Movie buffs and comedy fans know The Party (1968), a zany comedy by Blake Edwards starring Peter Sellers.
However, few people know that this film marks a turning point in the history of cinema.
The Party was produced from a script of around fifty pages where almost all of the scenes were improvised by the actors.
The concept was innovative. The entire film was shot chronologically, following the order of the scenes in the script. In this way, as the actors had to constantly improvise, they could consider each new scene as an extension of the previous one, in order to maintain a sense of continuity and dynamics.
However, Blake Edwards was aware from the start that it wouldn’t be easy for the actors to see where they were going.
Blake Edwards
Until then, in cinema, we had dailies , rushes filmed the day before, which the actors could watch to get an idea of what had just been filmed and, if necessary, to orient their performance accordingly.
But for Blake Edwards, waiting 24 hours to see the result of an improvised scene was too long.
To help the actors stay connected to the energy of their performance, the director used brand new technology, connecting a video camera to the Panavision cinema camera, and linking it to an Ampex VCR normally used in a studio of TV.
This system made it possible to instantly show the actors the scene that had just been filmed. This avoided the cost and time of having the film developed to show the rushes to the actors the next day.
This new technology naturally had a cost, which was not insignificant ($1,100 per day in 1968, or around $10,000 in 2022). But for Blake Edwards, the fact of being able to react immediately after a scene, without having to wait until the next day and without having to do time-consuming reshoots, was much more interesting from an economic point of view.
This system will develop naturally thereafter, until it quickly becomes the norm.