Cameras in Court

January 24, 2012 photog blogs

So the Illinois Supreme Court is finally allowing cameras into trial courts on a trial basis. Probably the only access battle the newsreel cameramen lost back in 1937 is slowly being won back bit by bit. The funny thing, the trial that started the whole “no cameras in court” rule and the cameraman who was anonymously blamed for “misconduct” at a trial that took place seventy-seven years ago this month was wronged by history.

I’m going to editorialize a bit here since this my site and say that I believe the American Bar Association was looking for any excuse to get the cameras out and the pool photog at the Bruno Richard Hauptmann trial in 1935 took the fall. The courtroom in Flemington was packed with press and sightseers on a level that exceeded O. J. Simpson’s trial and the fact the trial was in the news encouraged even more people to come to Flemington to watch the “show.” And if you get rid of the cameras, there is minimal coverage which means less people showing up to watch and potentially disrupt the proceedings.

History maligns the press at the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann in 1935 as contributing to an atmosphere of a “Roman holiday.” Tales of misbehavior of the photographers inside the courtroom during the trial were spread along with the inflammatory stories written by reporters on the outside and as a result in 1937, the American Bar Association enacted Canon 35 that banned news photography inside courtrooms. Joseph Costa, a still photographer with the New York Daily News who covered the Hauptmann trial, spent decades afterwards as a result arguing that the myth of the pool newsreel cameraman and soundman disrupting the trial proceedings with a hidden newsreel camera was untrue. Unlike the reporters on the outside, Costa insisted that both the still and newsreel photographers behaved like professionals inside the courtroom.

The pool newsreel men assigned to the Hauptmann trial inside the courthouse was cameraman David R. Oliver and soundman George Graham of Universal Newsreel. Their manager, Charles E. Ford, defended the behavior of his crew in a September 1937 interview in the Pittsburgh Press. “There was no trickery.” Ford said, “Dave had the camera up in front of the balcony. It was in a blimp. That couldn’t be hidden. It’s very obvious. And do you suppose they would have made us soundproof the camera with that and with rubber mountings and special silent fiber gears if they hadn’t expected it be used at some time when silence was supposed to be mandatory?”

A radio commentator once charged that the newsreel pool hid a microphone under Judge Thomas W. Trenchard’s desk, but soundman Graham stated different. “Anyone who believes that, about it being under the desk, doesn’t know much about sound recording. Put it under the desk and you’d get a muffled sound, a lot of courtroom sound blurring out the testimony. Instead the tone was sharp and clear. The truth is our microphone was hanging upon the wall. It faced the witness stand. Everybody could have seen it if they’d looked.”

Truman Talley, editor of Fox Movietone News also denied there was any trickery involved with the filming of the Hauptmann Trial. Talley claimed that Judge Trenchard never forbade the newsreels from photographing the trial. “Why, they had a State trooper stationed next to the camera to make sure it was not making any noticeable noise,” said Talley in a 1935 New York Times interview.

During the trial itself, Oliver stood several feet from his blimped camera and controlled the starting and stopping of the camera via an electric wire. Oliver had to merely press a plunger and his camera started to shoot the pictures that started a controversy over courtroom behavior that has never been settled since.

Costa’s crusade to get cameras welcomed back into the courtrooms partially led to his role in the formation of the National Press Photographer’s Association in 1946. Dave Oliver, however, whose camera helped to lead to the banning of cameras in the courtroom in the first place appeared to have never joined the association according to a 1950 membership list.

Universal Newsreels’ films of the Hauptmann trial are listed below: