Endnote 145: Orin on The Mad Stork and Found Drama
‘You’ve got to remember he came at entertainment more from an interest in lenses and light. Most arty directors I think get more abstract as they go on. With him it was the opposite. […] Plus the academics who hated him hated the artificial sets and the chiaroscuro lighting, which the Stork had a total fetish for weird lenses and chiaroscuro.
Context
Orin to "Helen" Steeply, the Moment-profile interview: the family's own one-line theory of the career — he "came at entertainment more from an interest in lenses and light," so the usual arty-director arc ran backwards (started abstract because he started with the glass; cf. 020's optics-as-through-line bio and 045's YEAR-OF header ordering OPTICAL THEORIST before FILMMAKER). The second catalogued phrase gives the signature at the equipment level: "a total fetish for weird lenses and chiaroscuro" — the sentence's syntax breaks mid-clause exactly there (as printed; see Flags), Orin's spoken run-on landing on the two words that matter. "Weird lenses" is the same kit vocabulary as 178's auto-wobble account and n160's interred "case of special lenses". All of it delivered interleaved with Orin's copper-earring seduction patter — the aesthetics lecture as pickup move.