June / 2010

The Legend Lives On:
Marilyn… Forever Blonde

by Karl Herrmann csc

Sunny Thompson.

As a freelance DOP, one never knows what will come with the next phone call. In this instance, it was a call to photograph a one-woman stage play called Marilyn: Forever Blonde. As it turns out, the play had been produced and run in New York about 15 years prior, to rave reviews. Various broadcast entities had optioned it, but never produced it. Now, the play was re-surfacing to open in Los Angeles and there was interest in filming it. Hmmm. Marilyn Monroe. One-woman play. Hollywood icon. Sounds interesting.

My initial instinct on what the producers were looking for was to run the play X-number of times and shoot it from various angles, cut it together like a music video, and viola! Wrong. In actuality, there was a different plan afoot. The production company rented studio space from Victory Studios in Seattle. It had a three-sided white cyc stage on which the three sets – bedroom, bathroom and living room – for the actual play were placed. The sets, I might add, were also painted white, because that’s what was being used in the stage play. Great, white-on-white and the production company had already done a deal to get the cameras, Sony 900s (version one).

A quick discussion with the producers, Kelly Johnston and Greg Thompson, produced some wonderful custom-made sheer curtains to cover all three sides of the background cyc. Behind the sheers and lighting up the wall, gaffer Doug Jordan placed 1K nook lights on the floor with three layers of full magenta to give a pink aura to Marilyn’s early life. As the play unfolded, Marilyn went from set to set stopping here, there and everywhere to deliver dialogue, so how to light it?

Inspiration came from the great Hollywood glamour still photographer of that era, George Hurrell. Always backlight. This was provided and contained to specific areas by the wonderful and powerful “Butterfly” lights with hard honeycomb crates. These units are a four-bulb, individually switched fixture capable of 2,000 watts. Hard, spotty, front light, usually in the Paramount Loop configuration, was accomplished with Tweenies operating at full spot, and wired down to the appropriate output. All lighting was run through a dimmer board for final tuning and dramatic effect.

Sunny Thompson, who is Marilyn, was astounding. She made possible our impossible schedule of 16 pages a day. She could simply back up the dialogue to anywhere in the script. Karl Herrmann csc

The look was right, but now we were confronted with the world of HD and not the long-tonal range of black-and-white negative. Enter my associate and terrific digital-intermediary technician, Enrique del Rio. He got the two Sony 900s up and running through a Sony 750 MSU and patched through various monitors on set. We had a huge 40-inch Sony CRT, which made imaging and focus checking great. It was so good, that eventually everyone left video village and was hovering over our shoulders as we manipulated the image.

Sunny Thompson, who is Marilyn, was astounding. She made possible our impossible schedule of 16 pages a day. She could simply back up the dialogue to anywhere in the script. We used various camera movement styles according to the script. At times the camera was absolutely static and other times Robin Buerki was doing his magic with the Steadicam to facilitate the mood of the play. Marilyn would go from one end of the stage on set one all the way to the other end of the stage and set three all in one shot, all the while speaking her dialogue. We had Robin cabled up while on the Steadicam so we could see everything in terrific HD (1080/23.98) resolution on the large monitor.

Now was the time to do that classic Hollywood 1950s song-and-dance number, Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend [from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes]. To stay true to the era, we used dollys and crane moves exclusively on this section of the show. Again, the sets were all pure white, so we used very vibrant colored gels to paint life into them. It was remarkable how well the HD picked up the intense colors.

As Marilyn went through her life, and the story begins to wind down, we changed out the triple magenta gels on the background cyc lights to a deep purple. This brought down the mood and the camera movement settled down with it. At this point, I asked Enrique to go into the Sony 750 MSU and create a de-saturated, faded look and match it to both cameras. Here the MSU was invaluable as everyone could see the image on our huge monitor, and we could instantly switch from our normal look to the new de-saturated version.

When Marilyn went into a rant about her life, the camera stayed totally static as she paced through the frame and right off camera only to come back on again like a locomotive and right off frame in the other direction. Exhausted, she finally crawled up to her bed, and Doug brought down the lighting on the dimmer board to full silhouette while she dropped all her clothes and laid down one final time. On her last close up we set an eye light that was so subtle it just seemed to flicker with life. As she died, the eye light simply dwindled out and she was left, alone, in silhouette, and in our memories forever.

The project was amazing on numerous levels. Sunny’s portrayal of Marilyn is riveting, in part due to her talent, but also to Stephanie Shine’s direction. The two have the Marilyn character completely wired, which made our shooting schedule possible. Is it a stage play? Is it a movie? Is it a period piece based on the look, lighting and character? Is it a modern show utilizing all the technical brilliance of the HD format? I don’t have the answer as I feel it was all of these mixed together to produce a unique shooting experience.

The one-woman play, Marilyn: Forever Blonde, was written by Sunny Thompson’s husband, Greg, and continues to tour the U.S. and Canada after a run at the Leicester Square Theatre in London, England, November 2009. Karl Herrmann csc lives in Vancouver and spent 25 years based in Los Angeles. His numerous television credits include pilots and series for Touched by an Angel and Dawson’s Creek. His feature resume includes visual effects work on Academy Award-winning films such as I, Robot, E.T., The Right Stuff and Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi.

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