Garrett Brown's 1975 invention is one of the few pieces of technology that has changed cinema's grammar permanently.
Most film technologies arrive and recede within their decade — VistaVision, Cinerama, 70mm Super Panavision, 3D's various waves. The Steadicam is one of the rare exceptions. Invented by Garrett Brown in the mid-1970s and first deployed commercially in 1976, the device has been in continuous use for almost fifty years and has shaped the visual grammar of mainstream cinema at a level few other tools have managed.
Garrett Brown was a cinematographer working in advertising in Philadelphia in the early 1970s. He wanted to combine the smoothness of a dolly shot with the mobility of handheld camera. He built his first prototype in 1972, working through several versions over the next three years. The breakthrough device — a vest-mounted spring-arm and gimbal system that isolates the camera from the operator's body movement — was tested commercially in 1975 and first appeared in a feature film in 1976.
The Steadicam was patented by Cinema Products Corporation, which commercialised the device. Brown himself became its first major operator and demonstrator, performing shots for several of the most-discussed early Steadicam films.
The Steadicam's commercial debut was Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory (1976), the Woody Guthrie biopic. The film's most-discussed sequence is a long traveling shot from a crane dolly down into a migrant camp, transitioning to Brown's handheld Steadicam without a cut. The sequence was technically impossible before the Steadicam's existence.
What the audience experienced was a continuous movement from aerial perspective to ground-level character interaction — without the camera-shake that handheld would have produced or the locked-track limitation of a dolly. The grammar this opened up was: characters could now move through space and the camera could follow them at any height, in any direction, at any speed, without losing the smooth-track feel that audiences associated with controlled cinema.
The same year as Bound for Glory, John Avildsen's Rocky used a Steadicam for the famous training-sequence shot up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Garrett Brown himself operated. The shot's emotional impact — the audience moving with Rocky up the steps in continuous flow — became one of the most-imitated sequences in modern cinema. The 'training montage' as a form has, since 1976, almost always included some version of this Steadicam grammar.
Stanley Kubrick deployed the Steadicam extensively in The Shining (1980), particularly for the Overlook Hotel's hallway sequences with Danny Torrance on his tricycle. Kubrick's argument for the technique was that the long-take following shots created a hypnotic relationship between the viewer and the space — the audience was made to feel they were inside the geometry of the hotel.
The Shining is the foundational example of the Steadicam being used not as an action-conveyance device (as in Rocky or Bound for Glory) but as a contemplative space-observation device. Kubrick's use opened the technique up for serious art-cinema applications.
Martin Scorsese's three-minute Steadicam shot through the kitchens and back rooms of the Copacabana in Goodfellas (1990) is, by almost every survey of working filmmakers, the most-imitated Steadicam shot in cinema history. The technique was, by 1990, mature enough to support a three-minute take with multiple choreographed extras, dialogue, and dramatic stakes. Almost every subsequent significant Steadicam shot in American cinema is in conversation with this one.
Paul Thomas Anderson's opening Steadicam at the Hot Traxx disco in Boogie Nights (1997) is the most-direct subsequent homage. Hard to overstate how many directors have replicated some version of this approach since.
The Steadicam is now standard equipment. Almost every major American studio production uses it. The development of the gimbal-stabilised drone in the 2010s extended the technique's possibilities to aerial work. Digital cameras have made Steadicam shots that would have been operationally impossible in the film era (the 12-minute long takes in 1917, the simulated single-take feature of Birdman) now routinely achievable.
For more on the long-take tradition the Steadicam enables, see our essay The History of the Long Take. For Garrett Brown's own account of the invention, his book Steadicam Operator's Handbook is the canonical reference.