The Technology Trail

- Introduction
- The Role of the Railroad
- The Three Billies
   Six Decades of Change
THE THREE BILLIES
SIX DECADES OF CHANGE

The story of Billy the Kid has been an enduring subject for film work in New Mexico, evolving along with style and technology. Gallup also drew the accomplished director King Vidor when he made Billy the Kid in 1930 (starring Johnny Mack Brown). The advent of sound in motion pictures - "talkies" - brought challenges to location filming similar to those facing the Edison Company when they began to film outside the studio. In this case the decision of where to hide the microphone was as pressing as the camera setup. MGM's gift to help Vidor capture the essence of the Southwest expanse was a new wide-screen process they called "Realife." Shooting Billy the Kid on 70mm film in an extreme rectangular image, twice as wide as high, provided tremendous sharpness. Vidor said Realife seemed to "see around each object. . . . I thought this was the way that all scenic films would go eventually." But it wasn't to be. Theater owners were not about to invest in new projection equipment for 70mm; they were already complaining about the investment in the new sound film equipment. Vidor wisely shot simultaneously in 35mm and this was the film that was widely released.

According to Vidor, he had hoped the wide-screen image would be like a proscenium on a stage, allowing him to dispense with the reaction shots and cutting setup shots by one-third. He found it didn't work that way: "It wasn't a question of size or width . . . it was a question of emphasis."

Shooting on location wasn't easy. They carried the big camera up to the tops of mountains and used Boy Scouts with semaphores to communicate with actors. However, the big image "discovered" in Billy the Kid helped propel a movement in Hollywood toward spectacular location productions. Though sound required the control they could get on a stage, spectacle required the detail of the real world.

Billy the Kid resurfaced in the cinema roughly three decades later in Arthur Penn's The Left-Handed Gun (1958). This time the location was Santa Fe, the actor playing Billy was Paul Newman. The developments in cinematography had come about to meet the needs of a new, introspective style of acting - Method acting, which meant more extreme close-ups of faces and hands, and flexible camera angles. To underscore the psychological drama rather than highlight background details as in many action Westerns, the film was shot in black and white, and Penn used swirling camerawork to stylize the gunfights.

Another 30 years passed and yet another Billy was to appear, in the form of Emilio Estevez in Chris Cain's Young Guns (1988). Again responding to the trends formed by audience demand, the cinematographic technology had evolved to the present-day sharpness of color, crisp image and clarity of sound that could be as mobile as the galloping horses and gun battles being filmed. As in King Vidor's Billy, this production emphasized detail in surroundings and turned the real-life village of Cerrillos into old Lincoln of the 1870s. Shot in the wide-screen format Cinemascope, Young Guns calls to mind yet another similarity to the Billy six decades previous, and brings to light the simple fact that in spite of the advances and refinements made in cinematography, motion picture cameras still function in essentially the same way as they did a century ago.