Non-Linear Editing in 1921

Editing a weekly Pathe newsreel release in 1921.

Ever wonder where the term “bin” comes from in your NLE? Well, here you go.

Cameraman’s Luck

A 1933 article about James Pergola gate crashing the 1930 Indianapolis 500 after arriving without credentials.

Read: “Cameraman’s Luck” (PDF file)

Pathe Newsreel Men

Three Pathe men atop their REO Speedwagon in New York City.

Will Hudson, Pathe News

Will Hudson started out as a photographer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but his interest was motion news photography and after purchasing his own camera, he strung for International Newsreel – selling footage at sixty cents a foot.

In 1913, Hudson went along on a Harvard-Smithsonian expedition to the Arctic to provide a motion picture record of the trip. The trip to the Arctic turned out to be hell on earth after Hudson and the rest of the expedition had to hike across Alaska to safety after their ship, the Polar Bear, was icebound. Hudson wrote about the Polar Bear expedition in his book Icy Hell.

After returning to Seattle, Hudson was more than happy to settle down and took a staff job with Pathe News shooting news across the Pacific Northwest until his death in 1945.

Terror of the Tropics

Since the first news cameraman showed up in hurricane country, photogs have been riding out the storms to document them ever since – even as the population around them flees.

In the 1920s, a deaf cameraman by the name of Ralph Earle was assigned to Pathe News’ Miami bureau, where in September of 1926, he rode out the devastating Category 4 hurricane that nearly wiped out Miami. The Miami News describes the acclaims he was endowed with:

Miami Pathe News Man Wins Acclaim for Pluck in Storm. Undaunted, Ralph Earle Scores Movie Beat on Hurricane Pictures.

Training his little motion picture camera into the face of the raging Florida hurricane, Ralph Earle, Pathe news cameraman for the Miami district, won the praise of the movie world for his feat in scoring a newsreel “beat” of the disaster.

Ralph Earle is back in Miami now, but the news of his acclaim in the north does not come from him. His Miami friends are the ones who make known his glory.

A veteran in the service is Cameraman Earle. He covered the Japanese earthquake. He holds a record in covering seven major events in various parts of the country in eight days. So when he learned a hurricane was approaching, he wired to his New York headquarters for extra film, which was rushed to him.

When the storm broke, he was imprisoned in a house at Miami Beach. But he kept his film dry by enclosing it in a fiber truck and placing the trunk on a chair in a protected corner of his room. The wind had not abated when Earle went onto the firing line, making a multitude of shots.

When he finished, he made his way to Jacksonville and there was met by an airplane which took him to Atlanta. From there he flew in another plane, piloted by Doug Davis, winner in the previous air races at Philadelphia. This plane was forced down by fog at Greenville, N. C., and Earle commandeered a fast automobile which caught the Birmingham Express. He went to Bolling Field, Washington, through a perfectly dovetailed schedule arranged by Pathe officials, and there caught a plane for the last lap of his journey.

He arrived at 4:32 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 22. His pictures were shown on Broadway screens that same evening, while newspapers in New York “played” his pictures as the first authentic photographs from the storm area.

Utterly exhausted from his long strain, Earle went to a hospital for a rest. He was not there long, however, for he was called to cover the Missouri floods for the Pathe organization. When he finished that assignment, he reported back at headquarters and was detailed to Miami again.

After the arrival of sound newsreels, Ralph Earle was forced to retire due to his deafness since it was assumed he would be unable to cope with the new cameras and the demands for natural sound. He spend his waning years as a portrait photographer in Saint Petersburg.

The footage of the Miami hurricane Earle shot can be found here.

The Mad Latvian

From 1906 to 1950, first with Pathe News and later Paramount News, John Dored filmed many of the major news events across the European continent. His colleagues nicknamed Dored “The Mad Latvian,” for he was able to obtain access to events and public figures that one would have to be “mad” to even attempt.

Among Dored’s scoops was the only foreigner to illegally film the funeral of Lenin – which earned Dored an arrest by the KGB and a stay in a Soviet prison. He was only released after intervention from both the British and US governments.

During World War Two, Dored was assigned as the cameraman for the USA newsreel pool in addition to his usual duties with Paramount News. Dored took his job very seriously as a letter he wrote to US Army Major Pelegrin in 1944 requesting transportation after another group of journalists took his car to flee a battle that was to take place shows.

Dear Major,

Usually I always try to get along with my work without troubling anybody, but this time I have to. Hope and expect you can help me out of my present difficulty. It is transportation difficulty. When I left your PRO coming up here, Capt. Hotchkiss said the car has not to return and I can use it as long as I want. Along with me came five journalists who also were supposed not to return to your PRO but would stick around until we all reached Paris. I hoped therefore we all had the same idea and working program and I would not run into transportation difficulties. What really happened, is this: on the very first evening reaching 36 Div. C.P., we all got a briefing and were told – a serious battle is going to take place. Seemingly some of the journalists got cold feed and wanted to leave the place. All five had a conference between themselves and the outcome was, they all left the C.P. half an hour later to an unknown destination and asked me what I intended to do. I had just one answer – I will remain here. Had to unload my equipment and they left in a hurry with the car and trailer and thus, absolutely unexpectedly I was left where I stood without any transportation. I had not seen those men since. As you know, dear Major, I am representing the USA Newsreel Pool and as such have a very great responsibility placed upon me. How can I work and do my duty in a proper way without transportation? Simply, it is not possible. I hope you realise that. The C.P. here is really very kind to me and does all they can for me, but they are very short of transportation themselves and cannot produce a jeep every time I badly need it to go to locations of interest to my film work. Thus, I am loosing very important material. It simply can’t go on like that. I must have transportation, and, with no journalists on board to share it. I trust, you will find a way to satisfy my legitimate request.

Expecting your urgent and kind reply and decision, I am,
Respectfully yours,

John Dored
Paramount News and Newsreel USA Pool

Dored retired from Paramount News in 1950 and spent his remaining years living in his wife’s native Norway.

Years later in his memoirs, Dored summed up his career in two sentences – “I’ve always felt limited by scripts and staging, I always yearned for freedom. I became a film reporter to shoot footage of those things for which our Father in Heaven writes the screenplay.”

First on the Scene, First on the Screen

The photographers of Pathe News pose outside the main Pathe office in New York City for a group shot in late 1927.

Willard Van Der Veer

Newsreel photographer Willard Van der Veer in Hollywood, California, during the fall of 1950. Van der Veer, along with fellow newsreel photographer Joe Rucker, won an Oscar for cinematography in 1930 for their photography during the Admiral Byrd expedition to the South Pole.

Ray Paulson (1950)

Photographer Ray Paulson of Warner-Pathe News’ Seattle offices.

A fatal hunch

From early land speed record attempts to modern-day NASCAR, the white sands of Daytona Beach have been a mecca for motorsports since 1903. The wide beach with its hard packed surface offered a place like no other on earth for the sport of racing, and fifteen land speed records were set between 1905 and 1935.

Racing itself is a dangerous sport, posing sometimes deadly risks for competitor, spectators and members of the press. Since 1923, at least eight known newsmen have been killed covering motorsport races across the United States.

For fifteen years prior to Pathé News cameraman Charlie Traub being assigned to cover an ill-fated speed trial in Daytona Beach, he trotted the globe in search of thrilling stories for the newsreels, sometimes taking extreme risk to meet the assignment editor’s demand of “get the picture!” In early spring of 1929, Traub was sent to accompany a USN submarine off the Florida Keys, filming experimental maneuvers from what today would be considered extremely foolhardy positions – being lashed to the conning tower much like Universal Newsreel’s Mervyn Freeman did in this 1933 story. After the submarine returned to its base in New London, Connecticut, Traub hopped a train to his next assignment in Daytona Beach.

At Daytona Beach, J. M. White was preparing his car, the White Triplex, to recapture the land speed record he lost just days earlier to Henry Segrave in the Golden Arrow. White offered the drivers seat for the trial to his inexperienced mechanic, Lee Bible, and March 13 was chosen as the date to recapture the record.

On the afternoon of March 13, instead of setting up his Akeley camera with the rest of the newsreel photographers assigned to the event a few hundred feet back from the track, Traub slung his tripod over his shoulders and plodded down the sand to setup at a spot 300 yards past the finish line. Traub had doubts about Bible’s driving skills and the powerful White Triplex, commenting to another newsreel photographer Larry ‘Booey’ Kennedy the previous day, “I don’t like the way that machine swerves when Bible tries to slow it down. I watched it today, and every time he brakes it, the car veers off to one side.” Traub had a hunch about Bible and wanted to be in position to capture the results on film. Barney Markham, who was handling the finish line asked Traub why he was setting up at the finish line instead of with the rest of the newsreel photogs – Traub replied back with deadpan seriousness, “I have a hunch something is going to happen when Bible attempts to slow down after crossing the finish line, and I want to be near here in case it does.”

Minutes later Bible took off in the White Triplex from the starting line and Traub started rolling with his Akeley. Twenty seconds later, the White Triplex crossed the finish line and true to Traub’s hunch, something did happen. Bible tried to slow down and the White Triplex swerved out of control. Traub saw the car bearing down on him and tried to run to no avail. At 200 miles per hour, the three ton machine swerved directly into Traub, killing him instantly and stopping just feet from his still rolling Akeley. With two bloody corpses and a destroyed machine sitting on the white sands, Traub’s footage was pulled from his unharmed Akeley and was shipped off to newsreel theaters across the nation with his death only mentioned as a cursory afterthought to Bible’s fame in the papers and along with it, slipped into the obscurity that is the fate of the news photographer.

“He was a member of the great anonymous army that goes unquestioningly into the far and perilous places, undergoing risk and hardship that the public may be served,” wrote Pathé News editor Ray Hall about his cameraman, “he was a soldier of peace.”