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Although Fail-Safe offered numerous photographic challenges to Hirschfeld and his crew, which included 1st AC Owen Roizman and operator Al Taffett, one of the biggest was also one of the simplest to solve — provided one was ready to approach the dilemma from a completely new angle. Much of the drama takes place in the Strategic Air Command operations center, a futuristic bunker in which maps of the world and radar images of aircraft are projected on wall-sized displays. It was up to Hirschfeld to create the live, on-set effect of these oversized displays, and rearscreen projection was out of the question because there wasn’t enough distance for the proper throw. “To top things off, Lumet told me to be prepared to make 360-degree pans on this set, which meant no lights could be on floor stands,” wrote Hirschfeld.“The solution was to use front projection on a flat matte screen, but that meant keeping the actors and mike boom out of the projector beam to prevent their shadows from ruining the effect. Using a scale ruler, a protractor, and lens and projection field charts, I came up with the answer. The cast would have to stay at least 16' from the screen and the projector would have to be elevated 35' above the stage floor, beaming down to the screen. With these facts and figures in mind, the set was designed and constructed.”The bulk of Hirschfeld’s lighting was incorporated into the set, with just a few fixtures overhead. However, given that the projectors were only delivering about 9 foot-candles of light to the “display” screens, the cinematographer was forced to illuminate the rest of the scene at very low levels to properly balance the image. Tests revealed that push-processing his stock would allow him to shoot at a stop of f4, the speed of his slowest lens, a 10:1 Angenieux zoom he needed to dramatically pull back from close-ups of “radar” images to wide shots of the entire room. “The result [of the lab process] so enhances the photography that special processing was used throughout the production, except for a few exterior scenes,” he wrote. Asked today about his working relationship with Lumet, Hirschfeld says, “I liked working with Sidney. He came from TV, and he knew how he was going to cut the film and put it together, because in live TV you do that on the spot. He could tell me that he wanted to dolly from here to there with a 50mm lens. I was to do the lighting and he would design the shots.” The two men would work together again on the 1972 film Child’s Play, a horror yarn set in a Catholic school.Hirschfeld’s article on Fail-Safe was not the last time his byline appeared in AC. In June 1965, he detailed the function and usefulness of the A-500 Luminance Analyzer. In November 1967, he thoughtfully described the photographic dilemmas posed by the advent of color TV. Faced with unique shooting demands on the sci-fi feature The Ultimate Warrior (1975), Hirschfeld teamed with Technicolor to employ a new latensification-enhancement process, the use of which he wrote about in August 1975. “I started teaching cinematography pretty early on at the Brooklyn Institute of Photography, and it was very satisfying,” he notes. “Writing for American Cinematographer was satisfying in the same way. Writing the book Image Control came about through my teaching. Using filters and shooting in available light were two things the students always wanted to know more about, and there was no practical book on using filters, so I wrote one.“You have to understand that this attitude of sharing information and teaching young people how to be cinematographers is a relatively new thing,” he continues. “When I was just starting out, in the 1940s, many cinematographers were very protective of their techniques. They would never tell you exactly how something was done. But the ASC and American Cinematographer helped change that, and that example has been copied throughout the industry.”Hirschfeld’s next feature was The Incident (1967), an incendiary drama directed by Larry Peerce. Based on a harrowing true story, the picture begins as two vicious hoods (Martin Sheen and Tony Musante) commandeer a crowded New York City subway car loaded with passengers, using fear to control their captives. “Obviously, the Transit Authority of New York was not happy about having a film of this type made,” Hirschfeld wrote in the May ’68 issue of AC. The Authority’s refusal to cooperate, as well as practical considerations, forced the production to build its own subway station, train car and other vital set pieces. “My approach to this film was to strive for the most realistic style of photography possible. Tests were made in black-and-white and then in muted color. No matter how subdued the color of clothing, props, and even the actors’ faces with pale makeup, the color seemed to be a distraction from the overall somber effect we wished to achieve. It was therefore decided to film the picture in black-and-white.”Using force development to increase contrast also gave Hirschfeld some added stop, allowing him to pull an f4 on 80-ASA Double-X stock with just 30 foot-candles. For lower-light conditions, he employed Tri-X, giving him an f2.3 at just 5 foot-candles, and for extremely dark situations (such as long shots of subway cars running along tracks) he employed a super-fast f0.95 lens. “If you can see it, I can photograph it,” he told Peerce.Given that 80 percent of the film takes place in a speeding subway car, it was a given that the extensive filming within it would be done using rear-projected backgrounds and interactive lighting to suggest movement. However, the filmmakers were denied permission to photograph the necessary background plates aboard actual trains. “I threw away the rule book and shot all the background material with an Arriflex camera, handheld and hidden in a cardboard box,” Hirschfeld wrote, noting that using available light forced him to use the somewhat grainy Tri-X stock. “I depended on the rocking movement of our subway car set to hide any jiggle of the background film. My assistant and I rode back and forth, pressing the carton against the car window as we pulled in and out of stations.” The duo was caught and ejected three times over four nights of clandestine photography.The stagebound train-car set — weighing 7,000 pounds without passengers — was mounted atop a heavy-duty rotating platform and could be easily pivoted to get the correct axis between Hirschfeld’s camera and his rear-projection system. And, despite the somewhat shaky and grainy plate photography, the effect worked perfectly. “I anticipated that the dirty car windows would hide a multitude of photographic sins,” he wrote. “They did.”One of Hirschfeld’s first Hollywood features was Mel Brooks’ comedy Young Frankenstein (1974), which stars Gene Wilder as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, who attempts to re-create his grandfather’s experiments. “Mel was a real prankster,” recalls the cinematographer. “When I went in to interview with him, he started picking apart my photography in Diary of a Mad Housewife. He said, ‘I noticed you had some problems on location with the gels on the windows, because I saw a flicker there.’ I said, ‘You saw a flicker?’ He played it down, saying, ‘Yeah, but I know how tough that is to do.’ I told him that was very interesting because we weren’t on location — it was a studio, and there weren’t any gels on windows. He laughed it off but then started picking on other things. I said, ‘If you’re going to just put my feet to the fire, there’s no point in my being here.” I was about ready to walk when Gene [Wilder] said, ‘Mel, stop kidding him!’ Mel was just pulling my leg to see how I’d react.”
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