By Robert Goldrich, Road To Emmy, Part 4

LOS ANGELES --

Jill Soloway knows a thing or two about the Emmy Awards. She earned multiple nominations as a producer/writer on Six Feet Under, and a pair of wins for Best Directing for a Comedy Series in 2015 and last year for Transparent (Amazon). She is now once again in the Emmy conversation, not just for Transparent but also for her new Amazon series, I Love Dick, which she co-created with writer/EP Sarah Gubbins while also serving as a writer, EP and director.

But in a recent Amazon FYC (For Your Consideration) session in Hollywood for I Love Dick, Soloway’s Emmy focus wasn’t on herself but rather her colleagues. She lauded the Television Academy’s launch of new categories—one honoring music supervision, the other splitting cinematography for a single-camera series into one-hour and half-hour series. The latter, said Soloway, will enable deserving artists like cinematographer Jim Frohna, who shot Transparent and I Love Dick, to gain recognition. Soloway said the same for her trusted music supervisor Bruce Gilbert whose contributions to Transparent and I Love Dick have been essential. Relative to I Love Dick, Soloway described the soundtrack as “more than a character,” serving as the “soul of the show.” To have music supervisors eligible for Emmy consideration for the first time is long overdue, affirmed Soloway.

SHOOT caught up with Frohna and Gilbert to discuss their work on the Soloway shows and the prospects of being considered for Emmy recognition. Frohna said the opening up of the cinematography category makes sense in that there’s “a whole new generation of these half-hour shows telling different kinds of stories. There’s been an explosion in the episodic world that takes the 30-minute format well beyond sitcoms.”

What Frohna loves about Transparent and I Love Dick is that they exemplify “types of stories being told that have not been told before. In Transparent, we are bearing witness to a family, directly connecting with the characters. That’s the main entry point for our approach to cinematography for the show. We want you to feel like you’re there, experiencing the characters’ depth of emotion. Beautiful looking shots are great but if the way I’m shooting doesn’t bear witness to the feelings or these characters, then we’re missing out. That’s my priority even more than the look. There’s a smaller scale intimacy, a deeply personal feel.”

Meanwhile I Love Dick, based on the novel by feminist author Chris Kraus, stars Kathryn Hahn as Chris, a New York filmmaker who somewhat reluctantly accompanies her husband Sylvere (Griffin Dunne) to Marfa, Texas. An academician, Sylvere has to be in Marfa for an artist’s retreat/residency, but it’s Chris who gets an education of sorts—about herself—meeting and instinctively being drawn to title character Dick (Kevin Bacon), a charismatic art professor/quasi cowboy. Rashomon-style shifts of POV help tell a story which chronicles a female artist’s self-discovery, the unraveling and development of relationships, and both the simplicity and complexities of life—all with a sense of the comedic.

For I Love Dick, Frohna noted that he and Soloway “have a certain shooting style that works, getting to the guts, awkwardness, ugliness and beauty of human journeys.” Adding to this was the town of Marfa with its landscapes and color palette. “Everything is so bold in West Texas–the wide openness, the vividness of the sky, the storms that come through. It’s a sunbaked tiny town with unique in-your-face townspeople. A freight train comes screaming right through Marfa. It’s a great poetic small town thing. We wanted to capture the place, the people there, and our characters within that environment. We sought to capture the feeling of Marfa and the extreme obsessiveness of the main character. We did a lot of hand-held work so that the story feels like it’s unfolding before us. We didn’t seek iconic western shots but almost can’t help it as you have this town appear like a speck in the middle of vast, wide open plains.”

Frohna deployed the Canon C300 Mark II on both Transparent and I Love Dick. “Way back when we started out on Transparent, the first generation of that camera had just come out. We loved the quality and the small compact size. The smaller the machine, the better the intimacy factor we’re going for. I operate a lot as well, am able to move around the actors more freely, with long takes to soak in their characters.”

Frohna frequently utilizes Zeiss Super Speed lenses on Transparent along with vintage Leica lenses dating back to the 1930s for flashback sequences. For I Love Dick, the DP has gravitated to Baltar lenses through which “colors are vivid but the look doesn’t feel hyper digital. It has its own character, bold while being detached. Since we are fully in the digital camera world, many of these vintage lenses have surfaced as another tool. Each has its own little character or characteristics to help remove the digital feeling and bring in other aspects.”

Frohna first connected with Soloway when she was looking for a DP to shoot her first feature, Afternoon Delight (2013).  Frohna had come from a background in commercials and documentaries. “Jill and I had this incredible first meeting and hit it off right away. The producers liked me but were concerned about pairing a first-time feature director with a DP who hadn’t shot a feature.” Thus Frohna was initially passed over for the movie even though “my heart and soul said Jill and I should be working together.” However, fate intervened and the gig became open again. I got a call from Jill who said, ‘Please tell me your are still available.’ Three days later, we started shooting.”

The collaborative relationship with Soloway, kicked off with Afternoon Delight, is described by Frohna “as an incredible gift in my life–creatively, personally and professionally. She is an amazing talent and person. I’m not just proud of what I bring to the stuff we’ve done together but overall the shows themselves. I’m proud to say I work with Jill on everything we’ve done. I feel extremely fortunate to have connected with her.”

Bruce Gilbert
“Music supervisors are absolutely delighted,” said Gilbert of the Emmy category recognizing what they do. “A number of folks worked hard to help get that recognition, creating that category. In and outside television, there’s probably not a ton of understanding of what goes into music supervision.”

Asked to delineate what goes into his profession, Gilbert explained, “We oversee all musical aspects of a production. That entails finding key songs in the infancy of a show, auditioning composers, figuring out the original score, attaining a balance between the score created for a show and the songs selected for that same show. Ideally we’re working in close connection with writers, producers, directors, editors and others on placement of all the elements–and it differs from show to show. Some shows know what they want, other’s don’t. Some people have different expertise in music. Some talk about emotion. Others are more technical. You have to be fluid in every version of that conversation. You are at times a translator between the composer and producer. And beyond the creative, there’s a mountain of paperwork going back and forth, an endless barrage of phone calls and emails. For every great creative choice, sometimes there are dozens of songs that don’t make it but many of which had to go through the clearance process. You have to have relationships with labels and publishers. And everything has to happen in a timely manner with schedules and budgets to consider.”

Gilbert has served as music supervisor on Transparent and I Love Dick. He said of Soloway, “Jill and I start the conversation sometimes before the writing. She has ideas about the arc of the whole season. I will begin to metabolize that information and let it sink in. I listen to music constantly, storing buckets of potential songs for projects in my head. A Transparent song might occur to me. Scripts will refine my ideas. You get into the episodes, refine your thoughts further. You get into scenes, and refine things even further. Some editors work on both of those shows. I sometimes deliver them folders of music–stuff that’s abstract, sometimes literal that appeal to me with the show in mind…We just finished the fourth season of Transparent. There’s huge difference between season one and season four. Jill is excited about and interested in making sometimes not so subtle changes between seasons. And then there’s the bigger conversation about how songs might work together in the greater fabric of the show.”

I Love Dick, continued Gilbert, was “an awesome adventure to figure out. A group of intellectuals in the desert; an academic setting in an otherwise rural wasteland, populated by artists who have made a unique place in Marfa. How should music serve us in this show which is unlike any other show? The music didn’t need to speak to the conversation which sometimes was hyper-intellectual. Instead we wanted to address the place and the emotion, the heart of the show–not necessarily the head. I happened upon an idea one morning after having watched an early cut of the pilot. I woke up with a song swimming in my head–by an artist I wound up using multiple times: Lhasa de Sela. I found the song and a couple others of hers. She had passed away several years ago. We had the ghost of this artist to score the show in addition to our own score. The pilot opens with one of her songs. Her music closes the episode. The spirit of this artist is so gorgeous, not like anything else you hear on television. It has an organic, almost handmade feel to it, singing in Spanish and English. It speaks sometimes literally to Marfa but at the same time doesn’t really sing to any particular time or place. A woman’s dreams are at the heart of this story. It’s fitting to have a woman’s voice lead us into the show and out of it–and to visit us during the course of the seven episodes that follow.”

The mix for the eight episodes of I Love Dick includes some that are heavy on licensed music, others where there’s a little more original score. “There’s music around every corner, between every scene–score and song, a lot of female vocals,” said Gilbert. “For me the biggest compliment is when people talk about the music in the show as almost being a character in the space.”

Gilbert’s has a strong heartfelt bond with Soloway. They were married for seven years. While they are no longer wed, they remain, said Gilbert, “great friends and partners. The way we work together speaks to our connection.”

This is the fourth installment of a 15-part series of feature stories that explores the field of Emmy contenders, and then nominees spanning such disciplines as directing, cinematography, producing, editing, music, animation, Visual effects and production design. The series will then be followed up by coverage of the Creative Arts Emmy ceremonies on September 9 and 10, and the primetime Emmy Awards live telecast on September 17.

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