Chapter 5. Good Morning America

How far away does one have to go to find one’s self? Probably no further than the front fence and I’ve gone to the other side of the world. I landed in San Francisco with my balls on fire. I had a nasty infection that itched and suppurated and when I booked into the Hotel Virginia on Mason in the Tenderloin, I immediately inquired where I might find a doctor. I had contracted a vicious gonorrhea, probably a side affect of rest and recreation from the Vietnam war.

San Francisco shone white in the sun with red roofs, dry hills and eucalyptus, the blue Pacific Ocean, the Bay and the Golden Gate . But it was a cold city, the west wind whipped across the Bay at night. The tram cars trundled up the hills. The people huddle in clumps waiting. I felt emotionally wrung out and not ready for the rough and tumble of America. I knew nobody. I had a bad case of the clap. It was not a pretty picture.  I wondered if I should have found a  beach hut like the  French couple I’d meet in Tahiti, disappear into the lushness of the tropics, like Gaugan.

I was thirty-two years old, had worked five years in the advertising business, spent seven years in Papua New Guinea where I’d married and subsequently separated, and now with help and advice of professionals who’d became colleagues, I’d moulded myself into a filmmaker. I’d made about a dozen sponsored films and I’d learned the trade. I felt like a traveling salesman with my film proposal and a reel of 16 millimeter under my arm.

I was introduced to San Francisco’s public television station, KQED, had a sit-down with producers but their advice was: “go to New York if you’re looking for production money. That’s where the money is”. So I went to New York. 

I called my old cameraman friend from Papua New Guinea days, David Brill. We’d met in Port Moresby and had grown close. In some ways he was a mentor. He’d moved to New York City to freelance with Australian Broadcasting.

Brill was a great cameraman, the real deal. As a young man in Tasmania he filmed the worst forest fires the state ever experienced. With his Bell and Howell, fixed-lens camera he got in close and felt the heat. He always felt the heat. He was hungry to film and soon jumped a plane to Saigon as a freelancer to film the Vietnam War. Now he had a French Eclair and Angenieux zoom lens, the best gear money could buy and he traveled widely sometimes embedded with the troops. This was the Apocalypse Now sixties rock no roll journalism and Brill was in the thick of it. 

Brill told me he needed a sound-man and there would soon be an assignment in Cuba. “Grab your gear and get over here”. So I did. I dropped my half-formed plans to travel to Mexico and South America and flew to New York City.

After Tahiti, the biting cold of November in New York shocked me. I had never felt cold like it and a bitter winter awaited. I slept on the couch in David's apartment on East Fifty-First off Second Avenue.  I soon became familiar with the nearby bars, one in particular, Eamonn Doran’s, an Irish hangout with an IRA tinge. In Australia the pubs closed at six with warning bells ringing and patrons lining up their last glasses on the bar to skol a half dozen schooners during the “six o’clock swill”. in New York the bars stayed open till 4am. New York City was for grown-ups.

 Between the mountains of glass and steel, yellow cabs, dented, dirty and aggressively prowled the wide avenues and narrow dark streets night and day. If you scratched your nose standing close to the curb, one might screech to a halt. Dog shit littered the sidewalks and many of the pampered animals were dressed in dog overcoats, dragging their owners through the frosty streets. When freezing sleet and snow fell and the cruel wind blew, umbrellas sprouted and their twisted skeletal remains were poked in sidewalk trashcans. Pedestrians with puckered blue lips, steamy white breathe and red cheeks, shoulders hunched under expensive overcoats, trousers tucked into boots, hair splotched with snow flakes, streaming past.

Breakfast at a diner was new. “You’re welcome”, and you are. “Have a nice day”, and you can. “Nice to see you”, and it is. “New York is a big lump of shit, but it’s golden shit and we make the most of it”, a CBS producer once told me swapping stories at the bar and I agreed. The patrons sipped into the night. The jukebox played. The pretty girl down the bar smiled. The barman slapped another free drink on the bar: “that one’s on me”, he said. Every third one was at Eamonn Doran’s.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s New York bureau was in midtown Manhattan. David and I walked across town five blocks; Second Avenue, Third, Lexington, Madison, crossed Fifth and there it was,  Rockefeller Center towering and imposing.   Around the corner on Forty-Seventh Street, Black-frocked Hassidim scurried back and forth in Manhattan’s diamond district.  The smell of chestnuts roasting and pretzels, sugary peanuts and hot dogs wafted in the frigid air.  On Fifth Avenue the executive class flowed past .

Opposite was St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Around the corner, Radio City Music Hall famous for The Rockets.  The limos eased past. The yellow cabs prowled. The cops slouched. Fire trucks with aggressive sirens and air horns, rushed to another emergency. Pigeons fluttered and warbled.

Entering the heavy glass doors at Rockefeller Center, polished brass handles and hand rails and marble floors, CBS NBC, BBC nearby, David and I took the elevator for the ABC bureau and entered the hushed luxury of corporate America.

On the nineteenth floor the elevator stopped and the doors silently slid open. Down the corridor I saw the familiar logo of the ABC.  The office door swung open and suddenly I was back home. It was startling to hear the Aussie accents.

It was 1977 and Australian commercial media had not yet made its mark in the U.S. It was all ABC which is funded by the Australian government but soon the media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch was to arrive along with commercial television. One cold day I found myself waiting outside the New York Post beside the East River. Rupert Murdoch had recently purchased the newspaper. The story was my first assignment in America and I relished rubbing shoulders with the newsmakers.

Under the hot lights, perspiration squirts from Brill's forehead. He props and squats, zooms in for another close-up, swivels and pushes the lens closer, all the time I follow like his shadow, glued to his every movement, listening through my headphones, glancing down at the VU meter that measure the volume units of sound recording on the quarter inch tape.

Working with a documentary cameraman as sound recordist requires teamwork. David and I worked like ballet dancers. Tracking in for a close up he looks through the viewfinder with one eye, the other open and squinting, absorbing the scene beyond the frame, raising an eyebrow encouraging me to push the mic closer, frowning if it crossed the frame line. 

I loved working with David in those early days of my new freelance life.  We shot sixteen-millimeter film and I recorded sound on my Nagra 3 tape recorder with a Sennheiser shot-gun microphone. I wrote extensive sound sheets and the reporter sent a shot list and script. The stories were sent air-express to Australia to be edited and assembled. 

Cuba next?