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Professional Hollywood tips its hat to a dozen top cameramen. There is lean, youthful Gregg Toland, who grabbed last year's Oscar with his eerie effects in Wuthering Heights, has this year supplied two more candidates with The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home. Toland's daring, imaginative style has earned him a reputation as the Artist of the cameramen, even though he is somewhat shorter on technical skill than his top-notch competitors. After 20 years at the job, Toland, now 36, earns $62,000 a year from his contract with Samuel Goldwyn, lives a quiet, unsocial Hollywood life in spite of his upper-bracket salary.
The millions of cinemaddicts who "ohed" and "ahed" over the brilliant colors in Gone With the Wind were admiring the first Technicolor job by the perfectionist of the cinematographers, tall, blond, rosy-cheeked Ernest Haller. At 44, Ernie Haller has 17 years' experience and 80 pictures behind him but still frets and fumes over details with a wad of gum in his mouth, always complains about his results. Now earning $800 a week at Warner Brothers, Haller's single Technicolor experience with G. W. T. W. has won him recognition as the dean of the field. Like most photographers, Haller's hobby is photography, and he is now building a swimming pool near his San Fernando Valley home with a peek hole in one side for experiments in marine photography.
Joseph Valentine (Guiseppe Valentino), who calls himself a "dago wop," has followed Deanna Durbin's cinema growth from a pup. Most great reputations in the business are built on subdued arty effects —the specialties of Toland, Gaudio and chunky Chinese James Wong Howe—but Valentine has won his colors with gaiety. The lilt he catches in the gait of Deanna Durbin swinging along, singing a song, is the difference between making a musical bright and fluffy or allowing it to settle like cold soufflé. Dark, athletic, with a Cupid's-bow mustache, Valentine is a leader in cameramen's politics, earns $700 weekly on his Universal contract.
How much fervent fans owe to these and other experts of the lens is Holly wood's well-guarded secret. But many an idol stays at the top of the heap because of their magic. They know they must avoid oblique angle close-ups of Clark Gable so that his sugar-bowl ears won't predominate. They quickly learn that a new comer like Ingrid Bergman must be shot from the left as her face is expressionless from the other side. They are careful with close-ups of older beauties like Claudette Colbert and Marlene Dietrich, keeping them motionless to conceal the wrinkles that make-up and careful lighting won't hide. Photographing rubber chins and putty noses on a bias to avoid detection is a matter of course.
They must also have eyes and memories more sensitive than a geologist's seismograph. The exigencies of movie production often require that successive scenes in the same room be shot weeks apart. The most accurate instruments used to record the intensity of light have a wide margin of error; so at least 25% of the factors involved in reconstructing a similar setting depend on the sensitivity of the cameraman. The experts say you have to "feel" it.