NEW HORIZONS WITH ALAN JACOBY
Last week, The Sheet reviewed Kevin Costner’s latest venture into the western genre—the first installment of a four-part saga, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1.
And last week, the Mammoth Channel’s Dan McConnell informed The Sheet that former Mammoth resident, Alan Jacoby, was the “A” camera operator of the film. That’s industry lingo for the primary lens on a shot.
But long before Jacoby was working behind the scenes of big-budget Hollywood films—what he calls “pictures”—he was a newspaper man.
While studying at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) as an undergrad, he started at the school paper as a photojournalist, covering news and sports.
“I realized I might want to do it,” remembers Jacoby. “Photography, I mean.”
After UCSB, he went onto what was formerly known as the Brooks Institute of Photography in Montecito. There, he started to entertain the idea of a career in entertainment, hoping to find work as “a stills guy”—the crew member on a film set responsible for capturing still photos to be used for the publicity and marketing of the production.
And by the early aughts, Jacoby had landed on sets for such projects as Baywatch, the war drama Windtalkers, and Star Trek: Nemesis. But, his focus had changed. Literally.
“I enjoyed the cinematography,” he says—the actual making of the movie more than the photographing of what the movie was doing. I fell in love with the opportunity to move the camera to help tell the story.”
The next few years—“the olden days,” says Jacoby—would be spent coming through the ranks as an equipment loader and assistant cameraman before cinching some of his own cinematography credits.
The Sheet asked Jacoby what lengths he had gone to in his career to move that camera more effectively as to tell the story at hand.
He recounted helicopter flights over Serbia. Rock climbing expeditions. “Underwater stuff.” Going to jail for stuffing someone into a large, fake cake to crash the Playboy Mansion (beneath the frosting was not cake, however, but empty Gatorade bottles, in which the stow-away could relieve himself).
But what kept Jacoby in the industry, through all of it, was the camaraderie on set. What he calls “the family away from family aspect.” There’s great loyalty on the production side of Hollywood, says Jacoby. You stick with the same crew because you know each other’s shorthand.
*On this picture, Costner urged Jacoby to include his actual family in production. The cinematographer’s two daughters appear as extras in the film.
“It helps that I’ve had great mentors,” says Jacoby. “I got introduced to a lot of great people early on.”
One of those people was Jimmy Miro, who serves as the Director of Photography on Costner’s saga.
According to Jacoby, Miro was one of the first Steadicam operators (a type of camera mount that allows enhanced stabilization for tracking shots) and has film credits on several Oscar-winning titles—Titanic, Crash, and A Few Good Men to name a few. Miro has also worked with Costner previously on Dances with Wolves and Open Range.
For Jacoby, it was the first time working with the Hollywood mainstay.
“It was a dream,” he says. “Kevin’s humble and soft spoken. A pleasure to be around. Never riled up, always even-keeled.”
He’s a gentleman, says Jacoby of Costner—who serves as the franchise’s mustachioed star, as well as its director and bootstrapping producer.
He’s a filmmaker, too, who sees the value in paying homage to the films of old.
According to Jacoby, much of the film’s pre-production revolved around location scouting for those landscapes best suited to seat the action of its plot.
“One of the goals is that the landscapes and the locations are like a character,” says Jacoby. “A lot of the picture is paying tribute to the John Wayne westerns; to Sergio Leone. Those classic 60s films.”
Several locations in Moab and St. George, Utah, were chosen for Horizon because of their prior features in “quintessential Western” films.
Everything down to the cinematic ratio of the widescreen was considered. According to Jacoby, the modern standard in filmmaking is to use a 2:39:1 aspect ratio—a “skinnier” frame. Horizon uses a 1:85:1—a ratio more common to older films, and one that gets “more top and bottom… lets you see more of the world, out there.”
And, says Jacoby, if you pay close enough attention to how the movie is shot, there’s a stillness to it. An intentionality given to the changing movement of the camera. He says that Costner, as a director, prefers “quiet cameras.” In other words, cinematic style in which movement is dictated by the story.
“We’re not just moving the camera around because it looks cool,” says Jacoby. “We want the camera in the right spot to tell the story the way it needs to be told… And we move it when a line is poignant. Or to help make a moment more impactful. Everything we do—everything—is story driven.”
And what that kind of style requires, says Jacoby, is clear communication amongst himself, Miro, Costner, and the other crew. And then everything else has to go right. Actors have to nail their lines. Wardrobe can’t malfunction. The familial level of camaraderie kicks in. Everyone has to work “on the same wavelength.”
But for Jacoby, that’s the very thing he likes about operating.
“It’s how I get my kicks,” he says. “To be there in the moment with everyone working. To be there in the moment with the actors… They’re in the middle of a scene. They’re delivering the performance of their life. And I’m right there, capturing it just five or six feet away.
When you cut, you just look at each other, and you both know ‘Oh yeah, we got that. Yeah, we got that.’”
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When The Sheet spoke to Alan Jacoby, the cast and crew had recently wrapped the first few weeks of filming for Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 3. According to the cinematographer, they are set to return to filming at the end of August.
On Wednesday, it was announced that Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 would be pulled from its intended August 16 theatrical release.
Said a spokesperson from the film’s studio, New Line Cinema, the decision was made, “in order to give audiences a greater opportunity to discover the first installment of Horizon over the coming weeks.”
