In a fortnight will be the 71st anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few stations will be doing anniversary pieces.
And its very likely that many of those stations will be using faked video of the attack…
Yes, you read that line right…faked as in staged on a Hollywood lot. In 1943, the US Navy had producer John Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland produce a propaganda film about the Pearl Harbor attacks for consumption by the American public called December 7th. That is the source of the Pearl footage that most folks mistakenly use since it is public domain.
The real footage? There is only a couple hundred feet of it that was shot by Fox Movietone News photog Al Brick. Brick was driving onto base to take a friend of his back to the USS Arizona on the morning of December 7th and he happened to have his Eyemo in the back seat. And like any good news photog, he started shooting. The US Navy only embargoed Brick’s footage, they did not outright seize it. It was never distributed into the rota pool for all the newsreels to use and therefore did not end up in the public domain via Universal Newsreel, so the rolls of film Brick shot was Movietone property. A couple decades later, Fox gave part of the Movietone library to the University of South Carolina, including the Pearl Harbor story. USC of course controls the copyrights on their collection. Brick’s footage of the attack can be watched here.
If your footage looks like Toland’s and not Brick’s…please do the right thing ethically and super it as a "re-enactment" since that is what it really is. Don’t perpetuate a decades-old lie that Toland’s footage was the real stuff shot by Al Brick.