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The Shining’s secret weapon: how the Steadicam helped Kubrick to make cinema’s scariest film

Lisa and Louise Burns as the twins in The Shining (1980) - Film Stills
Lisa and Louise Burns as the twins in The Shining (1980) - Film Stills

It was 1975, and at his Childwickbury estate, Stanley Kubrick was pondering what film to make next when a demo reel arrived. It was the work of 33-year-old American filmmaker and inventor Garrett Brown, showcasing the results of his new creation, the Steadicam: a camera stabilizer that mechanically isolates the operator’s movement.

Brown had been frustrated with the cumbersome methods required for smooth, stable shooting, which mostly involved huge, wheeled camera dollies running on railed tracks.

As soon as he saw the footage, Kubrick fired up his telex. “Demo reel on handheld mystery stabilizer was spectacular and you can count on me as a customer,” Kubrick typed to Brown. “It should revolutionise the way films are shot.”

He was right. Some of Hollywood’s most creative directors began employing Brown as soon as they’d seen it. Within months, he was filming Sylvester Stallone running around Philadelphia in Rocky and Dustin Hoffman sprinting through New York in Marathon Man. Then in 1977, having recently read a new novel called The Shining, Kubrick got in touch again.

Brown is responsible for many of the iconic shots in The Shining, which turns 40 years old this week. Notably, he made those that track young Danny Torrance as he pedals his trike around the Overlook Hotel, its wheels rolling ominously over carpet and floor. It was pioneering stuff – Brown’s gliding camerawork inseparable from the feel of the film, and from its success. From then on, everybody wanted Garrett Brown.

With his rig strapped across his chest, he filmed Robert De Niro making his grand ring entrance in Raging Bull, crept through Redwood trees for Return of the Jedi, and survived a perilous wooden bridge with Harrison Ford on Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom. Every shot was impossibly smooth. The Steadicam, proclaimed The Washington Post in 1985, was “the biggest thing since Technicolor.” Today it is indispensable.

Shelley Duvall, Jack Nicholson and Stanley Kubrick on the set of The Shining - David Rose
Shelley Duvall, Jack Nicholson and Stanley Kubrick on the set of The Shining - David Rose

Garrett Brown is 78 years old, six foot five, and has never stopped inventing. Today he’s in a factory in Philadelphia, his hometown, dreaming up a new machine. In the past he’s been embarrassed to call himself an inventor, he says, especially when such a person was exemplified by the likes of Back to the Future’s maniacal Doc Brown, but he’s reconciled with it now.

He was a folk singer in the early 1960s, as part of the duo Brown and Dana, but that career imploded and he went into advertising; he became a copywriter before moving into producing, with enough success to let him form his own production company. Sick of “lugging this gigantic 800lb dolly” around on location to get smooth shots, after much trial-and-error in the early 1970s Brown invented the Steadicam.

He loved shooting handheld, he says, because it’s fun, but he found the inherently shaky results “inhuman and hard to watch”. He experimented with cameras on long poles for a while, before eventually holing himself up in a motel room for a week and arriving at the final design, a spring-loaded arm rendering the camera practically weightless and the operation balletic. He spent a couple of days out with his girlfriend shooting footage for the demo reel, took it to Los Angeles, and had a licensing deal within a day.

“We made a bunch of prints to bicycle around to everybody,” he says, and “the demo was seen by every big-shot director in the world. It was effectively viral on 35mm.”

Cinematographer Haskell Wexler, with whom he’d worked on a commercial, hired him first, in 1974, to work some Steadicam magic on Hal Ashby’s drama Bound for Glory.

Wexler designed a shot for Brown that would utilise his invention to dazzling effect. Beginning atop a crane overlooking a migrant camp filled with 900 extras, the crane would slowly descend until Brown stepped off, following actor David Carradine through the camp, weaving in and out of the hordes. Brown was nervous.

“I was churned up pretty well,” he says. Attempts to conceal his anxiety weren’t all that successful. “Your hands are shaking,” said a camera operator next to him, “but not the camera!” Apart from a problematic viewfinder which meant Brown had to run on instinct, he had other reasons for the jitters. “Being up on the g-----n crane scared the crap out of me,” he says. But he duly descended, stepped off and made his way across the camp, executing the unbroken two-minute take with precision and fluidity.

Watching the resulting footage in a screening room with the crew two days later, Brown was nervous all over again. “This goddamn shot came up,” he remembers. “And it was riveting. The crowd was silent for a moment and then leaped to their feet and shouted Haskell’s name and clapped and roared. I'm tellin’ ya, that was something.” At the following year’s Oscars, Wexler won the Best Cinematography award for the film.

Meanwhile, Brown and his Steadicam were in high demand, working on two other films alongside Bound for Glory. As well as reaching Kubrick, the demo reel had found its way to director John Avildsen who, in 1975, was preparing to make Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky.

Brown’s demo climaxed with footage of his girlfriend Ellen running up and down the steps of the Philadelphia Museum Of Art. Recognising a colleague in Brown’s reel, Avildsen immediately thought of using the run in Rocky, and got in touch with him to ask: “Where were those steps, and how was that shot done?”

Rocky was a tiny production, says Brown, mostly because the unknown Stallone, who wrote the screenplay, insisted on playing the lead. Luxuries were lean. “We had one motorhome, literally,” says Brown, “this beat-up old Winnebago. Stallone would sit in the middle of it in his grey sweatpants. In the back was the bathroom, which was always vile and overflowing.

“Stallone was very open and humble, a very picturesque creature. My intro to him was walking past to enquire if the bathroom was working, and he looked up at me – he was a very colourful speaker – and said, ‘Well, don’t sling any iron in there and you’ll be alright.’ I thought, This is a great guy!”

Brown’s work on Rocky was pioneering. As well as accompanying Stallone up those steps, he shot many sequences, including the fighting scenes. Brown’s camera acted as the referee’s eye-view, circling the boxers. “That had never been done in that way before,” says Brown, “making it look like human vision, agile but stable.” When the production company saw the work in progress, they upped the budget.

With Marathon Man also under his belt and, as Kubrick predicted, having swiftly revolutionised the industry, Brown hit the stage at the 1978 Academy Awards, accepting his own Oscar for Scientific or Technical Achievement. By then he had also begun work on The Shining, a production he later referred to as “the Steadicam Olympics” due to the year he spent filming with Kubrick doing dozens of takes for each shot, honing his technique.

“It was a startlingly wonderful coincidence,” says Brown – the Steadicam was exactly what was needed for Kubrick’s vision of the film. As the film’s cinematographer John Alcott wrote in American Cinematographer magazine: “The story takes place in a very large hotel, and one could only explain it being large and complex by traveling through it, and one could only travel through it the way we did by using the Steadicam. Otherwise, I don’t know how we would have done it.”

“I could have done it literally forever,” says Brown now, enthusing over the amount of takes he (and others) had to do – sometimes up to 70 – to satisfy Kubrick. “I really learned how to do it in that year. I went from some native ability to doing this beautiful athletic work. By the end of it I was startlingly good. The art of operating the Steadicam was perfected during The Shining.”

After that, Brown worked with Martin Scorsese on Raging Bull, although he was, “for the first and last time, fired” when the director said the boxing scenes looked too much like the ones in Rocky. He provided the shots for the speeder bike sequence for Return of the Jedi; the sped-up footage resulted in a thrilling chase that “felt in some way real”.

Especially, he thinks, compared to the CGI counterpart in George Lucas’s first Star Wars prequel. “If you look at the pod race in The Phantom Menace, which is a sort of homage to the speeder-bike chase,” says Brown, “it’s boring as p--s. It’s insanely fast and goes on and on forever. There’s no sense of any jeopardy.”

Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) - ScreenProd
Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) - ScreenProd

Realism was a constant in Brown’s work. On 1984’s Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, he shot footage for Steven Spielberg not just on the backs of elephants but, for the film’s climactic sword showdown, along a vertiginous bridge. “That bridge was a real phenomenon,” he says. “No one will build a 380ft-tall rope bridge for a movie ever again, because it’s so easy for the CGI people to do it now. It was real and gritty and g-----n dangerous.”

There were a frightening six inches between the boards, which were flame-hardened for safety. Or so they thought. “Harrison is running, and I’m running after him, and a board breaks under him,” remembers Brown of a particularly hairy moment. “He falls towards the river, all the way to the crotch with one leg sticking down, and was only stopped by the adjacent boards.”

A furious Ford demanded Spielberg come out on the bridge himself to test the boards, the production was temporarily shut down, and the flame-hardened boards were replaced with even more flame-hardened boards.

“We resumed shooting. And I have to hand it to Harrison, he went back and went running on that bridge. I, who outweighed him by 60lb with the equipment, was a little less sanguine about this deal, but I ran out again too. It was hot; viciously, desperately hot; and really extraordinarily dangerous.” The resulting footage, though, was a thrill.

By this point, the Steadicam was also a phenomenon. The key to its growing global success was, says Brown, democratisation – it was now a commercial product for sale, and Brown himself ran workshops teaching operators how to use it.

Others began mastering it – Brown was particularly impressed by its use in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, in which Larry McConkey, inspired to take on the invention since being wowed by Bound for Glory, used it for the stunning tracking shot following Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill through the Copacabana nightclub.

After being let go from Raging Bull, Brown himself was employed by Scorsese again, first for The King of Comedy, and then in 1994 for Casino, in which he wound his way around the roulette tables and through the less glamorous money-counting rooms.

Brown’s big swansong was a decade later, in which he designed and shot the opening footage of a jogger in New York’s Central Park for Jonathan Glazer’s 2004 reincarnation drama Birth.

Glazer’s original plan was to deploy another of Brown’s inventions, the SuperFlyCam, to zoom on a cable above the trees. But Brown says he discovered that the park authorities “would not tolerate a single broken branch on any tree, and I started to smell a giant disaster in the making.”

Instead he suggested the graceful sequence we see on the screen, which had Brown following the actor from the top of a tall truck. When it was time to film, it snowed. “It was absolutely magical!” says Brown. “I’m proud of it. And it was a good way to get out. A good way to leave the business.”

He’s proud of a lot more besides, having produced classic shots on so many classic films. “It was a vastly huge joy for me,” he says. “One of those ride-the-whirlwind things.” He loved shooting, but had had enough of the more gruelling demands of film productions, and focused instead on further inventions, as well as Steadicam workshops.

“It's everywhere in the world, and growing,” he says. “I’m leaving next week for China, the first Chinese workshop. After 50 copies, they now want the real thing. And I’m exceedingly excited that my creaky old self will be over there to teach it. It’s great.”

The Steadicam itself is everywhere from The Revenant to Downtown Abbey – not just a tool for extraordinary shots, but an essential element of television and film production. Brown has also invented the SkyCam, which soars around sporting events; the DiveCam, which plummets down besides divers into the water; and the MobyCam, which speeds across the pool floor.

Today, in this Philadelphia factory, he’s working on the Zeen. A mobility device that’s somewhere between a wheelchair and a walker, he’d like to have it ready by the time he needs it himself.

It was inspired by Brown watching his father as his health declined some years back. “I watched my father’s cohort in walkers and wheelchairs and did not admire the results. I don’t wanna end up in either one of them. This is an attempt at improvement. It’s like a chair that gets up and goes with you then drops down into a chair again.”

He is hopeful of its success: of potentially revolutionising human mobility. His confidence is earned.