TV Talk: Western Pa. native films Apple TV+’s ‘Presumed Innocent’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Scott Turow’s 1987 novel “Presumed Innocent,” already adapted into a 1991 feature film starring Harrison Ford, gets the limited series treatment this week as Apple TV+ debuts its eight-­episode take on the same story. This time, it stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Chicago prosecutor Rusty Sabich, who’s accused of murdering a co-worker with whom he had an extramarital affair.

Written by David E. Kelley (“Big Little Lies,” “The Practice”) and streaming its first two episodes June 12 (then one episode weekly on Wednesdays through July 24), “Presumed Innocent” marks the latest Hollywood production for Joe Lindsay, a native of Freeport in the Alle-Kiski Valley. He was the “A” Camera and Steadicam operator for the duration of the production, which filmed mostly in Burbank, Calif., in 2023 before the onset of the actors’ strike.

Lindsay, 39, said he felt particularly at home on the “Presumed Innocent” set due to the story’s content and because his father, a criminal defense attorney, loved the Harrison Ford film.

“Because it was a popular movie, rather than just remaking what was already done, we took some creative liberties to keep people guessing,” Lindsay said.

Growing up in Butler County, Lindsay was a movie buff but thought he might have a career in music, not film production.

“What happens in the middle of nowhere, if you pick up an instrument you get really good at or you watch a bunch of movies,” Lindsay said. “Those are two things my family did. They were huge movie buffs. I think I was watching movies well beyond my maturity level at a really young age, absorbing the language of filmmaking without any formal training.”

But Lindsay didn’t think about filmmaking as a career until much later.

He attended Freeport Area High School but transferred to a private boarding school near Philadelphia in his junior year. After one year of college near Philly, he moved to San Francisco to study music production and audio engineering but realized it wasn’t for him. He wound up working in film editing, post-production “and a little bit of everything” for his brother Alex’s Bay Area production company.

Then Joe discovered Steadicam, one of the first variations of a camera stabilizer originally introduced in 1975.

“I wear a vest with a spring-loaded arm, and the camera sits on that spring-loaded arm. As I take footsteps, it steadies and takes the camera shakes out of what’s associated with handheld,” Lindsay said. “It’s really revolutionized the way people tell stories.”

After a training course in Philadelphia with Garrett Brown, the inventor of Steadicam, Lindsay bought his own small Steadicam rig and practiced filming daily. Lindsay worked as a director of photography (DP) on small film projects where he’d offer his Steadicam services “essentially for free” in trade for the footage so he could build a demo reel.

“I was aspiring to be a DP, but I was so into Steadicam that I decided I liked operating Steadicam better than being a DP,” Lindsay said.

He was hired for the 2017 Boots Riley film “Sorry to Bother You,” which filmed in the Bay Area, and continued to build his resume, often working with director of photography Doug Emmett, who brought him onto the 2020 film “I Care a Lot.” They worked together again on “Presumed Innocent.” (Lindsay also worked on the Disney+ movie “Crater” and the Peacock limited series “Angelyne.”)

“As primary camera operator, I work directly with everyone,” Lindsay said of interactions with film or TV series crews. “(I work) with the director to make sure you’re moving the way they want you to, with the DP on (camera) lens selection and the apparatus we decide to shoot the scene with. It could be on a dolly, it could be handheld. A Technocrane is an amazing tool but sometimes its perfection can take away from the intimacy of a small scene that handheld might be more appropriate for.”

Lindsay said that, as much as he likes flashy camera work, his background in sound taught him the idea that “if your work is noticed, then you’ve failed at your job, you’ve taken away from what you’re trying to do. I’ve taken that concept and incorporated it into my camera operation.

“Anybody who cares about their job in the film industry will say, ‘It’s story first and character first,’ ” said Lindsay, who’s currently filming Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass in Hulu’s “Natalia,” a dramatic adaptation of the docu-series “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace” about a person who presented as a 6-year-old Ukrainian orphan but turned out not to be. “The goal is to represent the story. Your approach supports the actors’ performances.”

Lindsay said what made filming “Presumed Innocent” unique was the emphasis on breaking some of the traditional rules of how a TV show is usually filmed with a wide, moving master shot followed by tight, over-the-shoulder close-ups.

“We had tons of out-of-focus in the foreground shooting, a lot of reflections on surfaces that are imperfect,” Lindsay said. “And we had a lot of direction from Jake Gyllenhaal to say, ‘Get weird.’ Jake, especially in the first week as we got shooting, understood who I was as a camera operator and what I was going for. He made sure we never did the standard stuff. What made it special to me was the rule breaking.”

In addition to filming at the Warner Bros. Ranch lot in Burbank, Lindsay also went to Chicago with a splinter crew to film establishing exterior shots that match the language of the scenes shot in California.

His next dream: Filming a project back home in Western Pennsylvania.

“I’m dying to film in Pittsburgh,” said Lindsay, who still lives in Northern California but works in Los Angeles as a “local hire,” renting an Airbnb for the duration of L.A.-filmed projects. “Because I went to boarding school at 16, I didn’t have my driver’s license (when I lived in Western Pennsylvania) and I never got to know the city for what it’s become. It would be such a dream of mine to work there. I have looked at production lists and sent my information, but I think at the time I didn’t have enough credits to warrant bringing in an out-of-town camera operator. … Now that I do have that, I’m not trying to have expectations but I’m hoping ‘Presumed Innocent’ will be a big enough deal to make that easier for me.”