American cinematographer David Mullen, ASC, took the Showlight audience through some highlights of the history of lighting when he presented his session about lighting the period TV series, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, for which he has won several Emmy and ASC Awards. The series takes place in various settings, including a nightclub, theatre stages, outdoor shots and television studios in the 1950s and required extensive research into the period.
Mullen began by saying that although street lighting had progressed from gas to low pressure sodium in the 1920s, by the 1950s the majority of cities had tungsten streetlights. In the three main areas of New York featured in the show, the Upper West Side where the main character, Miriam 'Midge' Maisel lives, Midtown Manhattan where her husband works, and the West Village where they do stand up comedy, he used tungsten to recreate the period look. By that point in time, however, offices were using fluorescent lighting, which provided a contrast to the tungsten in outdoor shots that included surrounding office buildings at night. For one video he showed during the presentation, the couple leave Midtown where the lighting is harsher LEDs and arrive in the Village which has a warm tungsten glow. The production arranged for the Empire State Building to be lit in white behind the couple, and during research they discovered that the former Met Life building on Park Avenue was still under construction so they changed it in post production.
Mullen explained that PAR cans technically took off in the 1960s but there were some units around in the 50s which they used to make the Gaslight Café, a comedy club, in a black box theatre. More modern PAR cans were used and painted black so they would disappear into the ceiling.
During the making of the pilot, Mullen learned that the director, Amy Sherman-Palladino, wanted to do a lot of continuous cuts, so he used darkened areas, such as the stairwell, to transition from a street in the Village into the set for the club to hide the change in locations.
In season two, Mullen described some scenes that took place in a television studio. He had uncovered a historical photo of Lucille Ball where he saw strip lighting in the background which he was able to replicate. The team also realized that even though television was black and white at the time, after the set was built it showed up as colorless and the art department asked him to add color so he used spots in cyan and magenta focused on stage curtains on to the set to add contrast.
Mullen also referenced a photograph taken by Stanley Kubrick on a trip to a television studio in 1947 when he was a high school student. Kubrick used this massive fill technique with floodlights and it became his go-to solution, lighting the floor or ceiling with thousands of tiny floodlights.
To maintain the warm look, Mullen used tungsten on all stage lighting scenes except when Midge, the main character, moves around using the whole stage and he didn't want to move tungsten fixtures or allow shadows on her face so he added a SkyPanel from Arri. The SkyPanel tracks the gel colors perfectly.
One of Mullen's favorite moments is when Lenny Bruce takes Midge to a Cuban nightclub. He explained he was trying to recreate the feeling of the film I am Cuba, drawing a sketch of that club for the art department. He said, "Because of the continuous shots, I couldn't use LEDs because I didn't want to risk the camera catching them changing color. Back then, there would be tungsten fixtures with gels in them. To keep the lighting even, every six feet I’d have a PAR can with a gel in pink, cyan, or yellow repeating it through the space and I ended up hanging 72 lights in the room. In I am Cuba, you often see lights beaming into the smoke contributing to the atmosphere and shadows so haze was important."
The Cuban night club scene includes a 360° shot, so Mullen had the art department build a door into the wall where the cameraman on a dolly steps out of and it shuts behind him so as the shot revolves you don't see where he came in.
To even out shadows on faces, he used Astera tubes on the floor of the club and they could be turned off when not in use but there are still some shots where you can see them if you look closely.