All This in 60 Minutes

by Lee, Nicholas

  After spending a day with him doing nothing but complain, we had nowhere near enough for a story. With luck we’d get a ten-minute story out of him by using a stack of archival footage, but Allan Hogan the producer was still doubtful. We couldn’t wait to see the back of Rooney. My diary entry of Tuesday, 16 June 1992: ‘Have just met the greatest arsehole of all time.’

  Still in LA we figured you win some, you lose some. The David Copperfield story should give us a chance to redeem ourselves. How could we lose? Copperfield was big time right then (not 40 years ago like Ninian Yule), beloved throughout the world, and not only could he walk through the Great Wall of China, he could fly.

  Before our first little get-to-know Copperfield interview, his assistant told us we could only film him from one side. At no time could I film the left side of his face. Okay, that’s cool, we had reporters who had a similar preference. This was not just a preference, though, this was laid down as the law, and as I usually like to abide by the law, I did the right thing.

  Copperfield was charming, the complete opposite to Rooney, which made us really like him. He told us how much he was looking forward to working with Aussies, and how excited he was to be going to Australia.

  The following day I shot a sequence of him in a hospital, teaching tricks to doctors and nurses to use for relaxing depressed and injured patients. It was great stuff, and he had all those medicos in awe of his skills. I went to the back of the room for a wide shot: but he was a million miles away. The shot was the backs of the medical staff with Copperfield on stage a mere speck in the distance. I headed for the corner to set up but I had literally crossed the line. In mid-trick he stopped, pointed at me and waved me over to the other side. I couldn’t believe it. From back there you wouldn’t even know it was him, let alone be disgusted by whatever horrendous blemish he was trying to hide from the television world. I did the right thing and moved, but ten minutes later I tried again. I thought no one could be this vain, and I’ve worked with some beauties. This time he sent the assistant over to say I must shoot him from the other side or leave. That must be some blemish.

  That night we went to see his show, not to film it, just to see what was in store for us for the shoot in a few days’ time. It was amazing. He flew, he disappeared, he turned himself into a woman and he made beautiful women disappear. The whole show was unbelievable and we couldn’t wait to film it.

  The next night we arrived at the venue and were met by the same assistant, all over us like a rash. She told us we had to film the crowds of people filing in and buying programs. All unbelievably boring stuff, but I did it to keep her on side. We were then ushered inside and given a spot where I could shoot the show. Then out came the rules. One, there would be no changing of camera position. Two, there would be no changing of lenses. (That was a shame. I was about to put on my how-to-expose-all-magic-tricks lens.) Three, there were two parts and two parts only of the show which I could film. And four, when we got the word to stop filming, I must stop immediately.

  The two parts of the show we were allowed to shoot were more boring than the program purchasing. I was filming bits of the show that had none of the great tricks. It was just Copperfield striding about the stage like a demented male model. It was nowhere near enough for a sequence and certainly nowhere near enough to give away any secrets. Still, yet again, we did what we were told. I figured I’d try for better stuff once we’d ingratiated ourselves with David and told him how amazing his show was.

  After the show we shot some quick interviews with heaps of mesmerised ecstatic members of the audience, before another interview with the great man himself. I had hoped he’d fly out to meet us, but no such luck, so we were ushered into his dressing room. Again he told us how much he was looking forward to coming to Australia and again we said how happy we were he was coming and we all gushed and smiled and grovelled.

  ‘We really loved the show,’ Allan Hogan, the producer, said. ‘We enjoyed it just as much tonight as we did last night.’

  Copperfield went white, then crimson, and suddenly the Great Wall of China stood between us and the great magician. And he wasn’t planning on walking through to our side.

  He glared at his PR woman. ‘They saw the show last night?’ he snarled. The poor woman had no idea. We’d bought our own tickets to have a look at what would be in store for us.

  The tension in the room was palpable. I don’t know why he didn’t just make himself disappear, or even better, make us disappear. That’s what I’d have done.

  When Allan asked if there was a problem, Copperfield started to rave about us being sneaky and trying to figure out his tricks. ‘Blah, blah, I’m a professional, blah, blah, do you realise what you’ve done, blah, blah.’

  Richard Carleton and Allan tried in vain to placate the mad magician and his stressed entourage, telling him we really liked him, and the show was amazing, but we didn’t have enough footage for a story. There was whispering between flunkies and Copperfield, they then asked us to leave while they discussed it further. As we were ushered out of the room, Richard turned and said, ‘I did Margaret Thatcher. I did Gorbachev. And they gave us better access.’

  That was probably our undoing. We knew we were doomed but, surprise, five minutes later, with a big smile on her face, the PR woman came out. ‘Okay, David says you can film him having dinner.’ Dinner? Dinner!

  Allan was furious. He made one last desperate effort. ‘Frankly we’ll have to drop the story,’ he said. ‘What we have is not nearly enough. We are professionals, as he is, and we need more.’

  ‘All right, I’ll put that to David.’

  An hour later she returned. ‘David says no.’

  End of story.

  So with Rooney only a maybe, and Copperfield non-existent, Allan said, ‘What next? The pygmies will probably be fucking six feet tall.’ It was up to the Sistine Chapel to save the day, the trip and our careers.

  •

  The Sistine Chapel was truly sublime. Years earlier, in the early 1970s, I was a tourist marvelling at Michelangelo’s brilliance, wandering through the chapel with thousands of other tourists staring disbelievingly at his masterpiece, but with everyone getting a little edgy, bumping and pushing each other as they gazed up at the ceiling. The experience was not a lot of fun. The Sistine Chapel is one of the world’s must-see masterpieces and I remember thinking how much better it would have been without the crowds. Now, that was about to happen.

  We flew into Florence, Michelangelo’s birthplace, to meet Professor James Beck, an art historian who told us the restoration of the Sistine Chapel was one of the great catastrophes of art in the 20th century. As we wandered through Florence he pointed out Michelangelo statues ruined by attempts to clean them. And if they couldn’t get that right, he said, what made them think they could do justice to the chapel. It was all good stuff to feed on the controversy, but we needed to feed on the great food of Florence, which we did for a few days in between filling our story with great works of art. Then it was onto a train to Rome and the chapel to get the restorers’ opinions on the restoration and on Professor Beck.

  Next morning we got to Florence railway station two hours early for our one o’clock train, but had none of the usual hold-up with the gear. The departures board showed there was a train leaving for Rome in five minutes so we jumped on that. Our 1 p.m. trip had been booked by our travel agent back in Australia. What sort of really stupid travel agent books a train journey for the middle of the day, ruining lunch? We hadn’t been travelling the world for a million years without knowing how to make life easy for ourselves, so we wanted to get to Rome in good time for Insalata Caprese, Braciole di Maiale and a cheeky dry white on the Via Veneto.

  The carriages were a little rundown, but we figured the Italians were much more into great works of art than public transport. We left the station at snail speed, travelled what seemed like two inches down the line then stopped at a small station to deposit a few little old ladies and pick up some mail. It was the f
irst of our 1073 mail stops. Michelangelo would have had time to complete the Sistine Chapel and be halfway through another Pieta. We got to Stazioni di Roma Termini only a few hours after our travel agent-booked train—and headed to our hotel, starving to death and cursing our own stupidity.

  Now, not only was I back in one of the great cities of the world, I was inside the Sistine Chapel gazing at Michelangelo’s masterpiece up close and alone. We hired the chapel for four hours. Not a soul in the place but us. I think the Catholic church really needed the money. Imagine what they could put away if they rented out the pope for fancy dress parties.

  Then I saw the light, or lack of. Perhaps if you’re a believer, you only need divine light, but I’m a cameraman and I need the real thing. Worse still, every now and then the light coming through the six tall windows high up on the wall would vary. The sun seemed to dance all over the place, changing my exposure and the look in God’s eyes during his universe-creating. I felt he was staring straight at me—and he knew that I was a non-believer. And now he was going to make me pay by switching the sun on and off.

  Yet the always-thinking-of-a-fast-buck Vatican guys just happened to have lights for rent for atheist cameramen. So instead of the Blessed Virgin to brighten up the place, I had Mario, a happy little Italian man with eight 2000-watt lights on heavy-duty stands and, boy, did I need every watt of ’em.

  More than 465 square metres of frescoes with more than 300 figures. Where to start? The masterpiece on the ceiling is 40 metres long, 13 metres wide and a staggering 20 metres above the floor, so I had to throw a hell of a lot of light up there to get an exposure. But mine was not the only exposure problem. It’s said that before the masterpiece was finished, the Papal Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, complained to the pope about all the nudity. ‘It was most disgraceful that in so sacred a place to have painted so many naked figures immodestly revealing their shameful parts. It was not a work for a papal chapel but for a bathhouse or house of ill-fame,’ he said.

  But the nudity didn’t seem to offend Pope Paul III or his successor Julius III, so it stayed, and Michelangelo got his revenge on Biagio and his shameful parts. In his depiction of the Last Judgement on the back wall, Michelangelo painted Biagio as Minos, the judge of the underworld, with a great serpent around his legs and donkey ears.

  Years later, just a month before Michelangelo died, Biagio, who had mounted a ‘fig leaf campaign’ along with his wowser compagnos, got his way, and the decision was made to ‘amend’ the frescoes by painting cloth around those shameful parts.

  But now with this latest restoration, half of the ‘fig leaves’ were removed and it was discovered that Biagio was actually being bitten on the genitalia by the snake. Go Michelangelo! And not only did he put Biagio into the work, he painted himself into his masterpiece not once but twice. Anticipating Alfred Hitchcock by 400 years.

  I went searching for those great bits of art history for our story, but unfortunately the restoration was not complete and the whole of the Last Judgement on the back wall was completely covered by grubby old grey canvas with a bad copy of the Last Judgement tacked onto it. So it was nearly all ceiling in our story and after four hours my neck was killing me. Michelangelo painted the ceiling for up to twelve hours a day for four years, tough gig I know, but he didn’t have to guess the exposure from 20 metres away or have Richard Carleton in the foreground. When Richard did his pieces to camera, I was struggling with the depth of field focus, plus it was not a flattering shot looking straight up Richard’s nose. But when all the ‘reporter’ stuff was done, Richard, Allan, Micky and Mario left the chapel, and I was alone with my camera to do a Michelangelo and create.

  It was fantastic. With a long lens I could see amazing detail. I could see right into God’s eyes as he created the universe, a starkers Adam and Eve awash with innocence and about to be lost to original sin, and just when I was feeling that maybe I should have paid more attention in Sunday School, I zoomed in to the drunkenness of Noah. He was soaking wet and exhausted after his family were the only people on the planet to survive a gigantic flood, so he decided to take off all his clothes, hit the piss, then flaked. But his sons, with Biagio-type hang-ups, snuck up and covered his offending parts. I suspect those parts were in no condition to offend anybody, because Noah was 500 years old. Leave the poor bloke alone, I say, and I reckon Michelangelo would have had similar thoughts to mine.

  Work over, still totally alone in the Sistine Chapel, I abandoned the camera and lay flat on my back on the beautiful, ornately tiled floor, itself a work of art, and stared in total disbelief at the size and beauty of it all, and my good fortune at actually being paid to do this. I lay there completely enveloped in what some say is the greatest work of art ever to have existed and I wondered what Michelangelo’s thoughts would have been on the restoration. We knew Professor Beck’s. He told us the restorers had ruined the masterpiece. I must admit I wasn’t convinced it was ruined, but it certainly looked different to when I saw it back in 1974.

  With grime and smoke from 400 years of candle burning and tourists and priests’ heavy breathing removed, the chapel now looked bright and vivid, with amazingly over-the-top greens, pinks and yellows. It looked, how do I say this ... so Italian.

  These bright colours ‘were not the way Michelangelo painted them’, Professor Beck told us. ‘If you like Walt Disney you would prefer this version, but if you have a real view to the past you won’t.’

  Which made me wonder who did he think actually painted those garish colours? Certainly not the restorers. All they did was remove paint.

  I was so impressed by the Sistine Chapel story that I read everything I could about Michaelangelo, his art and his genius. My job was fun and educational.

  •

  With my head still swirling with Michelangelo images, which can’t be a bad thing, we hopped on a plane to London and did something on a gold heist about which I remember nothing. Some stories just aren’t worth remembering. Then it was off to Uganda for a National Geo-type story on the pygmies of the Rwenzori Mountains. This should be a ripper, as long as they weren’t fucking six feet tall.

  As a kid I read every Phantom comic there was and was fascinated by his friendship with the pygmies. He owed them big time. Not only did they find him on the beach and nurse him back to health, they also found him his skull cave and I always hoped if ever I bumped into a few pygmies they might find me one. The only real pygmies I’d ever seen were in a country show in the late 1950s, when I was about ten. For one shilling you not only got to see pygmies but a woman with three legs. I didn’t know which was weirder. I had seen dwarfs before but never four feet tall men in perfect proportion. They looked as tough as nails with their loincloth and spears, but nowhere near as joyful as in the Phantom comics, in fact they looked more miserable than their friend the three-legged woman. My ten-year-old mind couldn’t figure out why that would be. At least they could go to the toilet. I was totally perplexed as to how any three-legged woman could go to the loo without major problems.

  Entebbe airport hadn’t changed one bit since I was there for the Amin atrocities story twelve years earlier, except now all the officials were no longer suspicious of everyone and everything. Customs was a breeze. No bribes. Just big smiles and ‘Welcome to our country’. Kampala hadn’t changed much, but the people sure had. They were happy.

  A local minder met us at the airport and on the way into town he asked what we were shooting. Before anyone could answer, he said, ‘I hope you don’t want to film pygmies. That’s all anybody wants to film these days. But you can never find them!’

  I wasn’t game to look at Allan, so I stared out the window, wondering if six feet pygmies would be better than no pygmies at all.

  After a night in Kampala we headed for the Rwenzori Mountains. It was an agonisingly slow drive up a very long, winding dirt road full of giant potholes, not as easy to avoid as the fallen trees. After a good seven-hour drive that took us almost to the border with Zaire, we m
et up with the group who were to look after us with food and tents, something Micky and I were not looking forward to after our comedy routine in Kenya with the three stooges. On first sighting, though, these guys did look a little more organised. They even asked us what time we’d like to eat.

  We left most of our gear with our eager-to-please hosts and headed off for pygmy country up in the tropical jungle of the mountains. Even though we’d climbed a thousand metres, we were only a few kilometres north of the equator and it was stinking hot.

  The hunt for our pygmies was unsuccessful and uneventful, and we were covered in bugs and sweat. On our way back to camp we were met by one of our local minders who told us our camp had moved and he would take us there. This sounded ominous as memories of Kenya and the stooges came flooding back.

  After a five-minute walk back into jungle, we hit a clearing. And there in front of us was Shangri-la. It was incredible. A gigantic tent surrounded by half a dozen four-man tents, a remarkably quiet generator and scores of locals with big smiles, digging holes, lighting fires and setting up beds. We were told we had a tent each, a spare for all the gear, a generator already up and running for the charging of our batteries, a toilet almost ready to operate, fresh water in a canvas sink outside every tent for washing our faces and hands, and the shower with hot water would be available any time after six in the morning. And for now, would we like a white wine, a cold beer or a gin and tonic before dinner, which would be ready at 7.30 p.m.

  Inside my tent I saw a beautifully comfortable bed, made up as if it belonged in the Louis XIV suite in the Hôtel de Crillon. Beside the bed was a small table with a large lamp, a small but very powerful torch, mozzie repellent and a bottle of water, all that was missing was a chocolate on my pillow and thick wall-to-wall carpet, though in the middle of the floor was a small grass mat.