More of a movie enabler. At that time I was a matte painter and had been hired onto the show to paint a matte painting, on glass, of the Montana ranch in winter which would be cross dissolved with the same shot without the snow overlay. The idea was to convey the change of seasons. I did an in-camera glass shot, a particular form of cinematic high wire act that few matte painters of my generation, or the generation before, could pull off. The shot is done live on location, not in post, and it has to work the first time or you're screwed. This means that you have to be able to correctly estimate the color temperatures of light and shadow at the time that the shot is scheduled to be taken. You have about a 40 minute window where the live background and the painting will merge before the direction of light and the color temperature shifts too much for the elements to marry up. You need to able to control light levels between the painting and the background. Everything has to be ready to go at the moment the shot is to be taken. With production costs running about $20.000 an hour (at that time} any delay is expensive, and too much delay means that the shot can't be taken. Glass shots were common in the early days of film, when any post processing would result in noticeable image degradation. Once technology improved, other more flexible and forgiving methods became prominent.
Simon fell in love with the lens I chose for the shot, one he hadn't been using, and he kept sending his assistants to "borrow" it for his other shots, which made getting the painting started and aligned with the live background location impossible to do. It was only when I quit and called for a car to take me back to Santa Fé that he cut the shit and I was able to get the shot done.
