Gerald Perry Finnerman (1931-2011)

[Dusty Ayres]

One of the people who made TOS what it was/is has died this week:

I’m surprised to see that, outside of a paid death notice in the Los Angeles Times and a post on the Archive of American Television’s Facebook page on Friday, no one has yet published an obituary for Gerald Perry Finnerman. Finnerman, who died last week, was the primary director of photography for Star Trek and then, two decades later, Moonlighting. In between came Night Gallery, The Bold Ones, Kojak, Police Woman, and a number of TV movies (he won an Emmy for 1978′s Ziegfeld: The Man and His Women).
Star Trek was Finnerman’s debut as a DP. Prior to his voyage on the Enterprise, Finnerman had been a camera operator for the legendary cinematographer Harry Stradling (Suspicion, Johnny Guitar, A Face in the Crowd, My Fair Lady), who personally recommended him to Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Finnerman had another mentor in the family: his the British-born Perry Finnerman, was also a director of photography who spent his last few years (he died in 1960) shooting episodes of Maverick, Lawman, and Adventures in Paradise.
It’s difficult to write about cinematographers without looking at the work again, but the imagery of the original Star Trek is certainly stamped on my brain. Idiots chortle over how the original Star Trek looks “dated” – they’ve even replaced the special effects with digital upgrades, which look cool but miss the point. But it’s precisely the look of Star Trek – the costume and set design, the makeup, the visual effects – that make Star Trek special, much more than the scripts or the utopian ideas of Gene Roddenberry. I love the bright colors and the strange shapes and spaces of the Star Trek world. The show’s budget meant that the Enterprise consisted of a lot of bare walls – and Finnerman wasn’t afraid to shine an orange or green or fuchsia lamp on them, for no particular reason.

Gerald Perry Finnerman (1931-2011)

 

[Christopher]

Ohh, this is a shame. He was one of the greats.

As for the "dated" charge, I'd say, rather, that Finnerman's style was classic. He was trained by DPs who'd worked in the heyday of black-and-white cinema, and he learned their techniques and kept them alive in his own work. Black-and-white cinematography is all about painting with light and shadow, and you could see the attention to that in Finnerman's work. He always shot men in cross light (from the side) to sharpen their features and women in front light to soften theirs, as well as using soft focus and filters to shoot women. He would often use a slash of light across the eyes to highlight a dramatic moment. And so on. Very noirish stuff, despite the way he also embraced the possibilities of vivid color for TOS. (And there was plenty of reason for shining colored gels on the walls. It helped differentiate different redresses of the same set, suggesting they were different rooms without going to the expense of repainting. And of course, TOS came out in the year that NBC's primetime lineup went full-color, and so the network wanted its shows to be as colorful as possible to promote the advance -- and to help sell color TVs, the patent for which was owned by NBC's parent company RCA.)

His old-school training also served him well on Moonlighting, where that classic look helped give the show a noirish tone and atmosphere, and particularly in their black-and-white, '40s-style episode "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice."

 

[Potemkin_Prod]

A very nice obit about a very talented man!

 

[Sir Rhosis]

A true artist. RIP.

 

[Ronald Held]

Not another. RIP.

 

[RandyS]

This is a surprise, considering I thought he'd died twenty years ago. But I guess I could be remembering somebody else associated with Star Trek.

Still sad though.

 

[KarmicCurse]

I was watching Moonlighting a week ago and had a flashback to Star Trek during a close up of Cybil Shepard. She was in very soft focus with a band of light across her eyes. Very old fashioned and glamorous. I had no idea it was the same DP.

 

[Harvey]

Finnerman was a great DP who was a key figure in the production of Star Trek. His tremendous use of color (spurned, of course, by NBC's desire to embrace color television full-force) is one of the reasons the series is so memorable. If it had instead opted for the much more muted (and, in my opinion, much more dull) color scheme of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, I'm convinced it wouldn't nearly have the staying power it continues to have, 45 years later.

RIP.

 

[PKerr]

Rest In Peace Mr Finnerman.



Man I really need to get the computer fixed that I have all my web page stuff stored on so I can update my Memorial Page.

 

[Botany Bay]

Sad news. Thanks so much for lending your incredible talents to TOS, Gerald.