said, "This book was an important event for me. While writing it, I realized I just might have found a solution to what had always been my greatest creative quandary. I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry." IN COLD BLOOD sold out instantly, and became one of the most talked about books of its time. An instant classic, IN COLD BLOOD brought its author millions of dollars and a fame unparalleled by nearly any other literary author since.

Cinematography giant Conrad Hall's bio via the ASC:

Hall was born in Papete, Tahiti, in 1926. His father, James Norman Hall, was a volunteer pilot in the American expeditionary force that supported the French army during World War I. He and another American pilot, Charles B. Nordorf, went to Tahiti in search of a quiet place to write about their unit’s experiences during the war. They subsequently collaborated on the novels Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea, The Hurricane and Botany Bay. James Norman Hall also married a Tahitian princess.

Conrad Hall was raised on the island in a cloistered literary environment. During his teens, his parents sent him to a private prep school in Santa Barbara, California. After graduation, Hall enrolled at the University of Southern California with instructions from his father to find a career. He decided to major in journalism but was discouraged by a low grade in a creative-writing class. “I noticed that the school had a cinema course, and that was very interesting to me for all of the wrong reasons,” he said. “I thought it was an easy way of getting through school. The problem was that once I shot a film and saw it on the screen, I was deeply affected. I realized that there was great power in telling stories through pictures…. It was a heady, profound concept for a young, idealistic person.”

His timing couldn’t have been better. Slavko Vorkapitch became head of USC’s film program in 1945, the year that Hall enrolled. Vorkapitch was a filmmaker who had migrated from Yugoslavia to Hollywood in 1922. He disdained Hollywood photoplay mentality and was noted for the power of the visual montages that characterized his films. “He had the spirit and soul of an artist,” said Hall. “He taught us the principles and said it was up to us to apply them.”

Citybeat portrait of Conrad Hall:

Hall is a wiry gentleman with white hair and beard. He is polite and soft-spoken. He insists that despite a 37-year career in movies, he has never participated in press interviews before, and it's easy to imagine that's the case. Inside the ballroom, he walks from table to table. Journalists ask Hanks about upcoming projects. For Hall, the majority of questions revolve around his past experience working with Newman.

"How has Paul Newman changed over the years?" one reporter asks Hall.

"Well, his eyes are a little less blue," Hall says, smiling. "But they're still baby blue."

Don't let Hall's lack of publicity fool you about his status in Hollywood. His photography is considered some of the tops in the business. The films he has shot, Tequila Sunrise, In Cold Blood and Harper, among many, are as beautiful, atmospheric and stunning as films come. Thanks to Hall's craftsmanship, they contain images that aren't soon forgotten by their audiences.

"Filmmaking is not so tough," Hall says. "It's all about problem-solving. It's not about standing on your head and doing tricks."

Hall is no celebrity, although he makes many of them look beautiful on the big screen. To some people, the cinematographer is just a member of the director's crew. To others, he's as significant a creative force as any of the actors. Still, if there is such a thing as film aesthetics, it's because of people like Hall. He creates what Art of the Moving Picture author Vachel Lindsay called "painting in motion." Hall crafts scenes of action and intimacy, and they all look stunning.

"There is an immense, childlike enthusiasm about the man," Mendes says, speaking later that day. "It's inspiring when you work with a 77-year-old man who has that kind of love and excitement still in him about what he does. And like Paul Newman, each day is like the first day of his career."

On the crew, the love for Hall is clear. After all, he is the person who makes it all look good, or bad if a shot turns out poorly. With movie audiences, there is no middle ground. Like the crowds outside Road to Perdition's premiere, nobody knows who he is.

Later in the day, inside his Chicago hotel room, Hall sits politely on a chair. He listens to questions, pauses and answers in his soft-spoken voice. His appearance is both gentlemanly and comfortable. He wears slacks and a sports coat and looks like a grandfather compared to the youthful publicists that surround him.

Hall has won two Oscars, one for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the other for American Beauty, Hall's first collaboration with Mendes. Road to Perdition, which is currently playing in theaters, looks to be an early favorite for year-end awards.

During the interview, Hall remains seated in the middle of his room. His arms remain folded at his side. He sits close. We're almost touching nose-to-nose. For the 77-year-old DP, the interview is a welcome opportunity to share his views. He has many, even if there aren't many moviegoers interested in hearing them.

"I remember the first time I was at the Oscars, I was afraid that I would forget somebody's name," Hall says. "But I remember John Wayne putting out his big paw to congratulate me. The second time I went to the Oscars, for American Beauty, it was a lot more fun."

Looking back, Hall has few regrets. He took part in many significant films. His son, Conrad W. Hall, the DP for The Panic Room, has become a significant cinematographer in his own right. The Hall family trade is continuing, at least for one more generation.