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Glitter Gulch
Director Todd Haynes and cinematographer Maryse Alberti
trace the rise and fall of a glam-rock enigma.

From American Cinematographer, November 1998

In between the lingering hangover from Sixties psychedelia and the banality of the late Seventies disco era, pop music entered into a strange new world of truly progressive sounds, outrageous fashion and even bolder inversions of sexuality and identity. Spearheaded by such pop icons as David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Bryan Ferry, the glam-rock movement was doomed to a short life; like almost all provocative trends of the time, it was eventually drowned by the tide of crass commercialism that swamped the 1980s. But glam did provide a few years of unforgettable high theater that continues to echo and reverberate in the more stylish performers of the modern era.

Velvet Goldmine writer/director Todd Haynes, a passionate rock-music aficionado who grew up in Southern California, discovered the glam movement a few years after the fact, but says that the songs still had a powerful effect on him. "For Americans, glam rock was a bit different than it was for the British, because it didn't have the same sort of mainstream success over here in the States," he says. "I got to know about it a bit later, when I was in college. What was really interesting to me was the degree to which it was all happening at the same time, and how artists banked off each other's ideas. David Bowie was really involved in the production of a lot of people's music, like Lou Reed's Transformer and Iggy Pop's Raw Power. He really had his finger in a lot of pies. "

Although Haynes stresses that his film is not a note-by-note retelling of Bowie's early Seventies golden years, he admits that it is loosely inspired by the curious friendship that was struck between Britain's Bowie, the consummate stylistic chameleon, and American wild-man Iggy Pop, the rocker's rocker. In a story structure that winks cheekily at the venerable classic Citizen Kane, budding journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is sent by his editors to interview former contemporaries of once-legendary glam-rock superstar Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who has seemingly disappeared into the obscurity of a gloomy, weirdly Orwellian Eighties landscape. Through the reminiscences of sources such as Slade's ex-wife, Mandy (Toni Collette), his former manager, Jerry Devine (Eddie Izzard) and artistic muse Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), Stuart gradually unveils an enigmatic, impressionistic portrait of fallen glamour.

"To me, Citizen Kane represents the classic structure of a Hollywood film which examines a famous, mysterious figure but is ultimately never able to define who he is," Haynes says. "In Citizen Kane, the result is all of these conflicting points of view, and this final hanging question of what 'Rosebud' means. That film proves that you can never really know anyone onscreen—and maybe no one in life, either—in some absolute, total way. That's the only way I could imagine approaching a film about a famous rock star. It wasn't my intention to presume this intimate knowledge of his private world, but more to look at him through the layers of people who knew him and the fans who followed him."

The director turned to cinematographer Maryse Alberti to translate his ambitious script to the screen. A longtime Haynes collaborator and Bowie admirer, Alberti jumped at the chance. The cinematographer had previously collaborated with Haynes on his experimental feature debut, Poison, and his short Dotty Gets Spanked. Alberti's other feature credits include Zebrahead and Todd Solondz's recent Happiness, and she has also lent her talents to the documentaries Paris is Burning, Confessions of a Suburban Girl, Crumb (which earned Best Documentary and Best Cinematography awards at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival) and the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings.

Ironically, Alberti had just finished working with Bowie on a forthcoming Michael Apted-directed documentary about artists' inspirations when she got the call from Haynes about Velvet Goldmine. "I was a great fan of Bowie in the early Seventies," the French-born Alberti says. "It was the music of my generation. He's just an amazing man. At the time of the documentary, everybody was asking him for the rights to use his music in Velvet Goldmine, and he kept on saying no. I tried too, of course, and he said, "Oh, not you too, Maryse!" .

While Alberti's knowledge of and affection for glam rock certainly was a helpful factor in her understanding of the script, Haynes says that other personality factors also came into play on Velvet Goldmine. "I like Maryse's style as a person, so our working relationship has a great deal to do with the fact that we communicate very well," the director comments. "One thing I've noticed about Maryse is that she creates an atmosphere on the set among her crew and particularly among actors that's extremely trusting. She's done films with me that have contained demanding content for actors — sexually or otherwise — and I think they trust her. They feel a kind of security with her that they might not feel in an all-male, macho kind of environment."

"On my film Poison, I remember her being extremely comfortable with gay male sexuality, when at that point I thought that most women felt excluded from it. I always felt that she could kind of enjoy it. It was sexy to her to watch it, and it definitely shows [in her cinematography]. I think she made it accessible to audiences beyond a gay male audience, which is great. Women in particular have found the films of mine with gay content extremely erotic, which is surprising to me! Velvet Goldmine deals with androgyny and turning men into sexual objects, really, so Maryse was the ideal person for the job."

Since the backdrop of the early Seventies glam rock scene in London was being used by Haynes as a mere jumping-off point for some very fertile flights of imagination, a healthy preproduction period was necessary for Alberti to get a handle on the film's visual style. Both the director and cinematographer live in New York City, so the two spent a week together hashing out ideas at a café near Alberti's home.

"A lot of the film isn't based in any reality as we know it," Alberti points out. "There are scenes in most movies where characters go to the supermarket, or they go home and have dinner, and right away you can see how it should look in your mind. In Velvet Goldmine, we have [imaginary] places like the 'Grand Ballroom' or the 'Posh Hotel' — it takes a little more work to visualize those scenes and communicate them to a crew. I tried to pick Todd's brains as much as I could; he has intelligence, a great imagination and is a great filmmaker."

To establish a set of visual references, Haynes and Alberti looked at specific films from the early Seventies, as well as some rather early, crudely made music video spots for glam-rock acts, and hundreds of still photographs and album covers by such definitive photographers of the era as Mick Rock. Haynes explains, "Like a lot of directors, I compile a lot of imagery not only as a whole panorama of references to guide myself, but also as a way to talk specifics with the other artistic people I bring onto the project. For this film, I compiled three mammoth books chock-full of clippings and photos. Maryse and I spent a lot of time looking not only at the way these artists were depicted in terms of costumes, makeup and hair, but also how they were photographed in terms of lighting and lenses. That was really the kickoff point for looking at a lot of films from the period that were inspiring to me while I was writing the script. It was also helpful to Maryse, since she could study the very different camera vernacular that existed in the early Seventies. Nicolas Roeg's Performance was probably the single most influential film for me. It still feels fresh and inventive today, which says so much about what was being done in film at that time."

Particulary inspiring to Haynes was the jarring use of zoom lenses in Performance and other films of the period, a technique now generally considered to be dated and passé. "Today, you have the constant movement in and penetration of the camera into physical space, with swooping tracks and pyrotechnics of all kinds," he describes. "The camera of the late Sixties and early Seventies seemed to really hold back — it didn't physically enter space, it would instead zoom, pan, or swish through space. It would rack-focus suddenly, identifying one part of the frame to the other. The difference is that you really got a sense of surface, this beautiful, almost caressing of the surface of the screen. In Performance or early Robert Altman films, like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the camera searches for and finds the subject in a fog of blurry haze and grain, then finds focus on one thing and follows it somewhere else. It's a more voyeuristic way of seeing, because you're not physically entering the space — you're staying outside and using the technology to scan the surface and isolate certain parts of the screen."

By using zooms extensively to create a more voyeuristic visual style (the cinematographer relied heavily on Panavision's 4:1 17.5-75 Primo and 25-250mm lenses on a Panaflex Gold camera throughout the shoot), Haynes and Alberti aimed to as much as possible make the film look as if it had actually been made in the 1970s, with the narrative framing sequences set in the 1980s presented as a projection of the future. The director states, "We really tried to use a lot of the [filmic] language of the Seventies, whether it be the camera style, or the use of dissolves and voice-over — things that have gone out of fashion. I really wanted to bring those techniques back with a vengeance in how we told the story visually. I put the script together in the same way that glam rock was put together, as this great collage of sources. Glam rock drew from a lot of references — old-fashioned ideas of Hollywood glamour mixed in with futuristic notions of the space age. Musicians of the glam era kept projecting these notions of a doomed future — that it was all going to end and we'd be living in an Orwellian [dystopia]. They really thought that everything was going to come crashing down, and to a large degree they were right! There was a big repressive aftermath to the drugs and youth culture of the Seventies."

Given this strategy, Alberti was careful to clearly delineate the atmospheres of scenes set in the film's two different eras. "Todd wanted to show the Eighties as a very dry time creatively and sexually," she explains. "He decided to push that thought further, eventually portraying the Eighties as an almost fascist state. I therefore decided to go with very cool, greenish-blue, monochromatic colors in those scenes. The Eighties scenes are quite stark — the costumes and the lighting have almost no color."

By contrast, the film's many Seventies concert scenes are flamboyant in their expressive, deeply saturated colors. "I now fancy myself an expert in the Lee book of filters!" Alberti exclaims with a chuckle. "This was the first movie I've done where I used so many colored gels. We started using them very early in the film, during a prologue in which a little boy in England finds an Oscar Wilde pin and takes it back to his bedroom. I used Lee's 119 Dark Blue gel for the scene, and I tried to use that color throughout the film as a metaphor for the passing of the creative torch."

Since Alberti had never photographed a rock concert before, she did some basic research before the Velvet Goldmine production began. "I looked at some footage of Seventies concerts and found that they were all quite simple in terms of the lighting effects and camera moves," Alberti recalls. "I consulted with a lighting designer named Suzanne Sasic, who's worked with Nirvana and Beck. I went to a Beck concert at the Roseland club in New York City, and I really liked what she did with colors.

"I tried to approach the concerts [in the film] not only as concerts, but as dramatic scenes, each moving the story along in a narrative or dramatic way. For instance, there's a scene in which [Slade's onstage alter ego] Maxwell Demon goes over and starts playing Curt Wild's guitar with his teeth. That's a really sexy scene, so I used colors that I find sensual. I started the concert with very acidic gels — greens, yellows, and edges of reds — and as Brian started his cat-like move toward Curt, I followed him with a Lee 118 deep purple. He then enters a pool of Lee 106 bright orange and starts to play Curt's guitar with his teeth. At the 'Death of Glitter' concert, which symbolizes the end of an era, I used very pale-green and pale-blue colors, with edges of lavender. Why these colors? They just felt right. I once went to see a talk by Vittorio Storaro [ASC, AIC] where a group of young-by-experience cinematographers were all trying to ask him, 'Which gel, which filter?' And Vittorio just started talking about the moon, the sun, the conscious and the unconscious! The message I got from that was to learn your technique but don't let it be the driving force. Instead, trust your intuition and instincts."

Many of the Velvet Goldmine concert scenes were shot at London's venerable and spacious Brixton Academy, the site of countless rock shows over the years. "When I first saw it, it was a bit intimidating because it's a big space!" Alberti exclaims. "For stage lighting I used standard rock 'n' roll concert rigging — truss, grid, and lighting trees and a computer board. Each song had its own color scheme and I played the board almost like a musical instrument. For the Seventies concert scenes, I used traditional lights like Par cans, augmented with a couple of 5Ks, because some of the gels I was using — like the purple Lee 180 — are very saturated and have very low light transmission."

Alberti opted to use Kodak's EXR 5298 for most of the film. "Vision 500T [5279] had just become available at the time, but I felt 98 had a look that was closer to the stocks used in the Seventies," she explains. "I used 93 quite a bit as well for exteriors and some newsreel scenes, which I shot with my Aaton camera in regular 16mm and later blew up to 35mm."

In keeping with Haynes's desire to contrast his view of the vibrancy of the Seventies with the blandness of the subsequent decade, Alberti approached the Eighties concert scenes in a much more sober style. "For the Tommy Stone concert in the Eighties, I used a couple of CyberLights, which give you thin rays of light that can cross and caress and sweep across the stage and audience. Those lights really came along in the Eighties. Todd stressed that the Tommy Stone musical figure had to be much more corporate and cold — he has lost his passion, sensuality and creativity. I therefore used those very electronic tools and cool colors."

Alberti extended this approach even to contrasting scenes depicting the two eras' musical heroes in their respective dressing rooms before they hit the stage. "The first time we see Brian Slade, he's at the mirror in his dressing room before the 'Death of Glitter' concert," she notes. "The room is painted a purplish red. I wanted to make a narrow pool of light in the background, so instead of dealing with a soft light and flagging it down, I used the narrow beam of a Par can with just a little diffusion to open it up a touch, and a purple Lee 180 gel to give the room a heavy feeling. Slade is about to 'kill' the Maxwell Demon character onstage, and he's at the end of his rope. I wanted to keep the room dark, moody and sensual, with no fill light — I was a bit nervous about that idea, but I just went with it. Slade is lit by the small practical lights around the mirror, which give off white light. But I added a tweenie on him with a Plus Green correction gel, which is normally used to correct a lamp to match it with fluorescent light. I used that gel quite a bit throughout the film as a color gel; it's a very nice green. I also used it a lot during scenes in the wings of the rock 'n' roll theater, on the backlight, with smoke acting as a fill light.

"By contrast, for a scene in which Tommy Stone is in his dressing room, I just bounced a light into the ceiling. It's all very white and flat."

Alberti was also asked to simulate the charmingly artless look of early music promotional clips, which can be seen as the prototypes of the modern music video. In these clips, a performer or band would often be photographed against a simple, stark white backdrop. "I lit those scenes with space lights straight from the top, as well as a couple of nine-lights coming through spaced double layers of 1/4 silk diffusion," she explains. "I used double layers so that the light was really diffused. I also used a little edge light from the side, so that the scene wouldn't be completely flat. But the idea is that the room is a white cocoon."

Most challenging for Alberti were fanciful or outlandish scenes in which she didn't have any sort of existing reference to motivate her cinematography. In one such scene, Slade and his fellow musical pranksters dress up in the foppish wigs and pantaloons of 18th-century British aristocrats as they regale journalists during a surreal interview session at the "Posh Hotel."

"I first looked at a lot of [production designer] Christopher Hobbs's drawings, and he had also built small models of the set," Alberti recalls. "I ended up using space lights for the set of the men in black suits who are arranged in a circle around Slade. Otherwise, I used a range of lights as small as Dedos to give a little accent to the sculptures in the background, as well as two 2Ks and a couple of 5Ks. The light in the scene was basically white, with 1/2 CTO on a couple of the lamps to warm up the scene."

Haynes admits mischievously, "I'd love to take credit for that scene, but I can't. It's like what Bowie said in the early Seventies: he was a human Xerox machine, constantly storing references. I tried to replicate that [philosophy] in this film. That scene in particular is a reference to Bowie's management company, Main Man, which once flew a handful of journalists from America to London to witness a Ziggy Stardust show. They put the journalists up at the Dorchester Hotel and wined and dined them. One afternoon, Bowie, his wife, Angie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed basically put on a show for these journalists. Bowie changed his clothes four times, and they drank champagne and ate strawberries. It was this decadent display: 'Let's put on a show, let's make the journalists really believe we are these people!' I really didn't have to take the scene that far from what really happened."

In another highly symbolic sequence, Slade descends a winding staircase as he performs a song in the decadent "Grand Ballroom," a metaphorical backdrop suggesting the singer's (and the glam era's) impending fall from grace. To plan for the sequence, Alberti and Haynes first blocked the action out on a scale-model set. "Todd and I had a small video camera, and we made a little 'man' out of cardboard," Alberti describes. "Todd would hold the little man and walk him down the staircase of the miniature, and I would tape him with a Hi-8 camera so that we could find the right timing and camera moves. I asked Todd, 'What is the Grand Ballroom?' And he told me that it represented decay and the end of an era. The scene [depicts] a last little creative burst or spark. My idea was to light the decaying ballroom as if it had just burned down, so I lit most of the scene from underneath. The set, which was on a soundstage, was basically two huge, flat panels that were painted quite beautifully in perspective. I used a lot of 1Ks and tweenies coming up through the cracks of the staircase, so Slade would be crossing through all of these little 'flames.' I had a couple of 5Ks in the rear. Todd wanted to change the color of some part of the set at the bottom of the staircase, so I used a couple of green gels there to offset the red paint. Slade eventually jumps onto a chandelier rising up from darkness. The chandelier is lit with strings of Christmas lights, and I hid little Dedo lights in there so that once again Slade would be lit from below."

In a flashback scene set on New Year's Eve, 1969, Slade meets his future wife, Mandy, for the first time. Alberti employed a four-point star filter — another common visual tool of the era — to lend the scene a diffused, vaguely psychedelic feel. "The star filter was very much an aspect of the glam-rock look," she points out. "I asked Todd if that scene would be a good place in the movie to use it. Like the zooms, the star filter was used so much in the Seventies that the technique eventually became tacky. But it was liberating to say, 'Yeah, zooms are great if they're used well!' And so is the star filter. It took every reflection of light — from Mylar-type curtains in the background to someone's earring to a reflection on someone's hair — and broke it up into a four-point 'star.' For that scene, I used a lot of 2Ks in a half-circle with just 1/8 CTO on the lamps. When Slade moves toward Mandy, and the romance starts, I tried to create the feeling of time stopping and people stopping around them. We faded down the 2K white light and cross-faded up some 5Ks with the dark-blue Lee 119 gel on them. Once again, those gels are very thick and the 5Ks allowed me to get an exposure."

A surprisingly simple use of gels and mirrors propels a later, very impressionistic scene in which new creative partners Slade and Wild ride together in a merry-go-round car as a hallucinatory mix of lights and spaceships swirl behind them in the night sky. "Christopher Hobbs built this little car that you normally see in fairground attractions," Alberti details. "We had two people simply pushing the car back and forth with the actors inside. I had four 2K lights altogether, two on either side of the car, all fitted with different gels. Four different electricians moved the lights across the actors. One had his light bounced in a mirror, and moved the mirror. Another had a light with a piece of Mylar, which I had him shake and move. I just told my guys to have fun with it, to 'dance' with their lights at different rhythms. Then behind the actors, we rear-projected some footage that the camera operator, Joe Arcidiacono, had shot on a fairground ride with my Aaton 16mm camera. It was very, very low-tech scene, but there is a beauty to the old techniques. The few visual effects shots in the film were done by Peerless Films, a great optical house in London."

Haynes consciously chose to use old-school effects techniques throughout the film to mirror the organic creativity of glam rock. "I wanted the film to have a grittiness to it, even if there were scenes that had to have spectacle and richness," he explains. "It's not like I wanted the film to look tacky; I wanted it to look rich, but I also wanted to achieve that look in simpler ways. That scene with the merry-go-round car is very effective despite the fact that it's achieved in the crudest possible way. Similarly, the music of the time didn't have a lot of gimmicks. When a song had strings, they used real strings, and drums were always real drums."

The filmmakers also aimed for a gritty feel in a Kane-inflected scene set in the Eighties, during which Stuart finds Slade's ex-wife wasting away her days at a drab New York bar, her best years well behind her. "We shot that scene at a bar in London," Alberti recounts. "I made the light quite harsh from the top, and used very little fill light. It's a harsh time in Mandy's life, and she's not glamorous anymore. Earlier in the movie, I lit her in a very glamorous, almost Thirties style. But now, even with no makeup, a bad hairdo and toplight, Toni Collette is still gorgeous, and so is Christian Bale. Christian had no fill light in the scene, because Todd had told me that he hates scenes in movies where everybody has a point of light in their eyes. The key light above Mandy is a Tota light that I hid in the beam of the ceiling with a little bit of diffusion. For the background I used a couple of flagged-off 2Ks from the balcony, as well as a few Kino Flos."

Haynes and Alberti took this carefully deglamourized style to its logical limit in the film's penultimate scene, as Stuart finally tracks down a burnt-out Curt Wild in a New York watering hole drowning in sickening fluorescent light. Ironically, the two find themselves surrounded by young Tommy Stone worshippers. "Todd really wanted me to push that scene to the extreme," Alberti comments. "It's sort of a satire and caricature of the era. He wanted to get across the idea that the Eighties were no fun, with no real creativity. The key for me was to light the scene with no color or passion. I lit the room almost entirely with [ceiling-mounted] Kino Flos with Plus Green correction. In the back window there's a red light to suggest that the scene takes place in New York City, even though we were shooting in London."

Alberti first credits the look of the film to Haynes's vision, then to Christopher Hobbs's production design, Sandy Powell's costumes, Peter King's hair and makeup, and to the support of the film's producer, Christine Vachon.

For Haynes, the film's final sequence sums up the passing of a bold, challenging era in pop culture and closes the movie on an appropriate bum note. "To me, that scene represents the dearth of radical spirit that I saw as such a tremendous aspect of the Seventies," he comments. "It's not meant to blame the poor kids in the bar — this is the music they were given, and it's all they have. Everybody needs some piece of pop music to cling to and get through their teenage years with. For this generation, it's Tommy Stone, while for another generation it's someone else. The onus falls more on the artists themselves. As Curt Wild says, 'If you don't think about what your work is doing to the world, this is what you end up with.'"

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