Look at that sunset! Yes, so pretty. I have something wonderful to tell you. What is it? People are so willing to help! Even though the sonogram revealed problems with our child, we will give thanks for him every day. No way else to say this. It was meant to be. Global warming. Financial ruin.
Bad hookups. There are random forces poised to get you, most of the time when you least expect them. Some of us organize our lives in patterns that create a sort of balance. We forge schedules, we label stuff, we categorize, all to squeeze this mad mad world back in line.
Cinematographer Alec Hirschfeld also happens to be a writer. A good one. He reveals intriguing anecdotes about those and other films and his working methods. He also talks about problems that some of these films raised, like how Taxi Driver was physically challenging for the staff, and also psychologically to Hirschfeld. He felt like an outsider with his long hair and alternative lifestyle. I well remember the time in which such differences mattered. As every creative knows, sometimes you take what work you can get.
He uses his experiences on that film to tell about the changing attitudes toward on-screen nudity. In B movies, nobody cared, and people freely walked about during the nude scenes, some just to gawk. He also uses his experiences with the black-produced film Cotton Comes to Harlem to write about the racial attitudes he grew up with, those of a middle-class educated Jewish boy.
I might have understood how significant it was, in the face of institutional racism, that this film was being made at all. Hirschfeld deals candidly with his life.
