What brought you to Buenos Aires?
The daily grind! I was working 22 days a month just to break even. It really began in England. We were pub crawling on a canal boat through the Midlands during a film festival when I was chatting with some friends.
We were talking about how if Bush was reelected in ’04 that I was going to leave the states. Well, he was reelected and I began to make plans to leave. I wanted to go someplace south of the equator, so when the fallout came I’d be far enough away. I needed an international airport with direct flights for work, so it was down to Sao Paolo, Lima and Buenos Aires. I hate Sao Paolo. It reminds me of Houston, Tx, except in Brazil. Lima is a bit too dangerous. So here we are.
I had actually been here before, 30 years earlier, while my sister was studying here. I decided to make 4 trips to Buenos Aires before I made the big move. I networked, researched job opportunities and then liquidated everything I had in the states.
What got you started in the cameraman business?
I was 12-years-old on a field trip at Loyola Marymount University in L.A. and we were visiting the Television Department. Milt Kamen, an old comedian was running the place and let us play around with the equipment and the cameras…I was hooked.
My first job came from a class at UCLA. There was a visiting professor that made a deal with the class. He said, “Anyone who gets an A in my class will get a job at NBC.” Me and one other guy got A’s and we both got jobs. My start was in the Broadcast Operations Department. I sat and monitored the feeds from all the shows and news to the other NBC locations, basically just watching several TVs for 8 hours a day.
George Schlatter started doing a pilot of “Real People,” a TV series for NBC, and on break I used to go down there and talk with the associate producer. I told him, “If this show gets picked up, I want a job.” Sure enough the show got picked up and I went down there and said, “Ok, the show got picked up, can I have a job?” I ended up being a Production Assistant getting lights, batteries and other stuff from different rental houses. I became buddies with the location manager there and he let me play around with all of the equipment. Eventually he began to train me and convinced the boss to use me as a field PA. For one shoot, I was sent to El Campo, Texas to help with a story about a Green Beret that had lost his benefits. They always brought two cameras and one cameraman. Next thing I know, they asked me to grab the second camera and get a shot from the roof during a parade for the Green Beret. I was given a PK-39, just a boat of a camera, weighed about 40 pounds. It had a separate recorder and battery belt. The belt weighed about 15 pounds and the recorder was another 25 pounds, but I did well, I suppose. They liked my shots and eventually made me a location manager.
What other companies did you end up working with?
“Real People” was cancelled and I partnered up with an old buddy. We started doing music videos at the Universal lot and got to shoot Tina Turner, Genesis and a bunch of others over a year. Universal offered me work in their production department and that lasted until the ’87 writers guild strike. ’88 there was no work so I went back to school for a masters in Semiotic Linguistics in San Francisco. I scored a job in Oakland as the head of production for a documentary production company and that lead to freelance work as a cameraman. I started picking up jobs with Fox News (ugggh), CNN, Outdoor Channel, Sci-Fi, Discovery… mostly, I worked for CNN.
1 Comment for Interview with a Cameraman
Interesting interview, nice one.