Some people went to a lot of work to put this machine together. I guess television advertising was really paying off. Here's a brief magazine story about this contraption. It's a scanned PDF, but you can enlarge it enough to make it legible. American_Cinematographer - March 1956 - Arthur_Miller Looks At Electronicam
The basic plot of Mission to Paris is we are making a movie. It's a fine story and I'm reading along and I come across this line:
They were on the set until 5:30, Avila had met his day's quota - two minutes of film - and Stahl, though he ached to go back to the Claridge and get into a hot shower, had one final chore ahead of him.
Two minutes!?! Geez, you've got a full crew, all the equipment you need and a sound stage and all you've got to show for a day's work is two minutes of film? Crimintently. Then I thought about it for a minute and I realized that if it takes you three months to shoot a movie, then all you need to do shoot is two minutes a day. (3 months times 4 weeks a month times 5 days a week equals 60 work days, times two minutes a day is 120 minutes which is two hours, which is how long a movie is supposed to be.)
Thinking a little more I begin to suspect that making a movie entails a whole lot of waiting for the crew. Everything has to be set and ready to go before you start the cameras, and inevitably there is going to be some aspect (sound, lighting, prop, wardrobe, makeup, etc. etc.) that isn't quite right, so everyone else will just be put on hold until that one little problem is fixed. And when that problem is fixed you need to be ready to go, just like you haven't been waiting for five minutes or five hours.
Kathryn Bigelow, the director, was married to James Cameron (one of those guys who makes big, fancy movies like Avatar and Titanic), so maybe some of his techno-crazy rubbed off on her. Or maybe it was the other way around. In any case, she wanted a compact, light weight camera to shoot some of the POV (Point Of View) scenes. Nowadays you could use a digital camera, no problem, but this was in 1995, and digital wasn't up to snuff, so they had to do this with 35 mm film, which meant building a custom camera. So I went looking for some info on this miracle of modern technology and found...well, a swamp full of alligators and techno-jargon. 35 mm hasn't died completely, but it is going away fast. The big problem is the cost of film. It was bad enough when you were shooting snapshots with your Instamatic, but shooting movies is like shooting a machine gun. Only the truly crazy are willing to spend the money to keep the machine fed.
Got some clues about the camera, but did not manage to actually track it down. At least I don't think I did, kind of hard to tell at this point. Did come across this video that gives a pretty good rundown on just what's involved. It get's a little repetitious when he starts talking about the magazines, but it also serves to remind us just how arcane film technology is. Everything involving film has to be done in absolute darkness. Totally black, lights out. One little slip and a thousand bucks worth of film becomes worthless.
And the magazines are the problem, aren't they? You can miniaturize the camera all you want, but if you want to film somebody doing something, you are going to need a lot of film. You need about a hundred feet of film per minute of showtime, which means those 400 foot magazines are good for maybe four minutes, and the thousand foot magazines are good for ten. Admittedly the magazines shown here are not like the gi-gun-do ones you see on the studio cameras, but they are still more than a handful.
Since the truly crazy are so few in number, it has come to pass that movie cameras are a niche market, something like supercars, with corresponding price tags. Now would be a good time to pick one up for posterity's sake, before they find their way to the scrap heap like the printing presses did. They aren't dead yet, as this page shows, and Panavision and ARRI, whoever they are, are still fighting the good fight.
