Behind The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Dazzling, Innovative Cinematography

In the fourth season, Midge takes a job as comic emcee at the Wolford, a burlesque club in Manhattan. In the season finale, for which Mullen received his fourth nomination, this precisely choreographed shot zoomed through a typical performance at the venue, spotlighting each of the dancers, seemingly, without a cut.

The question was, How do we do this shot? It’s very hard to coordinate elaborate moves because you’ve got to have multiple people time themselves, and Amy prefers talking to one operator. And I know she’s always happiest when we could do things with a Steadicam. So I asked Charlie Sherron, our key grip, if there’s any way we could hide a crane platform behind the set that [camera operator] Jim McConkey could step backwards onto, be lifted up to the second floor, and then dollied on while riding the crane to the other end of the set, be lowered, be disconnected, then step off and then back out again. So we had to build a wooden ramp to allow Jim to walk up onto the tongue of the stage, which we put carpeting on, and it’s sort of darkly lit, so you don’t really focus on it, but there is this ramp that he goes up onto the stage and then he walks into the room.

In this still frame, you can actually see the arm of the crane diagonally behind that pink mirror on the bottom-left corner. Charlie Sherron had to take a chain saw, cut away part of the set to make room for the weight bucket of the crane. So the bucket is to the left. The base of the crane is on the floor behind that curtain. So a grip steps off, Jim steps on, it lifts off, it gets dollied across, lowered again, a grip steps back onto the crane, and Jim steps off it again. At this point, visual effects had to paint out the crane in the second position because there was no way to dolly it completely out of view.