Deadlines and sleepless nights

At the time the Little Valley airliner crash occurred, December of 1951, George Gore was still shooting for FOX Movietone News.

On a New Year’s Eve, I was searching a northwestern Pennsylvania mountain for a lost airliner. However, it seemed to be a fruitless search and I headed my car back home. Then I heard a special bulletin on the car radio that the airliner had been sighted from the air, wrecked on a remote mountain top near Salamanca, New York. I turned the car around and, late that evening, arrived in the area just as the New Year was ushering in. I got a few hours’ sleep in a small hotel a couple of miles away from the scene of the disaster.

I awoke at 5:00 AM and readied my camera gear for the day’s work. I was taken by a tractor-driven sled up a steep snow-covered mountain, as far as the tractor could travel, to a dense forest. From there, for nearly a mile, with two cameras strapped over my shoulders, I started hiking in knee-high boots over the rough, slippery, snow-covered underbrush. As I reached the scene of the lost airliner, I met some of the rescue workers huddled besides a fire not far from the main part of the wreckage. The injured who had survived the crash, and some of the dead, had already been taken out by sled to waiting ambulances during the night.

Just a hundred yards ahead of the group of workers around the fire, I wearily climbed up a steep embankment to see one of the most awesome scenes imaginable. Parts of the airliner were scattered as far as the eye could see. A path had been cut through the tree tops by the lost airliner for a distance of about five hundred yards to the spot where lay half of the airliner, minus its wings. Seats, baggage and clothing were scattered for miles around. Torn bits of clothing were swinging crazily on the tree tops. I walked by a tree stump with a human torso sitting on it. Nearby lay the bare leg of the pilot, and, on ahead, beside a large rag doll, I saw the arm of a little girl which made me feel like crying.

Strange, though, when you are hurrying about filming a disaster story like this, you are too busy to realize the awfulness of the scenes you see while you fight time. The oncoming fog suddenly descended. Another ten minutes, and the thick fog that was engulfing the area made it impossible to shoot any more film.

On my way out with my completed story, I met other movie cameramen coming in from the clearing. They turned back because of the dense fog, which did not lift until the next day. I phoned my Fox Movietone News editor, Jack Haney, and told him it looked like we had a scoop as far as the first newsreel was concerned. He was pleased to such an extent that he said I would recieve a full week’s salary for the day’s work shooting a tough assignment.

That Sunday evening, after I put the film story on a plane heading for New York, I started driving back home. Six hours later, as I lay in bed, reviewing through my mind the tragic scenes I had witnessed, the one that seemed more exposed was the little girl’s arm besides the unscratched doll, which brought tears to my eyes…

Racing the Surf at Waikiki

After shooting a story of the Fiji firewalkers, Fox Movietone News soundman Charles “Chic” Peden and his colleagues cameraman Johnny Tondra and contact man AA Brown were sent next to Hawaii to shoot a story of the surfers at Waikiki Beach.

While they got their story, they nearly lost it and their gear to the waves themselves in the process as Peden related:

“We’ll have to step on it this time,” broke in Evers, a bit of concern tingeing his words. “The wind has shifted to another quarter, and on that last run I had a tough time holding the canoe true on its course. With all that stuff you put into her, she doesn’t respond the way she ought to.”

Back at the starting line we waited a while until Johnny had focused his six-inch lens for an individual shot of the best surfer. I noticed, with the aid of my ear phones, that the thunder of the surf was growing louder.

Johnny made the “let her go” signal. Once again we leaped forward, and this time we fairly scudded. The wave that propelled us was gigantic; every inch of the canoe’s lengh vibrated to the comber’s force. Even the Kanakas seemd to be having trouble in keeping their balance on the surf boards; they wobbled perilously from side to side, and their grins had changed to looks of worry.

One hundred, two hundred feet we sped, then the canoe began to yaw. Evers was frantically straining at the paddle in an effort to keep us on a straight line; his teeth were gritted, and his biceps bulged to the utmost.

It was too much for one man, however. Veering sharply, the heavy craft started to ride the wave’s crest obliquely. The effect was to raise the balancing outrigger from the water, and as this happened, we began turning over like a log. Helpless in the grip of the surf, we were swamped in an instance. We were about to capsize completely when Evers, with a heroic lunge, leaped out to throw his weight on the outrigger. This saved the canoe from turning bottom up, but now, without the guidance of a steersman, it spun crazily. Inside the craft we were having our own troubles. The water had shorted all the batteries, and everything was sputtering and crackling; smoke shot out of the amplifier, and we felt the sting of the juice as high-frequency leads charged the salt water.

Another breaker crashed against the canoe. The camera broke its lashings and fell upon us. Johnny let out a howl of pain as a tripod leg folded on his fingers, and I caught the sharp corner of the camera square on my face.  Blood began trickling down the side of my nose, and I felt myself getting dizzy. I was frantically trying to get free before we turned over. I discoverd my foot was wedged tight by a sixty-pound battery.

How lovely, I thought, if this thing tips over now!

It certainly looked hopeless, but the next wave came to our rescue and washed the canoe far up on the shore. In a few minutes we were being pulled out of the boat by the watching crowd.

After getting patched up a bit, we studied the condition of our outfit. It certainly looked hopeless, but nevertheless we unloaded the film magazines and made a test to check results. The drenching had not spoiled the film, and looking at the negative we all agreed the effort had been worth while.

(photo courtesy of Marcia Miner)

On location in Fiji

Courtesy of Marcia Miner née Peden, comes this photos of her father, Fox Movietone News soundman Charles “Chic” Peden and his colleagues cameraman Johnny Tondra and contact man AA Brown on location in Fiji in 1931.

One of the stories they shot while in Fiji was the firewalkers of Beqa Island, where Peden in his autobiogaphy, relates the reaction of the natives to his sound equipment:

“I passed the ear phones to the chief, that he might listen in. Hearing the racket of his subjects, greatly amplified by the recording system, his jaw dropped in amazement. Excitedly summoning the more important members of his tribe, the Buli bade them to listen. Gingerly putting the phones to their ears, they listened in incredulous wonder. It was laughable to watch their reactions. Some dropped the phones with shrieks of fear, while others were stupefied by what they heard. From that moment our position was assured. We were super-beings in their eyes. The Buli directed a long speech towards us, terminating it with a bow.”

Adventures with the Secret Service

Charles “Chic” Peden, a soundman with FOX Movietone at the time this was written, relates an adventure a colleague had with the Secret Service during the Hoover Administration over a misunderstanding of the term shooting:

“There are by-products in the newsreel business too – by-products supplying thrills and laughs. Allyn Alexander was recently asked to relieve another man in Washington. Since he was unknown as a newsman in that territory – and since the layman is not familiar with newsreel language – it was only natural that the following message which he addressed to his home office should cause a furor in a telegraph station:

Expect to shoot president this afternoon. Alexander.

But the real commotion started when a return wire addressed to Alexander ticked into the telegraph office. It read:

Ship Hoover immediately after shooting. Doherty.

It took the cameraman several hours of explaining to convince the Secret Service men that he was not contemplating an assassination.”

Shooting the Horrors of Bergen-Belsen

Paul Wyand and Martin Gray of British FOX Movietone were the only cameramen on scene to film the discovery and liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In his memoirs, Wyand wrote down what he witnessed that day.

“…The Germans gave their word and retreated, leaving behind a regiment of Hungarian soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who came from the danger zone.

“What can this place be?” I asked Martin. “It sounds like something out of fiction. Let’s go and take a look.”

We drove towards the forbidden area. It was a breathtakingly beautiful day. The fruit-trees were in blossom, wild spring flowers patterned the fields, and birds chirped merrily from the hedgerows. War and epidemics seemed thousands of miles away. Then we saw a notice. DANGER TYPHUS. A little further on was another notice. It bore one word: BELSEN.

Belsen Concentration Camp, some fifteen miles north of Cele, lay hidden behind a perimeter of thickly planted trees and the barracks of a panzer grenadiers’ training centre. The camp’s concealment was so effective that from the main highway we saw absolutely no sign of it. But as we drove along a road that branched through the trees, the sweet scents of spring were gradually replaced by another odour. Subtle and indefinable at first, it grew stronger and stronger as we went along.

At the barracks were were stopped by British M.P.’s. They asked us to leave the car and enter a building which we found to be occupied by members of the Royal Army Medical Corps. We were told to strip, and after being inoculated against typhus, we had de-lousing powder poured over us. When we dressed again, more powder was sprinkled on our uniforms. They we drove beyond the barracks and parade grounds to a barbed-wire fence. A gate creaked open, and we entered Belsen. The stench now completely dominated and polluted the air: a composite of rottenness and putrefaction that choked the lungs and made it almost impossible to breath.

It is difficult to recall the exact order in which the sights of the concentration camp unfolded before us. Even now, fourteen years later, Belsen still has the unreal quality of a grotesque and terrifying nightmare.

Men, women, and children – barely human beings, but skeletal caricatures – shuffled, staggered and stumbled towards us, their tattered pajama-like uniforms flapping loosely against emancipated limbs and starved bodies. Some dropped dead even as they walked – not to fall to the ground, but to collapse into the ankle-deep human excrement with which the camp was carpeted. There was no awareness of sex, nor did any sense of decency remain: if breast or genitals were exposed, neither men or women made any attempt to cover themselves. Eighty percent of the inmates were suffering from dysentery and they emptied their bowels and their bladders inside their clothes as they walked along. I blinked away tears as these creatures tottered up to me, incredulity in their eyes and raised skinny hands to pinch the fat on my jowls. As they did so, I could see and feel the lice crawl from their fingers to my face. A number of people crumpled up and died as they stood there.

We made our way around the camp, photographing scenes which, it seemed, could not possibly be the responsibility of civilized man. On three or four occasions, Martin and I had to break off work in order to vomit.

After about nine hours at Belsen, I felt exhausted and sick, both physically and mentally. We returned to the barracks where we were deloused, and made some effort to clean our boots. We took the road to Oyle to put our material aboard an aeroplane. After Belsen, it was the beautiful blossom-filled countryside that now had the air of unreality. I stopped at a farm about half a mile from the camp and sat for a while looking at a man and his wife busy in the fields, their children playing nearby. It was a scene that could have been duplicated all over the world. I left the car, went over to the man, and asked him whether he was aware of what had been happening at the concentration camp. He said in broken English that he had known nothing.

Neither Martin Gray nor myself have ever been quite the same after Belsen. In some subtle, imperceptible way, my experiences there changed me. The taste and smell were with me for a fortnight, and for years afterwords, I suffered from nightmares.”

Shooting the Hindenburg Disaster

On May 6, 1937, FOX Movietone sent cameramen Al Gold, Larry Kennedy and Deon De Titta, contact man A. A. Brown and soundman Addision Tice to Lakehurst, New Jersey to cover the arrival of the zeppelin Hindenburg. The crew assumed the day was going to be a typical arrival of an airship, but it turned out to be very different.

Al Gold recollected his thoughts of that terrible story in an American Cinematographer article a few years later:

“When the explosion occurred I was shooting the ground crew grappling with the ropes. Instinctively, without a thought, I panned up to the silver bag looking in my viewfinder to see what was happening. From then on what happened to me or my camera is a confusing memory.

It took only about thirty seconds for the big bag to strike the ground after the explosion. But if the Board of Investigation called me, I could never swear to that. It seemed an age or a moment. I couldn’t believe that what I was seeing was true. “I’m dreaming,” I said to myself over and over. The sense of time was like that in a dream.

I could only hear the grinding of my camera. Whatever other sounds were around the blazing pile never came to my ken. That there must have been hollering and screeching and the roar of flames I know, but I didn’t hear them. My wet belt was working. The film was unwinding before my lens. “I’ve got everything I can from this angle,” I thought.

Shutting off the motor and putting a lens shade on my two-inch, I hoisted the camera to Ad, asking Brownie to take the batteries as Ad and I went forward to the pyre for close-ups. As we hurried forward dodging through men running hither and thither I still though I was dreaming. All around the blazing mass we moved, the three of us. We must have made ten set-ups before Brownie called a halt and said we had better begging thinking of getting our film on the way to New York.

“When they come to,” he said, “they may confiscate our film. It has happened before on stories of this kind.”

We then recalled Larry Kennedy and his assistant Deon De Titta, from our company, who was with us getting a different angle. The last we have seen of them there were directly under the tail of the ship. We started looking for them. From one cameraman to another we ran. Finally we found them. Like us they have been moving around the ship making every possible angle. They have been saved by a gust of wind that came up as the ship settled. It blew it over their heads and it landed about fifty feet from where they were standing. They have gotten many of the marvelous shots you saw on the scree in the Movietone News special. I was the only man given screen credit but many of the great shots in our release were photographed by Kennedy.”

Gold and Kennedy’s footage is in the newsreel below. The package starts at 1:29

81 Years…and nothing has changed

Just about everyone with a television station on their resume has probably seen Pat Tomasulo’s revenge on those who mess up his live shots by now.

Then, as now, a news crew out in public can cause the public to act in rather juvenile ways as the last graf in this January 30, 1929 Saint Petersburg Evening Independent article illustrates a problem a Fox Movietone crew had to deal with on the dawn of the arrival of sound in the news.

Fox Movietone Crew Here With 4500 Pounds of Paraphernalia To Record St. Petersburg Scenes

In spite of the multiplicity of technical detail which complicates the new era of taking motion pictures and recording the sound upon the film, members of the Fox Movietone news reel crew in the city today to film, are revealing that the modern three-man crew and 4,500 pounds of equipment necessary to shoot the news “talkies,” are as mobile as the lone cameraman with his light hand outfit.

A bathing beauty review showing the latest thing in beach pajamas and coats as well as bathing suits is being held this afternoon at the Don Ce-Sar hotel beach with the solaria and beach paraphernalia forming a colorful background. Sound recording makes it possible to film the members of the Don Ce-Sar dance orchestra and record their music as well as the pictures that are being filmed.

Accompanying the movietone crew, consisting of Neil Sullivan, cameraman; Kenneth Allison, technician; and Louis Hoffman who serves as the contact director while on location, will be Clifton Adams, staff photographer for National Geographic magazine, who will take autochrome pictures of the review to accompany a Florida article which will appear in an early issue of the famous travel magazine.

The bathing review is being staged for the visitors by the publicity department of the chamber of commerce, which is also arranging other picture views for the visiting cameramen. The modeling talent for the review consists of members of the younger set of the city who volunteer their services as members of the publicity department staff of Sunshine City Beauties and who give their time to this civic service without remuneration.

Beach coats and pajamas for the scenes are being furnished by the S. R. McIntosh company and by Mrs. N. V. Plank of the Don Ce-Sar Novelty shop.

Many amusing instances are encountered by the crew which is shooting the new pictures. The entire equipment, including microphones, recording instruments, generators, cameras and film magazines, is compactly fitted into a truck, the top of which often serves as a platform when quick action pictures are being taken.

The microphone for recording is placed near the person speaking, the orchestra, or other sound that is being recorded, and youngsters often have the original idea of running past the microphone and shouting swear words into it. There is no hope of such breaks getting before the audience as they are carefully edited out of the “Copy.”

Predictions from the Past

George Gore of Fox Movietone News predicts in the December 7th, 1930 edition of The Pittsburgh Press, what sounds awfully like what is known today as ENG.

FOX Movietone News Crew

FOX Movietone News crew somewhere on the globe in the mid 1930s.

Fox News

An unidentified Fox News cameraman at work filming a fisherman.