[Tig] A Hard Day's Night photography

[Marc Wielage]

On 11/30/07 8:40 AM, "Jeff Kreines" <jeffkreines at mindspring.com> wrote:

>> AHDN is really a good film, photographed beautifully (Director Richard
>> Lester; can someone remind me who was the DoP?).
> 
> Lovely film, shot by Gil Taylor.  Obviously influenced by the New
> Wave, but slicker.  Anyone know what stocks it was shot on?
>------------------------------<snip>------------------------------<

I should know, but it's been awhile.  I worked for several weeks on the
MAKING OF HARD DAY'S NIGHT special (with archival producer Ron Furmanek),
and I had some of the original B&W camera negative up on a Rank in the early
1990s when we worked on it at Complete Post, Hollywood.  The film was in
great shape, probably untouched since only an optical dupe was used for that
opening credit sequence.  Sharp-eyed viewers would notice that Ron
duplicated parts of the opening of the film, but we keyed in new credits
over the camera negative to create a new opening title sequence for the
"making of" doc.

My memory is that the film stock was Kodak, and I'm guessing it was Plus X
(or whatever the daylight fine-grain stuff was in 1964).  The picture held
up well, but the original mag tracks were beginning to shed, as I recall.

We had nothing to do with the 5.1 remix, which was done a few years later by
Miramax.  Tom Nottingham did that video transfer, I believe from a couple of
different fine-grain prints.

Speaking of Gil Taylor, he also shot the first STAR WARS, among other
classics.  Ironically, George Lucas was not happy with the photography of
that film.  The one sequence George did like was the infamous "garbage
chamber" scene, which Lucas lit himself on the one day Taylor was ill and
couldn't make the shoot.  (I heard this one from the man himself, so I
assume it's true.)

--Marc Wielage/Senior Colorist
Technicolor Creative Services
Hollywood, USA

NOTE:  The comments above are strictly mine, and may not necessarily
represent those of my employers.