Cheers, I'll have to re-watch that. I've skipped so many of the episodes because I remembered them as cringe-worthy but not as much Larson's
other attempt at a space adventure.
I am guilty for having watched that as a little kid when it first ran on NBC. Many years later, I watched a segment on YT and quickly realized just how awful, tepid, and unimaginative it was.
BSG in general was extremely expensive - apparently the most costliest TV series of its era and you can imagine the TV execs balking at the additional expenditure that this would've entailed. At least they got to do it... As an aside, Kodak Ektachrome (non-infrared) rang a bell because that's
responsible for the distinctive look of Clockers.
So, according to the story you linked me to, it isn’t just that the film was shot with a particular stock of Ektachrome (Ektachrome 5239, whose emulsion is, I’m pretty sure, is a direct descendant of the same family of emulsion which made the tungsten-balanced Ektachrome 160T, or EPT, possible), but also that it was cross-processed using C-41 — or colour negative chemistry — which differs from E-6, or colour-reversal chemistry.
The results for cross-processing film in either direction can yield some really interesting, sometimes surreal effects. Aesthetically, it’s never been a thing I’ve been moved to do, but a cross-processing revival really picked up steam in the early ’10s as both the popular rise of Lomography™ and photographers snapping up expired rolls of expired E-6 film on ebay (and elsewhere) brought x-pro to the fore — namely because C-41 chemistry is so much more common, used in nearly all surviving photo labs.
In the case of Ektachrome 5239/7239, as used in
Clockers, it appears the haloing effect (halation) around bright objects is an artifact of how that C-41 chemistry interplayed with the emulsion (and also, possibly, that that film stock lacked an anti-halation layer, as some Eastman Kodak films have). What’s really interesting about its use in
Clockers is the colours themselves: though skewing a slight bit cool, they aren’t skewed to the point of appearing like you’re watching a flick on a liquid substance, as dried onto a miniature square tab of construction paper.
Coming back to what the article wrote about Ektachrome 5239/7239, a daylight-balanced (as opposed to tungsten-balanced) colour reversal (i.e., slide) stock, it’s true: it was never mass-produced for still or motion stock. I have never seen nor
known of a daylight-balanced ISO/ASA 160 version of Ektachrome, ever (but it would have been a wonderful film to use, especially for its inherent graininess). I have shot with the tungsten-balanced 160T/EPT (and its even grainier, more light-sensitive sibling, 320T/EPJ). So that fact alone makes the story you linked even more fascinating.
(Incidentally, “Ektachrome” is Kodak’s longtime catch-all brand for any colour-reversal stocks which can — or do, by design — use the E-series chemistry: E-1, E-2, E-3, E-4, and E-6, with only E-6 being used or available for most of these last 50 years. Ektachrome was created as a name to distinguish from the fundamentally different Kodachrome process, whose emulsion, chemistry, and steps, are nothing like Ektachrome’s E-6, Ektacolor/Ektar’s C-41, or Kodak’s D-76 black-and-white processes.)
