In the high hills of Santa Clarita, Calif., Jonah the chimpanzee leads a horse up a barren road. Cans of Sterno glow hot and blue as tumbleweed blows through the scene. The camera rolls, and DP Russell Carpenter squints as the pressure builds. After all, it’s a chimp leading a horse. He’s got to make sure the animal trainers don’t get in the shot.
"Ah, the little guy was just terrific," says Carpenter, who is repped for spots by Gravity, Hollywood. "He’s so well trained that it makes the job much easier than working with some human actors."
Jonah’s star turn under the eyes of Carpenter and director Bryan Buckley of bicoastal/international hungry man led to the memorable 2001 Super Bowl "Monkey 2" for E*Trade, out of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco.
The E*Trade spot is the type of ad assignment that Carpenter enjoys. "The humorous aspect is something I’m attracted to," he says. "You have to play against those things you’re trained to do."
Recently, Carpenter once again teamed with Buckley for a humor-based spot, this time a :60 called "Pageant" for Oxygen Media, out of Mullen, Wenham, Mass. "Pageant" features a pastiche of fake beauty pageant footage spanning 50 years, with the contestants answering the old saw, "What would you do to make the world a better place?" Fast cuts over several contestants from various decades illustrate them saying, a few words at a time, the phrase, "Well, Ted, I’d do my very best to make sure that every time you ever witness a woman, from Illinois to Nevada, in the media, it would be sure to reveal her true complexities, and not just the same old stereotypes that everyone has become so accustomed to, and that I believe do an incredible disservice to all humanity." The tag for the spot: "Somebody had to say it."
The shots of each beauty contestant look to be found footage, but Carpenter lit and filmed each woman so she would appear to be from a bygone era. The spot starts with black-and-white film, then moves to color-reversal stock to get a "plastic"-looking Technicolor—for the mod scenery and an Audrey Hepburn look-alike. Thirty-five millimeter and video appear for the ’60s and ’70s, and HD video carries the contemporary television looks. For the ’70s era, Carpenter used star filters—"they ran rampant in the Sonny and Cher show"—and for the ’50s, fake defects like comet-tailing were introduced, and heavy backlighting made the actors look like they were wearing halos. "That shoot took place over two days, with a one-day pre-light. We had to create the look of about eighteen beauty pageants, so nine a day," he recalls. "We were running."
Carpenter had to bring all of his lighting skills to the two-day "Monkey 2" E*Trade shoot. In the spot, the aforementioned Jonah plays the role of spokes-chimp, and walks a horse up the road—he’s headed into a dot-com wasteland, a ghost town. The Sterno cans, placed five feet in front of the camera, just below the frame, made for the heat waves shimmering off the desert surface, even though the shoot was done in early winter.
Jonah walks the horse through the town to mournful music, and the wrecked set shows the bones of ridiculous dot-com firms like Tieclasp.com and Pimientoloaf.com. Finally a dusty, beat-up, mangled sock puppet drops with a thump to the ground: poor pets.com. Carpenter’s camera closes in on his subject. A single tear rolls down Jonah’s cheek—a tongue-in-cheek nod to the late Iron Eyes Cody, the Cherokee immortalized in the ’71 Keep America Beautiful anti-littering campaign.
It’s not so easy, Carpenter says—getting a close-up of a weeping chimp. "We had to put a lot of light on him," he explains. "We wanted to see his eyes and we wanted to see the tear. That was a glycerin formula dropped onto his fur with an eye-dropper just before we rolled the cameras."
Director Buckley likes to work with reversal stock because of its contrast and harshness, and Carpenter says this means even more light is necessary. "We had to pour so much [of the glycerin] onto his face and hair," he recalls. "In the first version of dailies we saw, there was nothing there. It was one of those moments of pure panic."
Features To Spots
"I’m sure I have some sort of style, but I don’t think about it too much. I think about the needs of the script," assesses Carpenter. "I enjoy being an old-style Hollywood cameraman. In the old days the stars were icons, [and a DP] worked hand-in-hand with the makeup people or the costume people to maintain that Hollywood iconic imagery."
This versatile aesthetic marks Carpenter’s 30-year career, which started in San Diego at the local public television station, KPBS. Carpenter had no formal training, never went to film school, but this was ’69 and employers were more flexible than now.
The Orange County, Calif., native went to work doing cultural and scientific programs on 16mm film. "We got to write, direct, edit the music, cut the film, and shoot the film. One just learned quickly about the other perspectives," he recounts. "I made every single mistake you can make."
Then Carpenter was offered the chance to DP a low-budget horror film. "One of the directors [at KPBS] convinced a furniture czar in Orange County to fund a low-budget horror picture—if the czar’s wife could be in the movie," says Carpenter. "Miraculously, the film was released. That gave us all hope, and I moved up to Los Angeles."
That film, Sole Survivor, may not be available anymore, but it did launch Carpenter into ever-more complicated feature jobs, from the indie Lady in White to the ’94 big-budget True Lies, which brought him into contact with James Cameron. True Lies placed Carpenter square in the middle of Hollywood action, and the pressure, especially from Cameron, was "very hard" to take. Even so, after cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who directs commercials out of Dark Light Pictures, West Hollywood, left the set of Cameron’s epic Titanic, Carpenter took the call. That set was a widely reported hothouse, for Carpenter as well as for his predecessor. At one point Carpenter went to producer Jon Landau and declared, "You’ve been through guy A. I’m guy B. Get ready to go with guy C."
But Carpenter stayed the course, capturing great shots on huge set pieces involving armies of people and as many as 13 different cameras. The raft of Oscars earned by Titanic included one for best cinematography. "If you understand the bottom line with Jim [Cameron], it’s that he wants everyone who walks in a theater and pays ten bucks to have an experience," Carpenter says of the director. "So good, bad or indifferent, whatever storms come up, they are just storms, and you go back to making the movie."
Big Hollywood and an Oscar may be a thrill—Carpenter also DP’d The Negotiator and Charlie’s Angels—but about the time of True Lies, he also took up advertising work. He was looking to relieve the pressure of going from feature to feature. Carpenter loves ads, especially working with directors like hungry man’s Buckley, which he’s been doing for a little over three years. "It’s pure fun," Carpenter says of his spotwork. "Especially going to a hungry man shoot, more often than not, the commercials are just silly. They’re goofy. I really love doing that."
