A Collection in Motion

Grant Loucks stocks more than ordinary equipment at his camera rental house in Hollywood.

Jacques Cousteau used one underwater. Astronaut Alan Shepard took one into space. Another one, camouflaged as a machine gun, recorded combat action in WWII. An original one, dating back to 1885, appears as an unassuming brown box. So describes the various motion picture devices delightfully crowding Grant Loucks’ office in Hollywood, the headquarters of Alan Gordon Enterprises, a longtime movie camera rental facility, where Loucks is owner and president. ‘I’ve collected all kinds of things, more things than one should really collect,’ Loucks says with a playful grin. Rare posters and old movie slates, early projectors, 3-D glasses, even the miniature ship models used in the World War II classic ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’ share space among the bounty of vintage cameras, the core of the collection. The mini-museum is all a side note to the regular business of supplying modern camera equipment to the movie industry and student filmmakers alike. Loucks estimates owning nearly 1,000 objects of movie and camera memorabilia. Many of these items are stored in a warehouse. Other pieces enliven his home in Pacific Palisades, where they commingle with Mexican folk art, the passion of his wife, Judith Bronowski. His masterpiece’one of the Technicolor ‘three strip’ cameras used to photograph ‘Gone with the Wind’ (1939)’is on view for all to see at the Hollywood Heritage Museum. ‘What many people don’t realize is how Technicolor films were made with a special camera that recorded three black-and-white images simultaneously,’ says Loucks, whose lifelong fascination with photography includes work both as a cinematographer and technician. ‘With the use of a secret method, those images, exposed through filters, became the Technicolor print,’ he says. Technicolor film’revered for its richness of color–went the way of the dinosaurs beginning in the 1950s when more economical film stock was developed. Touring the collection becomes a journey through the history of cinema, with Loucks presiding as an engaging and knowledgeable guide. Two Academy Awards, both for technical achievement, bolster his expert credentials. He thumbs through a flip book to launch a discussion about the persistence of vision, the ability of the eye to retain an image for a fraction of a second as the next image appears, thus creating the illusion of motion. Although the world had known about the persistence of vision for hundreds of years, it wasn’t until the invention of photography in the early 19th century and later cinematography, around 1885, that the phenomenon was fully exploited. George Eastman led the way for the transition from optical toy to projected motion pictures with his development of thin-based roll film, an invention Thomas Edison capitalized on to produce the first movie camera. Of course, the early cameras relied on cranks to advance the film, a system that demanded the steady hand of an operator. ‘A good cameraman was able to crank at two revolutions per second, or 16 frames per second. Consistency was the key so the image wouldn’t flicker on the screen,’ Loucks explains. After giving the crank several loud turns, he adds: ‘That’s the sound young filmmakers using digital cameras will never hear.’ Many of the early cameras also required looking down into a viewfinder. The later designs called for picking the camera up and looking directly into the viewfinder. This proved disastrous in World War II, when a combat camera, shaped like a machine gun, looked all too much like the real thing. ‘When a cameraman came of out of the fox hole to take pictures, he looked like he was shooting a gun, so his own troops were shooting at him. They threw these cameras out as fast as they could,’ Loucks says while holding one of the remaining examples. Much more successful in WWII were the famous gun cameras designed to attach to a machine gun. Positioned in fighter airplanes, these on-board devices captured all the famous footage of enemies being shot down. Today, the rugged camera, built into the side of helmets, still takes one-of-a-kind point of view shots from cars, motorcycles and snowmobiles. Loucks is an old-fashioned company man. He started out at Alan Gordon Enterprises sweeping floors in the 1950s. Using savvy marketing and technical skills, he steadily climbed the ladder to become president and co-owner of the company in 1974 (Alan Gordon, the founder, died in 1969). He left in 1954 to serve a stint in the Korean War, training in the Army as a combat cameraman. He never saw action, but spent two years in Alaska conducting cold weather camera testing in subzero conditions. ‘I’m going to stop working long before the equipment,’ he remembers thinking. Born in Seattle, Loucks moved to Los Angeles at 11. A love of photography was present from day one. ‘I remember being 12 and sitting on a fire hydrant in front of my house waiting for something to happen. On rainy days, cars might be in accidents. I’d sell these pictures to the Citizen News in Hollywood after processing them in my own little dark room.’ He graduated from Hollywood High School (Carol Burnett was a classmate) and later studied business and cinematography at USC and photo engineering at UCLA. In 1989, Loucks received the first of two Academy Awards for slow motion effects using the Image 300 camera (think the original ‘Die Hard’ when the villain falls from the high-rise window). The second Oscar, in 1996, was awarded for the Mark V Director’s Viewfinder, a popular, innovative tool used by directors to compose and visualize their shots. When it comes to collecting, Loucks is less precision-oriented, preferring to come across things casually, though he admits to occasionally succumbing to ‘the thrill of the hunt.’ The hunt began with an early Eastman Kodak movie camera find at a garage sale in the 1950s. It continues today at places like the Rose Bowl swap meet and Portobello Road Market in London, where he pounced on what has become one of his most prized objects, a 1885 ‘Darling’ camera distinguished by its simplicity of style: a plain brown box. ‘I like my objects,’ Loucks says. ‘ I like to touch them and play with them and talk about them to others. Most everyone who comes and sees the collection leaves with a smile.’