Winning Time’s Jason Segel, in a pre-strike Zoom interview paired with co-star Solomon Hughes, is explaining one of the rigs used by the show on set. “We strapped this thing to Solomon, like he’s Robocop, with a camera facing himself,” he says. “So when he moves, the camera is moving with him.”
Says Segel to Hughes, “I don’t know if you know this, but we nicknamed you Camera Abdul-Jabbar.”
Hughes, who plays Camera Abdul-Jabbar’s namesake in the HBO basketball series, doesn’t confirm whether or not he knew this. Instead, he says with a committed deadpan: “Camera Abdul-Jabbar was heavy, and it was the end of a very, very long day when they decided, ‘Hey, let’s try this out.’ So Solomon was pretty delirious when he had Camera Abdul-Jabbar strapped to his person.”
That footage is just one of the experimental choices made by every other member of the creative team to create the series’ singular look, a blend of formats and technologies that aims to thrust the viewer directly into the 1980s era of Lakers history being depicted.
Most shows pick one type of camera to use — Winning Time, returning for Season 2 this Sunday, is shot on a mix of 35mm film, 8mm film, and Ikegami tube cameras. What’s an Ikegami? Glad you asked. Says star John C. Reilly, “I think it was actually a stroke of genius to shoot a lot of the show on the Ikegami camera, which is the original broadcast video camera from the era, because it makes it immediately seem like you’re actually in that era. The visual information just puts you back there.”
Using these older cameras, Segel says, “just contributed to the cool factor. I had the luxury of seeing the pilot before I took the role, because they had already shot it and Westhead didn’t arrive till late first season. I got to see the plan these guys had and how it was gonna look like some of the movies I love. I’m just in awe at how much art is put into the photography aspect of the show. When you’re filming a basketball scene, they’ve got like three cameras hung in the rafters, that are filming you almost like a televised game. Then you’ve got a guy sometimes on rollerblades who’s going in amongst the people… I’ve never seen some of the camera rigs that they’ve set up. It’s really cool.”
