All This in 60 Minutes by Lee Nicholas

Author:Lee, Nicholas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2016-06-22T04:00:00+00:00

13

Shit Happens

In all jobs things go wrong. Shit happens. For a pilot or a doctor one tiny mistake can result in death, and how bad would that feel. But a pilot can blame Boeing, if he’s still around, and a doctor can always blame the hospital system or even Hippocrates for not teaching him exactly how not to fall into the twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism. But for a cameraman working for a top-rating TV program, that tiny mistake is seen by millions of people. The doc and the pilot don’t have to put up with that humiliation.

On 60 Minutes the shit that happened wasn’t always cameras, schedules, sound, airlines, etc. They couldn’t compete with, for example, an idiot producer wearing riding boots. It happened in Oklahoma. Having arrived late as per usual, we had to set up in a big hurry with all of us offering an endless amount of apologies to the already reluctant interviewee. With tension in the room, I leant away from the camera towards the reluctant TV star for a quick light meter reading. At the same time the manic producer came racing across the room with arms flapping, yelling, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ In all his eagerness his bloody great clodhoppers clipped one leg of the tripod and down it all came. I lunged at the falling camera a millisecond too late.

We all stared in total disbelief. I had no idea a camera was made of so many different parts. How could a fall of only one and a half metres onto thick carpet cause so much damage? The lens had snapped in two. The viewfinder was bent, the magazine had severed all ties with the camera body, the light-proof door of the magazine triumphantly set itself free, and emerging from the rubble was 400 feet of film beautifully unwinding itself across the carpet, not stopping until it hit the door. It’d be impossible to duplicate that perfect unwinding.

Standing frozen, the producer looked around and said, ‘What do we do now?’

‘Well, I know what we won’t be doing,’ I said, ‘and that’s an interview.’

We must have looked like a bunch of amateurs as I crawled round the room picking up small pieces of my precious Arriflex camera. What I really needed was a vacuum cleaner. My diary entry of that day, 24 July 1986: ‘It was a perfectly shithouse ending to a perfectly shithouse story at the end of a perfectly shithouse day in a perfectly shithouse trip.’ Sometimes the perfect job can be too perfect.

I have never left a camera on a tripod again, not even to go half a metre away. But the floor is another thing.

Twenty years after Oklahoma, the floor where I left my brand new $80,000 Sony 700 Digital Betacam was the one at carousel five in Melbourne airport. I’d placed the camera carefully on the floor, surrounded by all my other hand luggage, stepped half a metre to the conveyer belt to collect one of my twelve bags, turned back and .

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