Keyser’s Interview: Day 1

Totally groundless rumors about Keyser’s possible political intrigues in the US capital notwithstanding, Keyser spent the last few days in Washington DC being interviewed for a cable television show involving a famous document about which Keyser happens to know a daemonological thing or two. Unfortunately, Keyser has to sign a release saying he wouldn’t do any publicity about it. Apparently, the network in question gets all fussy about this, and they even have people do web research to make sure that word doesn’t leak out. So, this has to stay strictly between you and Keyser, because if they learn that he’s revealing stuff about his participation in the production of Saint or Sodomite: Will the Real William Howard Taft Please Stand Up? over at the Food Channel, Keyser will be in big trouble. (For those of you with the patience to wait, it would seem that the production company expects to turn the finished product in next April, so it could be on by the summer. Apparently, this passes as “soon” in this line of work.)

All the same, Keyser took along his camera and took a few shots of the production. Perhaps you’ll find it interesting to get a sense of what goes into making the shots of the “talking heads” in those documentaries on the History Channel and whatnot. Take Keyser’s word for it, that setting up takes a lot longer than the actual filming!

The first day of shooting took place at the Library of Congress, in the Lessing J. Rosenwald room. Rosenwald was the son of a bigshot at Sears Roebuck, and himself became chairman. More to the point, he was a fabulous book collector, and left his collection to the Library of Congress. This room used to hold Woodrow Wilson’s library, but at some point they moved Woody’s stuff out and housed Lessing’s reference library here. That is, the huge collection of rare books is held elsewhere, and the room in which the filming took place just holds his books about books. Oddly enough, will come across both the real Rosenwald collection and Woodrow Wilson more intimately in a later post.

Anyway, here are some shots of the shoot to give you a sense of what it’s like to be photographed for this sort of thing. (The formatting looks clearer in the HTML than on the page. The captions go with the picture above.)

Seems there’s endless wrangling with the equipment. That’s Stefan on the right. He’s a German and was in charge of the camera. The guy to the left is his assistant, whose actual job never became clear to Keyser. They didn’t need him the second day.

Screwing around with the settings on the camera. The next day, they started talking about the cost of the equipment. This camera is apparently worth $100,000! Stefan said that if you add in some gadget or other, it’s actually $105,000, to which Keyser commented that once you get to 100,000 five grand one way or the other doesn’t matter. (Which is how they think in Washington too these days, though the relevant figures are trillions and billions.)

The read haired woman on the right is Julie, who’s in charge. Unfortunately, she was bustling about a lot, so most of the pictures of her are (literally) in a blur. The guy on the left was in charge of the audio equipment (Keyser can’t recall his name). Note the white screen in front of her. This will soon be used to diffuse light onto the person being photographed at the lectern.

Here, Julie has the monitor in her hand, and she and the boys are checking out the shot. What’s going on is that the guy from the Library of Congress (at the lectern with the gloves on) is being filmed bringing in the dreaded Necronomicon for Your Humble Pannonian (henceforth YHP) and Other Talking Head (henceforth OTH) to discuss. Note that the screen in front of the lectern is now on. This shot took forever. After it was brought in, Stefan had to film a POV shot as if he were the LoC guy bringing it in. Stefan held this huge camera and sweepingly brought it in towards the book something like ten tens. The camera obviously weighed a lot, and Stefan got pretty worn out. At this point, Keyser had no idea that the camera (which was attached to a sort of belt around Stefan’s waist) was worth a hundred grand. You wouldn’t catch Keyser hauling something that valuable around! Stefan said it would have worked better as a “dolly shot.” No shit!

Now we’ve set the camera up in the hall to view the fearsome book from outside. Remember that at this point, no head has talked at all. We’re just filming the arrival of the book. As it turned out, the placement of the room wasn’t all that great. The public would come down the hall making noise, and you could hear the elevator go “ping” at times too. Anyway, here Julie and Stefan’s assistant are checking out the shot back into the Rosenwald room. The cameras on the right, and you can see the monitor on the left.

This is the shot they’re testing more or less. That is, OTH is going to be filmed from a distance looking at the book, but now Stefan is fiddling with the doors (God knows why).

Now we’re finally getting ready for the interview. Julie will ask OTH questions. On the show, you won’t hear that, only the response. But when you give the responses, you look at her and interact with her. She’s to the right of the camera. Here she’s sort of biting her finger while thinking about stuff (she did that a lot). In the left foreground, you can see the base of a big light that’s illuminating OTH’s back. The difussion light in front isn’t too visible here, but it will be in the next shot.

So here’s what the actual interview looks like (Keyser had to stop filming at this point so as not to get in their way). The camera is now close up and Julie is asking questions from her sheet. You can see that bright light to OTH’s right, and the microphone above his head. There’s a million things going on so you can’t pay all that much attention to them all, but oddly enough, you (or Keyser at any rate) tend to focus on Julie and her questions and somehow the fact that there’s this huge camera pointing at you close by goes unnoticed.

Here’s a shot of the more than 500-year-old book we’re there to discuss. You probably can’t make it out, but in the middle of the left column it’s easy to make out the Latin text for “And the number of the beast shall be WHT. He will be the 27th chief magistrate of the commonwealth, and his perversions will be beyond number. Believe you me, if I were in the shower with him, I would not drop the soap. Word to the wise.” Whoa! Scary, no?

Here’s a shot of YHP flipping through this daunting text, which is, after all, reputed to have driven the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred bonkers. Pretty cool of Keyser to take a picture of himself, no? Rest assured, no acts of Satan were involved… Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible for Keyser to film himself being interviewed. You’ll have to wait for the show!

After the interviewing, we took the show out into the main area of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. This is, in Keyser’s view, one of the high points of Washington (which has a lot of high points). This is a basically a late Victorian temple to learning. Anyway, here we are getting ready for the shot (God damn it, Julie, would you quit moving around all the time!), which consisted of YHP and OTH walking around pretending to talk. As enjoined, Keyser pointed at various frescoes on the ceiling and column capitals as if he were talking about something other than the fact that we were pretending to be having a deep conversation. What you see is not necessarily what you get on television!

Here’s a shot of this part of the building. It’s hard to overemphasize how amazing it is. Oh, and if you walk down one flight of steps, you can see a copy of the Gutenberg bible and the famous manuscript Mainz bible of 1460. Maybe that doesn’t sound too exciting to you, but rest assured that for Keyser it was. But at the end of the second day, Keyser had an experience in this regard that he’ll remember for the rest of his life. Stay tuned, readers!