On February 27th, 1934, photog James Seebach and soundman Warren McGrath of Fox Movietone News along with Paramount News photog Irby Koverman visited the Golden Gate Bridge to film the construction of the North Tower.
Warren McGrath wrote about that story he worked on, a portion of which is below:
A friendly sun has begun to bore big rifts in the early San Francisco fog as the broad white bulk that ferries across the Golden Gate gives its warning blast and slips silently into the enveloping mist. Aboard, a group of newsreel cameramen peer anxiously into the west where the rapidly disappearing fog is reluctantly giving up the ghostly outline of the mighty north tower for the world’s largest span-the Golden Gate Bridge.
From here, it’s 580 feet, made diminutive by fog and distance, appears ridiculously inadequate for the burdens it is to bear. This illusion is quickly lost, however, when driving around a bend in the road the enormity of its mass and height bursts upon you. Involuntarily your eyes are drawn upward where they come to rest on the tiny specks of humanity becoming increasingly visible through the thinning fog. Right there is where your author becomes aware of a frigid sensation in the region of his feet.
Getting by the gates of the construction camp is worse than crashing the well-known wrestling matches. All sorts of credentials must be shown before we are finally admitted to the main office. But once inside the comforting influence of solid walls the old backbone straightens up again-that is, it does until we are issued a funny kind of hat resembling a French trench helmet but made out of a composition material designed to be a little lighter in weight. Inside the hat is the legend, “HARD BOILED HAT,” and I suspicion that they are designed to shield us from falling rivets, etc. I decide not to ask, however, lest my suspicions be confirmed.
Looking upward from the gigantic base of the structure reminds you of a modern Tower of Babel with its hundreds of workers building their structure clear up to the sky and vanishing in a whirl of fog. I rightly surmise that I will witness an object lesson in the well known daring exhibited by these news cameramen on stories such as these. As for myself, well, I’ve decided that good Old Mother Earth has been a pretty good friend this far and I ought to kinder’ stick by her. But maybe I spoke too soon for it becomes evident that my services are required “upstairs.” In a little basket-like cage in which we are solidly squeezed, we are swiftly raised to the highest level that it can take us, from there we make our precarious way up a spidery ladder to a sort of skeleton framework known as a “creeper truss.” The creeper truss is located about forty or fifty feet from the top and is raised by a system of cables as the height of the structure is increased, thus affording workers a maximum of safety. Safety, did I say? Maybe so, but it sure seems a long way down.
Local angles completed on the creeper truss, alpine climbing becomes the style and here we see daring matched with the best that the steel workers offer as our cameramen climb over the uppermost parts of the raw framework to catch those angles that pass so fleetingly before you on the screen. Look at the accompanying still shot of cameraman Jim Seebach fogging some of Movietone News’ film clear out on the end of a section member and remember that the first stop down is 580 feet away. Do I thank my stars they don’t want sound up there-you’re telling me!
Seebach and McGrath’s footage of the two hours they spent on the tower still exists and the outtakes of it can be watched at this link.