David Mullen ASC

It will mean though that all the people who shoot Cinestill film for that red halation around lights (because of the removal of remjet so no anti-halation backing) will be unable to get that effect anymore.

You might try contacting Tim Kang at Aperture, he runs the Academy's color science testing of lights and he might have some figures for old carbon arc lighting.

Showing the thumbprint artifact in the bokeh from Kodak Portrait Diffusion Disks.

Harrison started selling Fog and Diffusion in the late 1930s. Their Diffusion is sort of a mist filter I believe meant to compete with the more variable (in manufacturing) Scheibe filter of the 1930s. The most common diffusion filter for close-ups (besides nets) was the Kodak Portrait Diffusion Disk, which seemed to stop being used by the end of the 1960s. Kodak diffusion filters go back to the 1900s I believe, first used for still photography and in enlargers making prints. Mitchell diffusion appears also in the late 1930s. The design was revamped in the early 1960s when Panchro started making them. Tiffen started being popular for cinematography in the 1970s — I suspect in the 1960s they first catered to still photographers. Schneider Classic Softs are a variation of the old Hasselblad Softars. Perhaps the Tiffen Fogs, Low-Cons, etc. of the 1970s were slightly less blue in the halation than Harrisons but not by much.

There are a number of lenses that could have been used — for example the Zeiss Jena Biotar, the precursor to the Helios 44-2. https://casualphotophile.com/2019/02/13/carl-zeiss-jena-biotar-58mm-f-2-lens-review/ I took this picture with the 58mm Zeiss Biotar:

My dad took a lot of color slides while in the Navy in the early 1960s, stationed in the Philippines and Japan -- the Ektachromes faded to pale magenta but the Kodachromes got eaten by mold in the Philippines, dark spots everywhere -- I guess they liked the dye! The colors are still great though...

There isn't really a specific "commercial" look nor a "narrative" look, there are many looks. However, since the main point of a commercial is often to sell a product, and there are certain styles in commercials that repeat themselves (like the golden sunny kitchen light for an orange juice commercial), when one is shooting a scene with a car, let's say, and the director says something like "I want this to feel like a Porsche commercial", i.e. show off the car, make it beautiful -- or converse, complains that the shot "looks like a car commercial" -- the cinematographer gets the drift.

You can see the operator side of an 8-perf 35mm Technirama camera here -- it's not quite the same as the Mitchell elephant-ear VistaVision camera. This article says that Paramount converted some 3-strip Technicolor bodies to VistaVision but that the Mitchell elephant ear camera was a separate camera: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vistavision-searching-history-mark-pollio#:~:text=There were eleven 3-strip,one known as elephant ear.

The Technicolor camera bodies were converted to 8-perf 35mm for the Technirama process with the magazines usually on top -- though the Mitchell elephant ear VistaVision cameras look very similar I don't think they were made from a 3-strip Technicolor body. Though I acknowledge that Mitchell built both types of camera bodies.

Just depends. If the 4x4 frame is not too heavy, like an Opal, and would be larger relative to the subject compared to the distant physically larger frame, then sometimes that works as a fast way of softening the key further. But if the 4x4 frame wasn't going to be any larger relative to the other frame, then the light isn't going to be much softer unless that larger frame was too light so the lights behind it were creating hot spots rather than filling the frame, but at that point you'd be better off just adding the 4x4 frames between the lights and the large diffusion to make the light fill it more evenly, because it's the size relative to the subject that determines softness. If the 4x4 frame was relatively larger compared to the distant frame but you wanted something heavier like Full Grid Cloth, then you'd probably add some light behind it to compensate for the light loss. And sometimes you might want to bring it slightly forward to wrap around the face a little more too, so that would require both a diffusion frame and a light behind it. There are no rules.

It was shot in 1990; the year before Kodak came out with the first EXR version of their fast film, 5296 500T, so it probably was shot on that -- though it was possible to still buy the older high-speed stocks, 5294 and 5295. The EXR series was the first to use T-grain in all the layers. 5294 400T came out in 1983 before T-grain technology but was still being used by a few people as late as 1991 ("Bugsy" for example). 5295 400T came out in 1986 and used T-grain for the blue layer and was sold as a high-speed "bluescreen" stock. For a few years, it was a case of some DPs preferring 5294 and others 5295 (a bit less grainy but also a bit more contrasty, plus Kodak charged more for it). https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/page/chronology-of-film/

Michael Mann's "Heat" was shot in daylight without the correction filter on tungsten-balanced film.

Doesn't really matter whether it is a post process or a LUT, it's just different paths to color-correcting the raw or log file. As I said, it's a choice -- unless your TV isn't getting a proper signal. With HDR thrown into the mix with streaming material, I wonder if it is always being shown correctly.

Sure you can criticize a choice -- I only point out that it was a choice because too many people are looking for a technical reason.