The Mindblowing Camerawork Behind "Winning Time"

Plus: A Hollywood Tech Nerd Take on Box Office

Author

Steve
January 09, 2024

Happy New Year Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

Subscribe to get Hollywood Tech Nerds magically delivered to your inbox every Tuesday!

The Mindblowing Camerawork Behind Winning Time

Like many people (but ultimately far too few), I was a big fan of HBO’s Winning Time, the series about the LA Lakers during the early 80s. I loved the show and I’m not even a big sports guy, as can be attested by my father, who I once embarrassed at a family reunion by losing a three-legged race against my one-legged Aunt Joan.

What I didn’t know about Winning Time was how much of its 1980s gameplay aesthetic was captured using 1980s technology: rollerblades! The TikTok of camera operator John Lyke is a veritable rabbit hole of incredible BTS from Winning Time, such as this bit below on the unusual amount of creative freedom afforded to all the camera operators:

@johnfranklyke

I’d describe Todd’s insanely ambitious cinematic vision of this show as fearless genius… and that made for a hell of a good time during pr... See more

In an interview with the Motion Picture Association, cinematographer Todd Banhazl discussed how the show was primarily shot on film to achieve its vintage look:

After a lot of testing we landed on an aged Ektachrome 35mm look being our main format, and mixing into that documentary style 8mm and vintage video tube cameras from 1980. The idea was to create a collage of American cultural memory…

When we had to use more modern film stocks, we did various photochemical and digital techniques to age and destroy the film so that it would feel like an old film print found in a dusty box labeled “Lakers 1980 footage.” For example, we asked the film lab to leave all the dust and hairs on the negative. Things that are normally cleaned up we fought to make sure stayed in the image. Those beautiful imperfections are what excited us the most.

This was just an incredible mix of old and new technology to achieve the show’s vision, from 8mm cameras to green screen backgrounds. It’s too bad Winning Time never found a big enough audience, but remains an incredible technical achievement nonetheless.

A Hollywood Tech Nerd Take on Box Office

I once again find myself amused at the confusion of Hollywood’s business brains regarding 2023’s box office, exemplified well in this Hollywood Reporter piece.

…the box office turned on its head in 2023, leaving the film industry bewildered and befuddled. Superhero fare — the genre that helped prop up the business for well over a decade — no longer got a free pass as megabudget pics bombed, including The Flash and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, both from DC, and Marvel Studios’ The Marvels.

“Audiences’ tastes are changing, and it feels like they want more challenging fare,” says chief Comscore box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

I read these things and it makes me feel like perhaps the family reunion three-legged race gave me permanent brain damage! It’s really not that difficult: the studios are struggling with their superhero slop because they no longer feel like must-see events. Marvel released a movie called Endgame almost 5 years ago, and DC announced they are rebooting their entire universe. The assumption that audiences will continue to flock to superhero movies in theaters when given little reason to do so just makes it clear some studio execs don’t even know why people go to movies in the first place. “Come watch the death rattle of a cinematic universe we are no longer committing to” does not put butts in seats!

Audiences will go to the theater for the same reason as they have for almost 100 years: because they want to feel like they are part of something special. Can the studios remember that?

Here’s a round-up of cool links about Hollywood and technology:

The coolest tech at CES! (link)

Hollywood cyberattacks are back. Did we learn nothing? (link)

How HBO is celebrating 25 years of The Sopranos. (link)