Tales4

Stories from our guests

In Honolulu in the early 1950s, the Pan American World News was the only TV newscast on the only TV channel in Hawaii. Most of the 15 minute show was my talking head on camera, although we had a few kinescope film-clips from the Coast on a 1- or 2-day delay. We had no camera-man nor processing capability; our lead local story usually featured a live interview, with the guest shoe-horned in behind the news desk with me during the voice-over live commercials. The commercials themselves consisted of silent film clips or still photos. During the early days we had no slide projectors, so stills and any text to be superimposed had to be mounted on posters by a staff artist and placed on easels on the set. Floor cameras were simply pointed at them, and any text superimposed by the chaps in the control room. A device used often in these commercials had a floor-camera shot of a Pan American airliner--a model airplane suspended in midair by black threads--in front of a rotating globe of the world. The globe was about the size of a soccer ball, mounted atop a waist-high pillar. To give the shot a sense of movement, the floor camera with a big zoom lens was used, and would zoom in slowly to a closeup of plane and globe during the voice-over.One evening as that particular shot began, the zoom lens had not been "pulled back" so it could not zoom in. But the director in the control room wanted the customary inward movement and instructed the camera-man forcefully and repeatedly to "dolly in, dolly in tighter!" He did as he was told, not noticing how close he was to the suspended model and the rotating globe. Sure enough, the big, triangular hydraulic base of the zoom camera pushed against the pedestal. The earth quivered, touched the model and then toppled.To the viewer, the world fell out of sight with a crash and a bang. A rising spiral of smoke was seen around a jittery Pan American airliner, as the globe's electric motor had shorted out and exploded when it hit the polished concrete floor. The picture tilted, the airliner jiggled in the smoke, shouts were heard in the background, the control room was chaos, the voice-over droned on about "the world's most experienced airline," somebody finally cut to another floor camera and a shot of a bemused newscaster trying hard not to grin. I doubt I was successful. Wayne Collins a2Darth@rcn.com