Lowell Thomas writes about how Fox Movietone beat the other newsreels to get the Hindenburg story to the screen first as well as other Movietone escapades of the 1930s.
Nobody had expected any excitement at Lakehurst N.J., on that tragic evening of May 6th, 1937. For the news gatherers the assignment wasn’t thrilling. As a matter of fact, they wouldn’t have been there at all, not even to cover the arrival of the largest airship in the world, if it hadn’t been the Hindenburg‘s first landing this year.
Since four o’clock in the afternoon, reporters and photographers had been hanging around. For all of three hours the camera crews of five newsreel companies had been set up and focused, ready to shoot the anchoring of Germany’s pride, the Queen of the Lighter-than-air Ships. Routine stuff, by this time: they had covered the scene many times before. The long wait had growing exasperating. Most of the boys had hoped to be finished with the job long since and on their way to dinner and theater dates.
“At last!” was the growling chorus that arose as the Hindenburg finally hove into sight and definitely began to descend. Then came that deadly flash followed by darting, unbelievable spears of flame. A boring, oft-repeated spectacle had in an instant changed to the starkest of tragedies. A dull, routine assignment had suddenly provided the most horrible but spectacular disaster in the history of the newsreel. Also one of the most perilous.
For the camera crews actually were in the first line of danger. Indeed, to some bystanders, it looked as though several of the newsreel men were themselves enveloped in those sheets of burning hydrogen. A. A. Brown, for instance, Associate Editor of Movietone, thought two of the outfit’s best men must surely have perished. He was on the field in charge of the assignment. Brown was on top of the Movietone truck with Al Gold and Al Tice all set to get a full, head-on shot of the giant Zep as she tied up to the portable mooring mast. Larry Kennedy and Deon De Titta were right under the Hindenburg‘s tail to capture a picture of her as she passed directly over them.
“The first flash was followed by a regular inferno of flames,” says Brown. “Kennedy and De Titta were in front of us about two thirds of the ship’s length. We on the truck never thought we would ever see either of them again. As the Hindenburg sank she seemed to us to settle directly over the last place where we had spotted them. But they stood their ground and kept on doing their job under conditions that would have daunted the bravest soldier.
“I jumped off the truck and sprinted around the now molten mass of the airship’s duraluminum framework. 1 hadn’t gone three hundred feet when I ran across the men we had given up for lost. They weren’t at all fazed, hardly even excited. They were hurrying to find another position for a different camera angle. Kennedy was wet to the skin. A thunderstorm had broken over the airdrome an hour before, and he had taken off his raincoat to protect his camera. Thanks to that, he had been able to work right under the blazing Zep without burning either himself or his clothes.”
Meanwhile what was happening in New York, at the studios? Dan Doherty was in the office on the late shift. Everybody else had left except a telephone operator, a doorman and the watchman. Producer Truman Talley was in Europe, supervising the preparations for covering the Coronation. General News Manager Ed Reek was at dinner. As I said before, the Hindenburg assignment had been expected to be routine stuff. Suddenly the telephone rang, a toll call from Philadelphia:
“Dan? This is Dennis Welch. The Hindenburg‘s on fire.”
“Are you kidding me?” asked Dan, rather impatiently.
“Would I be calling you from Philly to kid you?” was the answer.
“I s’pose not — thanks Denny — get off the wire, will you? I got work to do.” Whereupon Doherty made himself exceedingly busy on the telephone.
“Get Mr. Reek,” he ordered. “Get Jack Haney (the news editor), get all the lab crew, developers, printers. Get the office boys and tell them to take it on the run.”
General Manager Reek left half his dinner uneaten. Before long, a hungry but highly keyed-up staff began pouring through the Movietone door on West 54th Street: sound crews for scoring, cutters, projectionists, even the chef, since it was bound to be an all-night job with no time to go out for even a sandwich. While we imagine them getting ready for the biggest sensation in their lives, let’s go back to Lakehurst and see what was happening there.
Gold, Kennedy, Tice and De Titta had been busy making pictures around that holocaust. But the man who had to worry most was A. A. Brown. On him devolved the problem of getting the film to New York, an almost impossible feat, for the field was a bedlam.
Brown remembered that one A. F. Cofad, Customs Broker for Movietone, was somewhere on the field waiting to clear a shipment. By a miracle. Brown found Cofad after only a few minutes search. Pouncing upon the broker and handing him the cans of negative Brown said, “Quick! Back to New York as fast as that car will take you!”
Cofad happened to know all the back roads in New Jersey. He broke all records. The Movietone films of that Hindenburg disaster were in the office by eleven o’clock — and ordinarily a man is driving pretty fast if he makes New York from Lakehurst in two hours. By 12:30 the film was back from the laboratory and in a half-hour it was all cut and ready to be scored. Before daybreak prints were being carried by airplane all over the world. The picture was being shown all over the United States and Canada on the following day. French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English commentators and title writers had been among the emergency staff so hastily summoned by Dan Doherty. All night they worked, so that prints for all over the world could be sent out little more than twelve hours after that first burst of flame from the Hindenburg.
That is how one scoop was accomplished. The Movietone film of the Hindenburg disaster was shown to American audiences hours before that of the nearest competitor. Partly due, as you may have observed, to an organization geared up to meet any emergency and eat it alive, and partly to Broker Cofad’s knowledge of New Jersey’s back roads. For the crowds of curious whose cars jammed up all the approaches to Lakehurst fatally slowed up most of the other newsreel men.
On the continent of Europe that Movietone film had a scoop by three days. Because the only ship sailing out of New York on that Friday was a slow one, the cans were flown to Montreal and rushed to London aboard a C. P. Express liner.
But the liner reached England on what is known as a bank holiday. Of course, no Englishman thinks of doing any kind of work on a holiday. An American in the London office rushed to the dock, got that film and shipped it immediately by plane to Paris, whence prints scored in foreign languages were dispatched immediately all over Europe.
While there is nothing daredevilish to tell about the filming of the Coronation, it was exciting enough for anybody’s taste. Consider this one bare circumstance: never before had anybody even dreamed of such a secular, material thing as a camera being allowed within the sacred precincts of Westminster, let alone photographing that high sacrament, the crowning of a British king.
You may have heard that the British public squawked loudly because American audiences saw much more of the actual Coronation, the scenes in the Abbey. Thereby hangs a tale. The English newsreel companies had decided that 150 feet of those inside pictures would be plenty. The Americans, thinking the English knew what they were talking about and that the inside shots probably wouldn’t be so good, made similar plans.
In the evening we were sitting in the projection room, watching the “rushes” and biting our nails, wondering whether the film would come through in time to be cut, scored and hurried to the Normandie which was to leave Southampton the following morning. The inside scenes were inevitably delayed because, by general agreement, they had to be censored by Their Graces the Duke of Norfolk, as Hereditary Earl Marshal, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The procession shots came in early and could be cut in plenty of time. But they were so cut as to allow of only those 150 feet of inside-the-Abbey scenes.
Their Graces arrived eventually and were most gracious. They proved to be about as easy and liberal censors as we ever encountered. Had I been the Archbishop of Canterbury I am sure I would have ordered the elimination of the shot in which he appeared to be fumbling with the crown, although it was said later the fumbling was actually the blessing of the four knots at the corners. However, he didn’t.
But when Truman Talley saw that film (of the inside scenes), he nearly had a fit. Not because it was so bad but because it was so amazingly good.
“A hundred and fifty feet of this!” he exclaimed. “Not if I know it! Eight hundred and fifty at least.”
That precipitated a dilemma and an emergency. There was nothing in our agreement with the British to prevent our using more of those Coronation scenes if we saw fit. But all arrangements for releasing had been made on the supposition that there would be only 150 feet. And S. R. Kent, head man of Twentieth Century-Fox, was already on his way to America, in fact was somewhere on the Atlantic. The question had to be decided then and there, immediately, pronto. Talley did his durndest to get Kent on the radiophone. No luck. Finally he said:
“Nuts! I’m going to take a chance. We’ll use 850 feet of that inside-the-Abbey Coronation stuff and swim or sink by it.”
As everybody now knows, he swam with gusto. Those Coronation pictures were a raging success. What was more, Talley scooped the world. Not through any daredevil stuff but by a singularly cagey prevision. He had taken a full crew to London with him. The result was that he was able to develop, cut and score the film on the spot. Other companies sent the negative to New York to be cut and scored which entailed a delay of, to be sure, only a few hours. But the difference of a few hours is something that newsreel men feel entitled to crow about for many weeks.
The most harrowing story about a scoop concerns the one that didn’t come off. It almost ended with the death of six men. One of the group actually did perish.
Jack Kuhn of Fox Movietone conceived of a plan to scoop the country on the pictures of the assassination of King Alexander of Jugo-Slavia and Foreign Minister Barthou of France. They were aboard the S.S. George Washington, bound for New York. The idea was to meet the liner some 600 miles out at sea with a plane, pick up the film and fly back, thus beating every other newsreel by at least one whole day. The can of film, tied to a life preserver, was to be thrown off the stern of the ship and be picked up by means of a grappling hook lowered from the plane.
Elmer Grevenburg, one of the most audacious of pilots, undertook to handle the controls. With him in the plane were Jack Kuhn, Ed Reek, his boss, who went along for the ride, as did a radio operator, a mechanic and a co-pilot. The latter never came back.
A gale was blowing. When they met the George Washington she was ploughing through monster waves. Captain George Fried slowed his vessel up and gave the signal to drop the film can tied to the life preserver. Kuhn lowered his grappling hook — a miss! On the next try, better luck. But only for a moment. With a ping, the line parted; it wasn’t heavy enough. Away went the grappling hook to the bottom of the sea. Life preserver and can floated off.
Captain Fried then radioed the men on the plane that he would swing his ship around and create a wake of smooth water on which the plane could alight. Then Kuhn could pick up the can, Fried would head his vessel into the wind and make another wake from which the plane could take off. Meanwhile “Grevvy,” the pilot, was circling the George Washington about thirty feet from the surface at about eighty- five miles an hour. Suddenly out of nowhere arose a huge wave. The plane crashed into it with terrific force, throwing the radio operator and the mechanic out into the sea.
Grevvy and Johnson, the co-pilot, were up in the nose, strapped in. The plane went down nose first. The only way for everybody to get out was through a small door up near the tail, which now stood almost vertically in the air. Captain Fried threw life preservers overboard, but the struggling men couldn’t reach them. Kuhn and Reek got hold of a broken piece of pontoon. But it was attached to the wreckage of the plane by a small steel cable, so that the half-drowning men were being crushed between pontoon and wreckage by the force of the waves. The co-pilot grabbed a kapok cushion, but the waves washed him, cushion and all, completely out of sight within ten minutes. When the lifeboat from the George Washington approached the wreckage, wave after wave drove it away. After endless effort the sailors rescued Grevenburg, the mechanic, and the radio operator. Grevvy was unconscious. They threw a line to Reek, but nobody was holding it, so he sank with a hundred feet of line dragging him down. One sailor dove and brought him up, but the line got tangled and they both sank. A second sailor had to jump in and save them both.
By this time Johnson, as I have said, was completely out of sight. Kuhn’s pontoon had broken loose and he was rapidly drifting into the distance. He saw the lifeboat heading back to the George Washington. The sailors had given him up for lost. In desperation he took off his white muffler and waved it frantically. He would have been hopelessly lost but for Senator LaFouette of Wisconsin who was on the bridge. It was he who caught a glimpse of that white muffler through his binoculars. The lifeboat crew had to row two miles to pick Kuhn up, so far had he drifted.
Sometimes I am inclined to think that these newsreel men are the most resourceful, wily fellows I know. If they aren’t, they don’t last. In the nature of their jobs, they often have to go where they aren’t wanted, where there are strict “verbotens” and elaborate systems to prevent them from penetrating. Like the good reporter’s, their slogan is: “Get the story.”
Let me illustrate with an experience of husky, round-faced Bill Jordan. With his blond hair and blue eyes he looks like the most guileless of individuals. On the occasion I am thinking of, he was covering the cataclysmic eruption of Mt. Etna in 1928. With him was his foxy colleague, Ettore Villani. They went to the mouth of the crater and made simply historic shots of the volcano in full eruption, beating the world, but escaping death only by crawling back through streams of lava under a terrific bombardment of noise and sulphur gas.
But they wanted to do still more, to get some shots of towns that were literally being swept under by rivers of lava. To do this, they had to go around the base of the mountain. Let Bill Jordan tell the story.
“We had left Rome in such a hurry we hadn’t bothered to get special permissions of any kind,” says Jordan.
“When we got to a town that was fairly near where we were headed for, we were stopped by soldiers of the regular army. It seems martial law had been declared. We had no permission to pass through the lines, and they wouldn’t recognize any arguments. Villani then pulled a fast one. He asked if he could go into the town on foot. The soldier figured it was okay and let him do it. Villani went in, located the mayor of the town, and asked his permission to bring the truck into the town and park it, so we could go to a hotel.
“He got the permission and, like all Italian permissions, it was a piece of paper with red seals, ribbons, and looked most authoritative. He came back to the car, and showed this permission, and we got by the soldiers. Villani then took this piece of paper and put it on the windshield and held his hand on it, while I drove the car like mad. So we went right through that town. And every town we went through where there were soldiers we refused to stop. I kept my hand on the horn, drove sixty miles an hour, and Villani pointed urgently to this red seal he was holding to the windshield. The soldiers would put up their guns and try to stop us, but when we got up close they’d see this red seal and salute us, and let us go through. And it was only a parking permit! We went through three or four towns that way.
“Finally we got to the actual lava zone. This river of lava from the crater was flowing down slowly, and as it came along it completely wiped out houses. The lava piled up the sides and then spread over the tops, causing them to collapse. The way we photographed them was to get on top of a house and get the picture of the lava coming up the side. Then when it got up to the point where it wasn’t safe for us to stay any longer, we’d get off the roof, go back to the next house, and then photograph the one collapsing, that we’d just left. We just kept backing up. We stayed there all day long, got enough in one day, so immediately drove back to Naples and then to Rome, to ship the film. We got out the same way we came in.”
Then there was that exciting bit of camera reporting, the newsreel film taken during the Memorial Day steel clash at Chicago. This graphic visual record, the horror of it enhanced by its roar of sound, was suppressed by Paramount, you remember, for an entire month after the riot, for fear of inciting further labor battles throughout the country. This was the film that was run off before members of a Washington investigating committee — a drama-packed account of an occurrence of grave national importance, whose accuracy could not be questioned. Once again the boys behind the cameras had scored!
If you question the newsreel men, you’ll find that they are usually in agreement on the point that industrial warfare is one of the meanest assignments in their job. Beatings, camera smashing are an old story to those men who cover labor battles and, oddly enough, the boys are usually viewed with suspicion by both sides. However, they love their work, and they do it — fearlessly, courageously and well. And there are amusing compensations.
One of the funniest yarns they tell around the newsreel studios concerns the now historic anti-Prohibition parade in New York. The principal figure in that march, as you will remember, was the jovial, effervescent Mayor Jimmie Walker. Now, it is the custom of the biggest newsreel companies to bring its European cameramen to America from time to time, to give them an idea of American technique, American requirements and so forth. So it happened that the brunt of the anti-Prohibition parade assignment was given to a visiting cameraman from Vienna.
As his film was shown in the projection room that evening it was quite good. But the news staff was puzzled by the frequent shots of one particular marcher, a dignified, almost pompous old party with a long gray beard. In fact, there was footage upon footage of the Gentleman with the Beaver. But not an inch of Mayor Jimmie Walker, the leading man, the star, the principal attraction of the whole show. Finally the news editors broke forth in a roar:
“Where in is the Mayor?”
“Why,” stuttered the bewildered cameraman from Vienna, “you yust saw him — dere he is again, de gentleman mit de viskers.”
In Europe, especially Teutonic Europe, the Herr Burgermeister (Mr. Mayor) invariably wears a long beard!
By the way, Dennis Welsh’s name was actually Dennis Bossone (who later went to KYW-TV). Welsh was a nickname of Bossone’s that was held over from his short-lived career as a boxer and you’ll find him using both names on his Movietone dope sheets in the University of South Carolina’s archives.