Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville) May 14, 2004 Friday, City Edition

Cameraman found very little creature comfort filming 'Sunnyside Up'

Matt Soergel, Times-Union staff writer

It was a big project for Jacksonville-based cinematographer Mark Kohl: A quick call for help and a plane ride across the country, only to face desert sand and temperatures of 116 degrees. Not to mention explosions (many explosions), a monster and some stars of 1960s and '70s television.

It's a movie by Christopher Coppola, brother of Nicolas Cage, that's lived by a couple of different names but now has settled on The Creature of the Sunnyside Up Trailer Park.

Kohl found out this month it was coming to this week's Jacksonville Film Festival, where it played on opening night Thursday (it plays again at midnight Saturday at the San Marco Theatre). He was looking forward to seeing it -- for one thing, it'll be his first chance to see the entire film.

"It was a big, big project," said Kohl, who's worked in TV, film and commercial productions. "We must have had 100-plus guys on the crew, four cameras working at once. We worked pretty much guerilla-style filmmaking on a large budget -- a zillion set-ups a day, a lot of prosthetics, a lot of monster stuff, a lot of explosions. It was pretty grueling."

Kohl was the cinematographer on two of Coppola's previous films, Palmer's Pick Up and Gunfighter, and had even traveled with him to a film festival in Berlin to show Palmer's Pick Up.

Kohl was called to shoot Creature when the project ended up going far longer than expected: It was supposed to last 24 days, but Kohl said he joined it on day 30 and ended up spending 38 more days on it.

Kohl read the script while he flew to California, where shooting took place on a mountain in the desert near Twentynine Palms. It was August 2002, and temperatures during the day were well over 100. Most of the film was shot at night, which presented many lighting problems: After all, there aren't convenient streetlights in the middle of a desert.

He worked with the production crew and came up with a solution: torches. Many of the characters would carry torches. Voila -- instant lighting.

The film was shot with what was then a new technology: high-definition digital cameras, a system Kohl said is designed to replicate the motion of actual film. With cameras costing about $15,000, it's not to be confused with the inexpensive digital cameras that have given life to hordes of low-budget, independent filmmakers.

The Creature of the Sunny Side Up Trailer Park is a tongue-in-cheek monster movie about brothers -- one black, one white -- who battle said creature to save their mom's trailer park. The Partridge Family's Shirley Jones, Batman's Frank Gorshin, Wonder Woman's Lynda Carter and Love Boat's Bernie Kopell are among the cast.

Kohl said it reflects the "quirky" style of Coppola, nephew of Francis Ford Coppola.

"He's just got a different sense of vision," said Kohl. "He's extremely intelligent -- he knows every character, every move they make. He has a shot list, but he has it so memorized, it's almost like a conductor conducting his orchestra. I know to stay prepared, to got anywhere, quickly."