At home I had my calm Suzie and my two beautiful girls, Jessica and Kathryn. There were often tears as I walked out the door—not mine, though, I saved them for inside the taxi, knowing if the kids saw me sobbing they’d be even more upset. When they were very young with no concept of time, it was a little easier, though when Kathryn was two she refused to look at me or allow me to kiss her for three days after I got back from a trip. Seven was the killer age, and the kids would ask how long I’d be away. I couldn’t lie and never did, but many times I was lied to by the office. Often, near the end of a trip while my three girls and I were counting down the days, I’d be told that another two stories had been found, adding a week or more to the trip. Those phone calls home were the worst.
In 30 years I was home for three of Suzie’s birthdays. I missed practically every swimming carnival, parent–teacher meeting and concert the kids had. I know I’m not the only father to do this. I think of the poor blokes like my father who went away to war. But it doesn’t make it any easier ... and there must be some connection with an absent parent and their kids’ immune system. Kids only ever get sick when you are away, and that’s verified by every travelling parent at 60 Minutes.
Balancing family and career was difficult, but I really did get a buzz out of having a camera on my shoulder and trying to capture Rembrandts. But they’re hard to come by, and there are a million reasons why. A beautiful scene can be spoilt by overhead powerlines. The angelic face of a child in a crowd should be a breeze, but get too close and the kid pokes out his tongue or runs screaming to mum. But the main reason is that we were always running late. Trying to get four people to leave the hotel at the same time was impossible. With lack of time comes, ‘Fuck art, just get the shots done. We’re late for the next appointment.’ Where there’s a jackhammer next door, a bribe is needed. Soundmen carry loads of cash to buy a slice of silence, but often they’re told to fuck off and the cacophony continues. Then we find the location has stark white walls, a nightmare for cameramen. With the soundman sweating over jackhammers, and me sweating over a flat, lifeless background, it’s no good protesting: it’s taken the producer three months and thousands of phone calls to get this reluctant piece of talent to talk, and so the interview must go ahead. And now. No Rembrandts today.
Some great Rembrandts only occurred after a stash of local currency had changed hands. Did money change hands in Cerro Muriano in September 1936, when Robert Capa took his famous shot, the ‘Falling Soldier’? In some quarters it’s deemed to be a fake. I hope not. Because Capa is one of the all-time great photographers, and shot many fearless Rembrandts, specifically during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Those shots are revered around the world.
Capa almost single-handedly invented the character of the photojournalist. In horror situations—war zones, urban riots, military takeovers—guys like him helped define the 20th century. But they were alone with their cameras. I was always with a team of friends.
One of the great things about working in a team of four is there are four sets of eyes. Extremely helpful in a dangerous situation. We were in the ancient city of Hebron, one of the most confusing places on earth. The Palestinians, the Jordanians, the Israelis, all claim some sort of ownership. There were 120,000 Arabs and 500 Jewish settlers permanently living in Hebron. The tension was frightening. Nobody wanted us there, especially the settlers. I was filming a group of Jewish settlers when some loopy who hated Palestinians, the world, and us, went for me with a knife. Richard Carleton dashed in, wrestled the guy to the ground and snatched the knife from him. I hadn’t seen it coming. Richard then pocketed the knife, and as I filmed the guy bolting away I was extremely grateful for that extra set of eyes.
Real teamwork is what happens with a cameraman and a soundman, and I worked with the best. Micky Breen—a great soundman, and an even greater bloke. His sound was always perfect, even with jackhammers nearby. I could do a 360-degree shot and not see him. He’d watch me like a hawk, anticipating the shot and ducking just in time. Sounds simple, but with some others I’ve tried the same shot and seen a stunned soundman staring down the lens with a moronic look, saying, ‘I didn’t know you were coming round this way.’ If Micky suggested a shot, I’d do it immediately, knowing full well it’d be a beauty. The general misconception was, ‘What do soundmen do but aim a microphone at peoples’ faces? How hard can that be?’ So, whether we liked it or not, they were always at the bottom of the crew pecking order. Reporter, Producer, Cameraman, Soundman. Some soundmen were treated appallingly. But soundmen tend to be tough guys, and I’ve seen a few producers with bloody noses, or chairs hurled at them, and they deserved it.
In 25 years I spent more time with Micky than I did with Suzie. Probably not healthy for all concerned but we were away from home more than seven months of the year. I can honestly say Micky and I have never had an argument; maybe a few disagreements on minor things but nothing serious.
That wasn’t the case for everyone. Every trip was a lottery. You never knew which reporter and producer you might score. You did try to stick with the ones you liked, but that couldn’t always be achieved. These other crew members got Micky and me as a unit, and some of them travelled with the unit better than others. We were all different, some more so, and living with each other 24 hours a day for six to eight weeks, often in very difficult circumstances, sure stressed those differences.
I’ve seen separate flights and separate hotels, screaming matches, chairs and punches thrown, tears, walk outs, calls to executive producers demanding a sacking, and even a producer and reporter who were not on speaking terms. That was a beauty. They were both claiming ownership over the story and neither would budge an inch, so a second producer was flown in to ‘translate’. The feuding couple even sat at the same dinner table and the reporter asked the number-two producer to ask the number-one producer to pass the salt!
Micky and I dubbed ourselves the A team, not just because we couldn’t spell B, but because we came up with it first. The A team survived six executive producers, sixteen reporters and five million producers. Producers are a dime a dozen, their attrition rate huge. Executive producers thought it kept producers on their toes if they chopped a few at the end of each year. Seems counterproductive to me to control through fear, but what would I know about office politics.
Absolutely nothing, and I’m glad. Because once my eye was up against the viewfinder of a camera, the size, shape, colour and length of the shot was all mine, nobody else’s, though the subject was not always my choice. Over time cameramen somehow develop a way to become totally detached from the subject, and under most circumstances it’s a marvellous thing. Just as I hadn’t smelt the blood in the bucket in the prison cell in Uganda until I’d taken my eye from the viewfinder, while filming I was always removed from any horrors coming at me through the lens. Having filmed natural childbirth at home and in hospital, caesareans, heart surgery, mastectomies, brain surgery, a sex change, a circumcision, implants of all kinds, penis straightening, prostate surgery, knee reconstruction, burn victims, tortured animals, poverty, wars, bombings, criminals, politicians, priests, paedophiles, paedophile priests, film stars, rock stars, dead children (that’s tough), grieving parents of dead children (even tougher), my camera protected me not only physically but emotionally from everything I shot.
Some will argue I don’t have to shoot any of the above and they’re right, of course, but I did and I know that without a camera a lot of it would have turned me into a blithering wreck. How the others coped, I have no idea. I loved my camera ... most times.
I developed an interesting relationship with my cameras. All the 60 Minutes cameras were the same, but not unlike your car they somehow develop a personality with eccentric traits you must learn to live with, and just like that irritating younger brother, you end up loving them or wanting to kill them. Or both.
Cameras hate water, sand, extreme heat and cold (mine hated early mornings), and they go into total shutdown mode when dropped. They
hate that. Sometimes they just need a rest and act like a spoilt child refusing to do what they’re told, and just like the child, their timing is impeccable. Just as the reporter asks that confrontational question the talent was dreading, or you’re inside the helicopter that’s been waiting an hour for the weather to clear, the camera decides it’s allergic to work. Then it revels in the cameraman’s embarrassment. If all this seems a little weird, not a lot of people have a bloody great lump attached to their body for up to fourteen hours a day, unless it’s a child or brand new lover, and as with the child or lover all the camera wants is a little love and respect.
The first twenty years of 60 Minutes everything was shot on 16-mm film using an Arriflex (Arri) SR. Shooting film meant there was a break every ten minutes to whack on a new magazine of film. That could be done in ten seconds if need be, but after three magazines a longer break was needed for all three to be reloaded again. I did this with my hands inside a black light-proof ‘changing bag’, unloading the already-exposed film and replacing it with a new 400-foot roll. Sometimes monumental hangovers meant the changing bag was forgotten and I’d have to climb into the boot of a car to change the film. Very black in there when it’s slammed shut. Tough if it was summer. I did it only twice in the tropics, but I might as well have been in a swimming pool, sweat gushing out of every pore and making my hands extremely slippery. And it’s never a good look seeing ‘water marks’ all over a reporter’s face.
On a long trip, some of the finished stories (hopefully full of Rembrandts) would need to be shipped back to Sydney. But often there was no shipping company, or there were dodgy governments with heavy censorship, so we had to sneak the footage out. I’d head to the airport in search of a courier, who often turned out to be a pilot with a friendly face, then hand over our hard work to him and just hope to hell it’d make it to Sydney. Try doing that today.
With film I had no idea what the footage looked like and, more to the point, neither did the reporter or producer. Nobody got to see a shot until the footage finally made it to Sydney, was developed in the lab and put into synch with the sound. Often the script was written on the road without anyone having seen a single shot. All the reporter and producer had to go by was their notes and what I could tell them about what I may or may not have filmed. This was always fraught with danger. Not only would they have in their minds scenes that never existed, but also shots that Steven Spielberg would have had difficulty conjuring up. They’d get most upset when told those shots didn’t exist. It was as if somehow I’d lost the shots they had so beautifully described in their script. Plus we’d often shoot up to 30 ten-minute rolls—that’s 300 minutes or five hours of film—for a fifteen-minute story. The amount of Rembrandts that ended up on the cutting room floor was soul-destroying.
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But if a shot absolutely has to be used, it’s used. Even if that footage for some reason is soft, scratched, the wrong colour, edge fogged, underexposed or overexposed, there are only so many times you can blame the lab. Which works for the first few hundred times. After that, producers, and more importantly executive producers, having dismissed a few lab technicians, begin to suspect others. Namely me.
Then there’s the lens. Which must be treated with utter respect. If it gets a bump, and it does regularly, it can create all sorts of problems with focus. Soft (out of focus) pictures are not acceptable, but if you’re in the middle of Africa for three weeks and the lens has had a knock, there’s not a lot you can do. On such a trip my lens was suffering from a six-hour ride in the back of a ute over rough, rocky terrain. When I started shooting, I found the lens was a bit soft on the wide end, completely out of focus in the middle range, but sharp as a tack on the telephoto end ... So telephoto shots, millions of them, dominated the story.
The only people to notice were the editor and a very cool producer who looked at the shots over and over. When the producer asked why so many shots were on the long end of the zoom, I leapt in with, ‘Stephen, please, with the long end of the lens, the less difference is observed between close and distant subjects, making it appear as if they are closer regardless of the distance between them. It’s called “compressed perspective”, and by doing this I feel I’ve made the audience think they are more a part of what they are seeing rather than just being an observer. What do you think?’
I was expecting, ‘Impressive. Yes, I agree.’ But what I got was, ‘Piss off. Go and get your lens fixed.’
The ‘hair in the gate’ is a beauty. In old movies you might see a little hairy thing wriggling all over Katharine Hepburn’s face for five seconds. Then it miraculously disappears because the projectionist, having looked into the ‘gate’ of his projector and seen the culprit and with no lab man to blame, quickly blows some air from a compressed air canister, or more likely his mouth, into the gate and Kate is blemish-free once more.
But in the camera that hair in the gate is not noticed until it’s too late. At the end of the scene, the magazine of film is taken off for a gate check and sometimes, lying across it, is what looks like a piece of driftwood. Has it been there the entire 400 feet? Or did it drop in halfway through. However long it has been there, the shadow of that hair is now permanently, for as long as that piece of film exists, plastered right across the scene.
Even though the term is ‘a hair in the gate’, I should explain that 99 per cent of the time it’s not a hair. It’s a thin slither of film that could have been shaved off by a wonky magazine, but most often it occurs because the manufacturer hasn’t cut the film cleanly and has left little dags hanging off the film edge. Try telling that to the bosses. I’ve had a moustache all my life, well obviously not all my life, only since I was three, and every time there was a hair in the gate I was told, ‘Shave off that fucking moustache.’
Scratched film is a killer. A scratch can come from slack handling of the film when it’s loaded, from dirt, or even a grain of sand. Once that tiny grain gets into the magazine, it sits there waiting to ambush that beautiful brand new roll of film. Scratches really upset executive producers, reporters even more so. For some reason they are not too keen on giant scratches across their beautiful faces.
Then there are filters. Depending on the type of film being used, different filters are needed ... and somehow (mostly due to a hangover) wrong coloured filters end up on the lens, and the pictures can be red or blue. All attempts to explain that this was ‘my Picasso-like blue period showing a marvellous expression of poetic subtlety and personal melancholy’ fall on deaf ears and I get reminded that only recently, while going through my rose period, I had told them I felt, ‘My subjects now had a melancholy feel and I was evolving as an artiste.’
As for the under/over exposure thing, of course being a professional it should never happen, but in haste it can, resulting in a call from Sydney asking why Richard Carleton suddenly looked like an African, or how come the scene in the nightclub looked like virgin snow at midday. But there’s not a cameraman in the world that hasn’t done some or all of the above.
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Digital cameras brought on a whole new set of bigger and more irritating problems. Give me hairs and scratches any day. At least they were simple. But digital cameras have a mind of their own. They pixelate, dictate, hesitate, deliberate, decide your fate and, I suspect, masturbate. Pixelation is a ripper. With pixelation all the colours go wonky, the picture is out of whack and bits of the shot appear where they shouldn’t. An electronic nightmare.
The look of digital pictures is, I think, fake. Film mimics our eye much better. Film has an organic calmness to it, softness, an overall smoothness. The digital pics have unbelievable clarity, so bloody clear the shots look magnified. Sweat looks like Niagara Falls, wrinkles the Grand Canyon, and an unfortunate little cold sore looks like Vesuvius on the morning of 23 August AD 79.
Talk about spoilt child, the digital video camera is the sickly spoilt child that is somehow capable of ruining everyone’s day. Everyone else catches a cold. He gets pneumonia.
He has to travel on the plane with you. The Arri went in the hold. He hates to come out of his air-conditioned hotel room in the tropics, so throws a tantrum and can’t be used for half an hour while he sulks about the humidity. The sudden change of temperature sends all the electronics loopy and shuts down the recording part of the camera. We know this because the spoilt brat has the digital world’s equivalent of tears. A flashing red light that cries until it feels acclimatised. But even worse, at that time the viewfinder was not in colour. Everything I shot with a digital camera, I saw only in black and white. I never, ever, got used to it. I’d be utterly amazed when later I saw the day’s footage in exquisite colour.
But I came to love my petulant child of a camera, as all parents do. We were a good team. Rembrandts were few and far between, but not for lack of trying on both our parts. The camera and I both knew how hard it was, even on the best show in town, to make every frame a Rembrandt.
13
Shit Happens
In all jobs things go wrong. Shit happens. For a pilot or a doctor one tiny mistake can result in death, and how bad would that feel. But a pilot can blame Boeing, if he’s still around, and a doctor can always blame the hospital system or even Hippocrates for not teaching him exactly how not to fall into the twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism. But for a cameraman working for a top-rating TV program, that tiny mistake is seen by millions of people. The doc and the pilot don’t have to put up with that humiliation.
On 60 Minutes the shit that happened wasn’t always cameras, schedules, sound, airlines, etc. They couldn’t compete with, for example, an idiot producer wearing riding boots. It happened in Oklahoma. Having arrived late as per usual, we had to set up in a big hurry with all of us offering an endless amount of apologies to the already reluctant interviewee. With tension in the room, I leant away from the camera towards the reluctant TV star for a quick light meter reading. At the same time the manic producer came racing across the room with arms flapping, yelling, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ In all his eagerness his bloody great clodhoppers clipped one leg of the tripod and down it all came. I lunged at the falling camera a millisecond too late.
All This in 60 Minutes Page 17
