Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [440]
“Although we had powerful generators and scores of reflectors,” Howe later wrote, “we used them as little as possible for the simple reason that the movement on the Old Man’s boat on even the slightest swell would reveal their presence as a fixed source of light. Instead we used only the sun as our natural source of light. An important reason for this was the desire to give the audience the intense feeling of heat from the glare on the water—the intense exhausting heat the Old Man of the story was getting. And without the use of artificial balanced light, it was necessary we keep changing the position of the camera barge to maintain the proper light source angle.”
Lighting became such a severe problem that filming took more time than anticipated. Tracy’s double, Harold Kruger, typically worked a ten-hour day, while Tracy himself appeared in just two, three, or four setups. “This picture is becoming my life’s work,” he groused to a visiting reporter from the Associated Press. “The book is a masterpiece and should make a great picture. I believe in it. You’d have to believe in it to stay with it after all the troubles we’ve had. By now there isn’t a chance to make back all the money we will spend, so we’re concentrating on making something worthwhile.”
Shooting The Old Man and the Sea in Hawaii. Cinematographer James Wong Howe is behind the camera. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
He was on his best behavior, but Hemingway, for one, could not be placated. His Old Man still weighed 210 pounds, a fact Hayward confirmed in a phone conversation. “Tracy can make money playing fat men now,” the author thundered in a subsequent letter, “or he can always get by in those toad-and-grasshopper comedies with Miss Hepburn, but he is a complete and terrible liability to the picture and has been since he presented himself out of condition in 1956.” Hemingway was also unhappy that Hayward had asked Paul Osborn to go over Peter Viertel’s latest draft of the screenplay to “make the dialogue more playable.”
A half day’s work on June 26 completed the water exteriors, and Tracy was able to leave for L.A. via Honolulu several days ahead of schedule. It was 110 degrees in Burbank the day he walked onto Warners’ Stage 7, where a tank held a million gallons of water tinted with candy dye and Jimmy Howe was struggling to duplicate the single-source lighting he had achieved at Kona. Sturges spoke to Tracy “very frankly” and told him that he was still too fat, yet Sturges and Hayward both had to acknowledge that Tracy’s ulcer made it “damned hard” for him to diet as he should. Hayward assured Hemingway they were photographing their star “very, very carefully” and that while they were both fully aware of the problem, no one else would be. Work got under way again on July 5, with Tracy expecting to be another two months on the picture.
There were camera problems that first day—“par for the course,” as Tracy said—and they got exactly one shot in the can. The following Monday was given over to process work, and the ultraviolet lights needed for Arthur Widmer’s new blue screen effects were so strong (2,300 kilowatts) that Tracy was suffering from eye burn—an injury akin to welder’s flash—by the end of the second day. The doctor gave him drops and ordered him to work only half days in front of the UV lights, a restriction that hobbled the company still further and made the matching shots more difficult.
Felipe Pazos, now twelve, was brought to California for interiors and had to be photographed just as carefully as Tracy to keep from jolting the audience with a year’s growth. “This time we are going to rehearse with him carefully,” Hayward assured a dubious Hemingway, “and try to treat him with some kindness and understanding which he never had before.” Tracy played the film’s first dialogue scenes