When producer John Wells was preparing to shoot his crime drama “Southland,” he chose a digital camera that few had heard of a few years ago.
The Red One was inexpensive, easy to use and enthusiastically endorsed by his friend and director Steven Soderbergh, who used it to film his two-part movie last year about Che Guevara.
Wells was so taken with the Red camera that he even used it to film the final six episodes of “ER.” That was a blow to Panavision Inc., the movie camera rental company whose roots go back more than half a century in Hollywood and which had provided cameras for hundreds of episodes during the hospital drama’s 15-year run.
Panavision’s movie camera, with the director squinting into the eyepiece behind it to line up the shot, has been a ubiquitous presence on film sets. But now the company, beset by cheaper rivals moving into its turf, a sharp drop in film production and huge debt acquired in a 1998 takeover by investor Ronald O. Perelman, is struggling to hold on to its reputation as the industry’s leading supplier of cameras and lenses.
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