Before you go to the theatre to watch The Last Exorcism, consider the terrible cost.
As the movie industry faces the deaths of great classic cinematographers like Conrad C. Hall (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), it finds that the young filmmakers who might have replaced them are being killed off at an alarming rate due to the recent trend of “Found Footage” films.
“Take that Micah Sloat kid from Paranormal Activity,” says directing legend Martin Scorsese, “He really knew how to frame a shot to make the most of a creepy situation. It wasn’t enough that he captured some weird ass shit – he captured it in a way that was artistic. I really feel like he had a future in the industry. Now… well… we all know what happened to him.”
Many industry insiders are now encouraging young filmmakers to avoid this sort of movie. “Hudson Platt must’ve thought he’d hit a goldmine when J. J. Abrams asked him to film Cloverfield,” cinematography teacher Buddy Kraft told us, “now one of my most promising students is gone because he got mauled by – whatever the hell that Cloverfield monster was.”
When contacted for comment, Abrams said “The script for Cloverfield did not involve the death of a cinematographer. Unfortunately, ‘Hud’ was trying to get a really good close up of the monster and tragedy struck. We left the shot in because we knew he would have wanted it that way.”
Kraft continues “I’ve started telling everyone in my classes that if they get an offer for a ‘found footage’ film, they had better make sure they get every page of the script before they accept the job. If they have a director telling them that the ending is still being scripted, I’d walk away. I’ve never seen one of these films where the guy shooting the footage survived.”
Roger Deakins (The Shawshank Redemption, almost every movie by the Coen Brothers) agrees. “I think that young men and women in this industry will do better shooting garbage like Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo than they will doing something like The Last Exorcism. So what if the movie sucks? You get your work out there and you don’t end up like that poor kid standing in the corner at the end of The Blair Witch Project.”
