In early December of 1941, Fox Movietone News sent cameraman Al Brick to Hawaii to film scenes of the naval base at Pearl Harbor for a short subject the newsreel was working on called "Filming the Fleet." (I’ve also seen writings elsewhere mentioning the footage was also intended to be used in the 20th Century Fox film "To the Shores of Tripoli"). Due to his assignment, by coincidence Brick happened to be on base the morning of December 7th with his Eyemo and managed to shoot 850 feet of Plus X whose images are permanently embedded into the collective consciousness of the American public.
Al Brick never really gave an interview afterwards about what he shot that Sunday morning or how he felt about it from what I’ve managed to locate save for a notation of some footage that Fox News apparently has in their archives, but its safe to assume that what he thought he was going to shoot at Pearl that morning and what he actually left with was not the same thing. The Navy embargoed his footage for a year as well as Brick joining the Navy almost immediately after the attack, so Brick never got the near-celebrity status that was forced upon another cameraman a few years earlier when he shot footage of a different Japanese attack upon American naval assets.
Brick’s actual dope sheets of what he filmed that morning can be read online here at this link. The newsreel itself that finally showed the aftermath of the attack visually to the public after the Navy lifted the embargo on Brick’s film a year later is posted below.
And Al Brick himself
