Free Empire of Light by Gregory Earls Page B

he was in the know. By the time he hit his forties, he was in demand as one of Hollywood’s most popular cameramen. Everybody loved the Cinematagrapher.
    Unfortunately, the Cinematographer’s technical genius overshadowed his artistry and he was never allowed to shoot the masterpiece he craved. He was relegated to B-Movie gangster and science fiction films, with tight schedules and little money. With these limitations, the Cinematographer could only show flashes of his brilliance in one or maybe two scenes in a single movie, if he were lucky.
    Yet the kids at his old orphanage loved him and all of his movies. Whenever the Cinematographer finished a film he would treat the kids to a screening, complete with popcorn and an iced bottle of coke. Aftwards, he would escort the kids back home where they listened to the radio while he taught them how to fashion pinhole cameras out of Quaker Oatmeal boxes.
    On his fortieth birthday, the children returned the love with a present, a Brownie camera. It was a used 1930 Number 2 Beau Brownie Camera. Produced by the Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, New York. It cost about four dollars and twenty-five cents when it was brand new, some ten years earlier. The Cinematographer owned far more expensive and professional equipment, yet there was not a camera on this planet he loved more.
    By the time he reached the ripe old age of seventy-one, he had photographed hundreds of films, but he had never had a chance to create the masterpiece he knew was in him. In the end, after a very long and busy career, he finally gave up and decided to retire. The old Cinematographer would pack up a few possessions, including his precious vintage Brownie camera, and move to a rest home to live out the remainder of his years in peace. However, what the old Cinematographer didn’t know was that as the 1970s rolled around, he had obtained a cult following with the new generation of young filmmakers, maverick directors who lived outside the confines of Hollywood.
    They had watched his films and took note of the constant glimmer of greatness in his work. The young filmmakers had critiqued and re-examined his films and declared that the old cameraman’s career was, in fact, riddled with unsung works of genius. The problem was that nobody could find the old cameraman to tell him of his newfound fame.
    That is, until one day, a young whiz kid of a filmmaker had managed to track him down and he gave the Cinematographer the gift he had always craved. The maverick asked him to come out of retirement to photograph what could be a masterpiece of cinematography, a film shot entirely at Magic Hour.
    Magic Hour is that fleeting moment after the sun has already set. It’s when the sun can no longer be seen, yet it’s rays still illuminate the sky. And because the sun is so low on the horizon, its rays have to pass through more of our atmosphere than normal, making them softer and warmer.
    But the Cinematographer also had a theory about why this light was so full of magic. He surmised that the light also had more time to pass through all of the prayers, hopes and dreams that were sent to heaven from good people down on Earth. It was this ethereal contact that transformed the light rays into a magic light, one that can make almost anything that it falls upon glow like Christmas morning.
    Now, Magic Hour,appears at the very end of the day, lasting longer as you get closer to the North Pole..So the production team decided to set up shop in the tall wheat fields of Canada where they could take advantage of the longer period of the enchanted light. But only shooting ninety minutes a day meant it would take years to finish the film. The folks back in Hollywood thought that everybody involved with the production was crazy, but as it turned out, the exact opposite was true.
    Since the crew had to wait until close to the end of the day to begin photography, and even then the shooting only lasted an hour and a half at best, the crew had