Kill Your Darlings

By Pauline Rogers

ICG Magazine, February 5, 2013

Editor’s Note: The following article appeared in the November 2012 issue of ICG Magazine and focuses on NYAM as a filming location for the upcoming movie Kill Your Darlings, starring Daniel Radcliffe.

Columbia University Library, circa 1944, is where much of the action in Kill Your Darlings, an indie drama about a murder that helped spawn The Beat Generation, takes place. Cinematographer Reed Morano says she and director John Krokidas scouted many places, including the New York Public Library’s main branch.

“It was beautiful but far too large for us to light on our budget – we shot night for day interiors as well as massive night interiors with moonlight as our motivated lighting. Location Manager David Velasco found the Academy of Medicine, which John and I fell in love with.”

Velasco says the building, on upper 5th Avenue near 103th Street, was constructed in 1926, and became the permanent home of The Academy of Medicine.

“There were bookcases fixed to the walls in the main room,” Velasco explains. “The stacks downstairs had low ceilings and were barely three feet wide. But they did have books that would allow us to sell the Columbia Library feeling.”

The script was broken down for Academy of Medicine Director Francine Leinhardt, who would decide what stayed, or what would have to be brought in.

“It was the first time we allowed a production into the stacks,” Leinhardt admits. “The crew was restricted from using anything with flames in the library or machinery that might cause damage to the books. Nothing could be taken out of place.”

That meant a scene where Ben Foster, playing famed Beat writer William Burroughs, lights a match, was out, as was using a smoke machine for impressionistic lighting.

“Production Designer Stephen Carter did a great job dressing the library and the stacks,” Morano observes. “He took advantage of the massive old windows by adding smaller individual panes of glass that felt right for the period.”

“Once Alex Chrisiko (our art director) came up with some clever ways to conceal the inevitable but minor modern intrusions, we were able to concentrate on more artistic points,” Carter relates. “We fabricated hundreds of monotone book spines to cover the colorful modern texts and focused on vintage card catalogs that were still in place.

“For the ‘stacks’ where Columbia kept the sexy [i.e., banned] books,” Carter continues, “all I had to do was provide a wide array of bare incandescent bulbs, obscuring the modern fluorescent fixtures and forcing the shadows to get stronger.”

Gaffer Frank McCormack says they were fortunate the library’s windows didn’t get direct sun, providing a “soft, even light” all day long, and subverting continuity problems with the added movie lighting. Given the modest budget, pre-rigging from second-story windows was out, so Morano and McCormack lit everything from the floor. “We used a lot of indirect lighting: bounces and book lights. It was a challenge to balance lighting versus Reed’s needs for a roving hand-held camera,” McCormack recalls.

Adds Morano: “The [Academy of Medicine] added production value to our story in a big way. We didn’t have the money to dress massive exteriors or interiors for the 1940s period. So this was by far our biggest and most impressive interior.”

Post shoot, Leinhardt had compliments for the production. “With approximately 200 staff members at the Academy, it is always challenging when a film crew descends,” she says. “But everything worked out fairly well, except for Daniel Radcliffe’s bodyguards, who took their jobs very seriously. The producers gave a donation to our Rare Book Room, which is always welcome for a nonprofit organization.

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Contact:
Andrew J. Martin
Director of Communications
The New York Academy of Medicine
1216 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10029
212-822-7285
amartin@nyam.org

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