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Playing for Laughs in The 4th Tenor FILMMAKER magazine The 4th Tenor is a comedy featuring Rodney Dangerfield as a nightclub owner who loves the opera. In a hilarious attempt to win the heart of a beautiful soprano who performs at his club, Dangerfield falls for a scam and travels to Italy to take singing lessons. His caterwauling makes enemies of the entire village, right down to the teacher's dog. Eventually Dangerfield finds some magical wine that makes him sing like Caruso, and the hijinks take off from there. Director Harry Basil tapped cinematographer Ken Blakey. Blakey began his career shooting documentaries and commercials. His work on A Day in the Life of Bonnie Consolo (1975) helped the documentary earn an Academy Award nomination. He has shot over fifty feature films, and his credits include Psycho Too (black-and-white short), Simple as a Dog (short), Extreme Honor, Unconditional Love and Dirt Merchant. Blakey and his crew worked at a café in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Atwater, and in Santa Inez, a wine-growing region on California's central coast that stood in for the Italian countryside. There are also several establishing shots in the New York City area with the Universal Studios back lot providing settings for an Italian village and the streets of New York City. At the Serenade Café, Blakey lit the stage with a follow spot gelled to warm up skin tones slightly. By contrast, the street exteriors, also filmed on the Universal back lot, were kept slightly cooler in color temperature. "In the café, I wanted a warm and inviting, natural look with true skin tones," says Blakey. "When we're out on the New York streets, I wanted the look a little cooler because you're down in the canyons between buildings and there's a lot of ultra-violet light. I shot the Italian scenes with a Tiffen number 1 chocolate filter on the lens and timed it warm, so that it looks a little bit old world - very warm and inviting. There's a definite difference to the feel and the look." Blakey photographed Dangerfield with wide lenses to accentuate his trademark bug-eyed look. He generally prefers wider lenses because they help to place the character in the environment. Blakey also chooses to create looks in the camera, using filtration and lighting. His filter package usually included a number 1 Ultracon and a 1/8 white Pro-Mist from Tiffen. Blakey shot the entire film on Kodak Vision 500T 5279 film. "I started using one film stock after seeing Dante Spinotti's work on Heat," he says. "I read that he shot the whole movie on [Eastman EXR 500T] 5298 film. It's not something I do every time; different shows call for different approaches. But when you're shooting multiple cameras and multiple units in changing light, it solves a lot of problems." Blakey generally overexposed the negative, shooting the 500-speed film at an E.I. of 320 and sometimes 250. "You want a bullet-proof negative," he says. "There's no reason for underexposure, which can bring graininess and lose contrast. Pushed a stop, the '79 looks gorgeous." Blakey's most recent project is another comedy, Back by Midnight, a movie that reunites him with Basil and Dangerfield.