idea ·After Hours (1985)

The keys nearly killed Griffin Dunne

To get the point of view of a set of falling keys, the crew dropped a camera platform four storeys on climbing rope and stopped it just above the star's head. The footage was out of focus.

camerawork
point-of-view
atomic
production
stunt
ballhaus

Scorsese wanted the key drop in After Hours — the keys shot from the keys' point of view. In 1984 that meant something had to fall. Amy Robinson, producer, tells it:

So our crew designed this Rube Goldberg contraption, like a platform with a hole in it. The camera was attached to it. And then they had the platform tied up there on the fourth floor of the building with mountain-climbing rope. They dropped this entire platform down four stories of the building and it stopped just above Griffin's head.

— Robinson, in Kelly, unpaged

Griffin Dunne was the star and also her co-producer. Then the rushes came back: "the whole thing was out of focus. And Marty, of course, said, 'Well, we've got to do it again!' And this was really the only fight we had" (Kelly, unpaged). She refused: "it's lucky Griffin's not dead. We can't do it again." Scorsese won: "you never just say no to Marty". They reshot it "with a crane, and it was very simple, which was the way we should have done it in the first place" (Kelly, unpaged).

Ebert credits the fix to the cameraman: "Ballhaus came up with a terrifyingly fast crane move" (Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged), and he makes the point that matters: "In pre-digital days, that really had to happen."

A case for Camerawork: the literal solution (drop a camera) failed and the illusion (move a crane very fast) worked. What the audience reads as the keys' Point of view is a machine pretending to fall. See Michael Ballhaus.

Go on, then

scene After Hours — the keys A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.
idea Five set-ups a day became sixteen Scorsese drew every shot of After Hours in the script margins and found he had about 500 of them. At his usual pace that was impossible. Michael Ballhaus said he could do it.
idea Close-ups for no reason After Hours cuts to big close-ups of light switches, keys and locks that turn out to mean nothing. It is Hitchcock's grammar used as a prank on an audience that has learned to read it.
film After Hours (1985) A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.
idea Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway One planned ending had Paul climb inside June to hide from the mob and be born again, naked, on a Manhattan street. David Geffen, who was paying, asked if they had lost their minds.
idea Tim Burton stepped aside Before Scorsese, the producers of After Hours wanted a Disney animator with a six-minute cartoon to his name. They could not raise the money with Tim Burton, and then Scorsese's big film collapsed.