Сhapter FOUR
IT'S ONE THING TO memorize lines and deliver them before a camera; it's quite another to move or even gesture while also speaking. Add factors beyond those and the task becomes even more challenging.
I am filled with admiration for David Attenborough, the British host of countless natural history television programs. His stand-ups set a very high standard. Actually it was a often sit-down rather than stand-up. In one instance, somehow he and the film crew had been able to move close enough to a group of wild gorillas to get them into the shot without spooking them. Attenborough was almost whispering his lines, when a female gorilla sidled up to him and began to check him out in a rather friendly manner. No amount of preparation could have anticipated the animal would move in like that, but Attenborough incorporated this unexpected intrusion into his words and kept going without blowing his lines.
In the same way, Australia's Steve Irwin is very impressive in the way he delivers his lines in his TV series The Crocodile Hunter. He works at close quarters with wild snakes and crocs in a very physical way while conveying tremendous enthusiasm, yet he is able to evade a snake strike or a croc's mouth or tail without losing his cool or a limb.
I had an unscripted close encounter with a creature when we shot a stand-up for A Planet for the Taking that pondered the mystery of our relationship with the apes. I was seated on a stool as I posed the question of our evolutionary history; a trained chimpanzee sat on a stool next to me. In the opening shot, the camera was focused on me—the idea was that when I mentioned our nearest relatives, the shot would widen and reveal the animal.
As we began to shoot and I started talking, the chimp reached into the frame and tickled me under the chin! It was a probe of curiosity that we could never have rehearsed or trained the animal to perform, and it worked as a perfect surprise for the piece—but I blew it. I was so shocked at the chimp's initiative that I stuttered and then broke out laughing. Too bad, but I'm just not the calm and cool type.
We've tried to create fun in stand-ups, though. When we were filming a story on location at Cambridge University in England for Science Magazine, I did a stand-up while poling a punt on the Cam River that runs through the campus. As I finished my piece, I pretended the pole had stuck in the mud, and I flipped off the punt and into the water. It had to work on the first take, because I didn't have dry clothes to change into. It worked.
Another time, I was hired by an energetic dynamo, Margie Rawlinson, to narrate a film she had commissioned to raise money for a science museum in Regina. She would show the film at a fund-raising dinner to be attended by special guest Gerald Ford, former president of the United States. During his presidency, Ford had been filmed stumbling, and it was widely joked that he couldn't walk and talk at the same time. I was filmed on a skateboard, and my opening line was something like: “Well, I can ride a skateboard and talk at the same time.” Then, following the script, I slid right into a lake and finished my piece while soaking wet. I thought it was hilarious and so did Margie. Apparently Ford didn't.
We once did a two-hour special on drugs for The Nature of Things, at a time when George Bush Sr. was U.S. president and waging war on drugs and drug users. Vishnu Mathur was the producer of the program and Amanda McConnell was our researcher and writer. We traveled to Liverpool, where there was a very successful program of prescribing heroin to addicts so they could remain healthy and avoid the aids-causing HIV. We then went to the Netherlands, where, with approval of the police, “coffee shops” were selling marijuana and hashish.
I did a stand-up seated at the bar in a coffeehouse. On one side of me was the owner of the shop, and on the other side was a regular customer. The plan was for me to start talking on a tight close-up so that no one else appeared in the frame. As I expounded on the Dutch experiment, the camera would widen out to reveal the two men, one puffing on a joint and then passing it in front of me to the other, while I finished the piece.
Well, it was a huge joint, more like a cigar than a cigarette. We were just starting to use videotape rather than film, and the crew was still getting used to it. We had filmed several takes with these two guys sucking on this huge stogie before John Crawford, the soundman, discovered he had not flicked the right switch on the camera; my mike had not recorded my piece. I was annoyed, because we had already put these guys through a lot. But they seemed quite cooperative and we began to shoot again.
It took a lot of coordination to get the joint being passed across at the right moment in the script, so Rudi Kovanic kept shooting and reshooting as the smoldering dope was passed under my nose. Finally, everyone pronounced the take to be perfect; we then shot a “safety” that was also great, and we were done. The crew had to reset lights to film a scene in the coffeehouse, but my work was over. I told them I would walk to the van and wait there for them to finish.
I set off walking. And I walked. And I walked. It seemed I had been walking for miles, yet still the vehicle was way down the street. I started to freak out. I had taken ages to get here, but if I turned around, would I be able to make my way back? I turned around, only to discover that I had walked maybe half a block. All that joint passing had affected the host as well.
People ask whether it's dangerous filming for The Nature of Things. They're usually thinking about encounters we might have with wild animals. The cameraperson who does the filming is the one who may be at risk; doing a stand-up is pretty controlled, and I can remember only a couple of times when I even worried about danger from animals.
One of those occasions came when we were filming elephant seals. They get their name from the incredible proboscis of the males, who can blow up those snouts into trunklike structures that are quite intimidating, exactly as intended. A male can weigh up to a ton. Elephant seals were pushed to the very edge of extinction early in the last century and have made a remarkable comeback, now numbering in the tens of thousands.
We set up a stand-up on an island just offshore from Los Angeles, where the animals go to breed. Several huge males were lying on the beach, looking most benign. Rudi lined up a shot so that I could give my lines with the seals visible behind me. I delivered my lines, and Rudi said, “That was good, David. Now, would you mind backing up to get closer to the animals?”
The thing about camerapersons is that they are totally focused on what they see through their eyepiece. Often they seem completely unaware of the danger or discomfort others may feel. But I was up to the task. We had a usable stand-up “in the can,” so now we could try for a more impressive shot. We filmed another piece, which Rudi also pronounced fine, and then he had me move closer. My back was to the animals, but they didn't seem to mind, so I kept backing up. We did four or five takes.
I began my spiel once more, then realized that Rudi's free eye wasn't squinting as usual but was opening ever wider, staring at me. The nearest elephant seal was practically under my bottom, and I thought he or another must have woken up. In fact, a huge male had lifted his head and body to tower above me. I'm no Attenborough; I fluffed my lines and scrambled out of the way.
When we were filming for The Sacred Balance, a series of four one-hour shows, one of our first trips was to Pond Inlet on Baffin Island in the eastern Arctic. It was a wonderful time: the sun remained above the horizon twenty-four hours a day, and we often found ourselves filming at 10:00 PM with light streaming down on us. The ice was melting, and we were able to film hunters shooting a narwhal at the edge of the ice sheet.
One spectacular shot from a helicopter was to show me walking alone across an immense expanse of ice. All our gear and the crew had to be taken far away so they wouldn't be in the shot. Neville Ottey, the cameraman, was perched in a chopper that hovered above me for a while as I walked along, and then it pulled straight up until I became just a dot on the ice.
Before we took the shot, at the insistence of our Inuit guides I had carried a rifle, because polar bears are virtually invisible on the ice. They can jump up and attack so quickly and powerfully that I wouldn't have been able to get help before I was killed. That shoot is the only time I have felt the hair on my neck stand up; all of my senses were wide open as I walked along. I can't tell you how happy I was when Neville announced that he had the shot and we could leave.
More common hazards have arisen in urban areas. Once, for a film about magic and illusion, producer Daniel Zuckerbrot had a cute idea: we would start a stand-up with a “medium” shot from below of me on the strut of an airplane, wind blowing through my hair, propeller roaring, sky in the background. Next we would cut to a wide shot of the plane in the air with me outside it, then to a close-up of my face as I continued talking “to camera.” Finally, I would let go and drop out of the frame. In the following shot, we would reveal that I was standing on the strut of a plane that was still on the ground, with the propeller spinning; I had merely stepped onto the ground.
The sequence was edited together perfectly, and until the last shot it did indeed seem I had jumped out of a flying plane. But in order to get the sequence, I actually had to fly while being filmed from another plane. Yes, I had to get out onto the strut, talk to the camera on the other plane and hang on until the cameraman signaled he had the scene.
Even more hair-raising, I couldn't be tied or attached to the plane. I had to wear a parachute and be prepared to use it in case I fell. I was quickly instructed on how to pull the cord and release the chute. I had never jumped from a plane; somehow, a one-minute instruction that ended with “if you slip off, just pull this cord and you should be fine” was not that reassuring. Nevertheless, I did it, and for some reason I felt no fear when I got out onto that strut. Actually, I was half tempted to jump. I instructed the cameraman to keep shooting if I did fall. No point wasting the opportunity.
I think the most dangerous urban shoot was a stand-up for that same show on drugs. Vishnu said we had to do a stand-up in New York City to convey the flavor of a “drug neighborhood,” so I flew down to New York on a Saturday to meet the crew that night. We drove to the middle of Harlem and parked the van at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X streets. It's the only time I have ever felt white, as if my skin were shining like a beacon.
When we hauled out the camera and gear, a cluster of young black men formed around us. “What are you guys filming?” they asked. Perhaps Vishnu felt oblivious to the attention we were attracting, but I was scared. When he told them we were doing a film on drugs, the response was exasperated. “You mean you are going to do another film showing us bad-ass niggers doing drugs!” a young man exploded. A big fellow put his hand over the camera lens and told us: “You are not going to film a f---ing thing here.”
“Let's get the hell out of here, Vishnu,” I hissed, as he seemed about to argue with the group. Filming in that location seemed to me the most horrendously stupid idea I've ever been involved in, and I believed we were lucky to get out of there intact. So where do you think we ended up shooting the stand-up? On a street where all the buildings were boarded up because they were occupied by gangs of crack and heroin dealers. I did my piece under a streetlight with the dark, shuttered buildings behind me, expecting to feel a bullet in my back at any moment. And the CBC doesn't even give danger pay for a shoot like that.
A lot of the time, the danger seems real only in retrospect. When we are shooting, we are so intent on getting the piece in the can that any danger seems minor. For A Planet for the Taking, we filmed a sequence on a kibbutz in Israel near the Jordanian border at a time when Arab–Israeli hostilities had broken out. As we filmed, we could hear gunfire and the drone of planes along the border, but it was only after I had left Israel that I wondered how dangerous it might have been.
Another shoot was very plainly hazardous. It was a story about offshore oil drilling before the Hibernia oil field off Newfoundland had been fully developed. We dressed in survival suits and flew in a large helicopter far out over the ocean to an immense drilling platform where dozens of men lived. From there, a smaller helicopter lifted our gear in a sling and transferred two of us at a time, clinging to the outside of the net, to a barge where we would film the stand-up with the platform in the background.
As we soared into the air and over the water, I was confident in my ability to hold onto the netting, but I learned later that cameraman Neville Ottey was terrified on that ride. I am impressed with his courage, because in spite of his fear, he did the job. I realized how dangerous the whole operation was when we were being dropped onto the barge. It was rising and falling many feet at a time; at one moment we would be way above the deck and then suddenly, splat, right on it. It turned out to be a spectacular stand-up, with the barge surging up and down with glimpses of the oil rig behind me.
Preparing to dive for an underwater shoot near Halifax with unidentified scientist
from Dalhousie University
I have had many uncomfortable stand-ups, usually involving squeezing into spaces such as an astronaut's suit at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration center in Houston, Texas, or a hard-hat diving outfit for deepwater exploits. But two are particularly memorable for their unpleasantness.
For Science Magazine, producer John Bassett was doing a report on hypothermia and decided the best way for me to do a stand-up was in the ocean. But it was December, and although we shot it in Vancouver, which has a relatively mild climate, it was snowing that day. I was wearing street clothing, but underneath that I had a wet suit of vest and short pants. Since the mid 1960s I had been an avid scuba diver, and in British Columbia the best time is in winter, when the cold water is clear and visibility is excellent. So I knew what it felt like when a wet suit first filled with water.
But on this shoot, I had minimal protection for my torso and no hood, gloves, or booties. I was not prepared for the shock when I jumped in. The water sloshed onto my skin and literally took my breath away. I could barely gasp out the lines as I had memorized them, my teeth chattering and my breaths coming in spasms. I can't remember how many times I had to do the stand-up, but when I crawled out of the water, it took me hours to warm up.
By far the most disagreeable shoot was for The Sacred Balance, filmed in a gold mine just outside Johannesburg in South Africa. It was bad enough going two miles underground: I had worried for days about developing claustrophobia, because in a huge, packed crowd, I get panicky at being swept along. What would happen when I was so far below ground in dark, narrow tunnels? I think the fear of being regarded as a wimp was the major factor that got me through those two days of shooting. But the biggest discomfort was not the noise, confinement, or darkness, it was the heat. The rock was 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and the air was almost as warm. We were advised to drink at least a quart of water an hour, which I did without having to pee—the water simply poured out of our skin.
We were there for a fascinating story. Until very recently, it had been believed there was no life below a few hundred feet underground. Oil drills had kept clogging up with microbial contaminants, but over the years those were dismissed as having originated above ground. However, the persistence of such findings finally induced scientists to determine whether there was life at a deeper level than was then known.
We followed the scientist Tullis Onstott of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, who had discovered life embedded in rocks deep underground. Now bacteria are found up to five miles deep and probably farther. (Writer/researcher and my sometime coauthor Holly Dressel's response when I told her about this was, “I always knew rocks are alive.”) What Tullis has discovered are bacteria that belong to entirely new groups of organisms, which may have been isolated hundreds of millions of years ago. They metabolize so slowly they may divide once every thousand years.
We were going to film a sequence in which I would assist Tullis as he took samples of water flowing out of the rocks. He would explain to me what he was doing and what he had found. As we hunkered in front of the camera, the heat was overwhelming; it was so hot that the camera had been taken down the day before to allow the fogged lenses to clear as the camera heated up. We shot for a few minutes, then all of us retreated about one hundred feet down the tunnel to where one of the ventilation ducts blew cooler air into the shaft. We cooled down, then rushed back to film for another couple of minutes, then fled back to the vent.
After we had done this for about an hour, I was beat and was relieved to be told my part was finished, so I could stay by that vent. But Tullis was the star of the piece and had to be there to the end. He was beginning to stumble over his lines, and I warned the producer to watch him because I was worried. Sure enough, Tullis passed out from overheating and had to be dragged to the vent of cool air. The collapse of a worker is a nightmare, because at least two others are required to pull him to cooler air, and the rescuers are at risk of overheating and collapsing themselves. Pretty dicey, but our dogged scientist survived to talk another day.
Sometimes I have to juggle several stand-ups in a shoot. I had remarried in 1972; my wife, Tara, was pregnant with our second child when, in 1983, filming started for A Planet for the Taking, the biggest television series I had ever been involved with. We had slotted in a three-week interval around the time the baby was due when I could be in Vancouver. The anticipated date for the baby's arrival came and went, and day after day the amount of time I would have available to stay home shrank.
A publicity shot with illusionist David Bens for a film on Martin Gardner called
“Mathemagician” for The Nature of Things with David Suzuki
We had three camera crews out filming at the same time, one in India, the other two in Europe, and I was absolutely needed to do the stand-ups because they would hold the entire series together. If I couldn't be there when filming was going on, I would have to be sent out with a crew later just to shoot stand-ups, and that would be terribly expensive. I kept getting messages from India asking when and where I was arriving there so I could be picked up. Finally, the day I was supposed to leave for India came and still no baby. Sarika arrived three days after that, so I stayed around for another two days and then flew to India, five days late.
I did my stand-ups in India over several days, then moved on to Europe, Egypt, and Israel before flying to Kenya, where producer Nancy Archibald was filming a sequence on baboons. At this point, I had not seen Tara or Sarika for over three weeks. Tara had received clearance from doctors to fly with Sarika (and three-year-old Severn) to meet me in England, where I would be shooting a segment on the mathematician Isaac Newton, so I had to leave Nairobi on a certain date. As you might imagine, I was very antsy to leave for England.
Three days before the day I was to meet my family in England, I met up with the crew in Kenya. We filmed a number of stand-ups, and the day before my departure, we were scheduled to film a series of stand-ups with the baboons in the background. Shirley Strumm, the baboon expert who was advising us for the filming, had assured us that once the baboons were awake, they would move and forage for food for two or three hours, then settle down in midmorning for a couple of hours, and that's when we could film our stand-ups. If all went well, I could be out of there by noon.
We had followed the troop of baboons until they bedded down for the night, so we knew where they were. The next morning, we woke very early when it was still pitch-dark and set out so we could follow the animals once they started to move; they would tolerate us in close proximity as long as we were unobtrusive and didn't look them in the eye. I had four long stand-ups to deliver, which meant a lot of material to memorize. As soon as we were on the trail, I began to go over and over my lines, feeling the pressure both because there were wild, unpredictable animals involved and because I just wanted to get the hell out of there and onto the plane.
As Shirley had predicted, the animals woke up in the dawn light and began to move in a leisurely way. Lugging all our gear, we followed them for a couple of hours, until they finally seemed to be settling down to rest and digest their food. Nancy whispered, “Okay, David, stand-up number 1.”
Rudi pushed me around so that the baboons were nicely arranged behind me as I concentrated on stand-up number 1 over and over again. Just as Rudi was ready to shoot, the animals would get up and shift around. We'd scramble to find another spot where they had settled. “Okay, number 4 this time,” Nancy instructed, and Rudi and I repeated the process.
We followed the monkeys for the entire day and didn't complete a single stand-up. “I'm so amazed,” Shirley insisted. “They always settle down for a rest.” My brain had slowly turned to mush as the day dragged on and I was cranked up to shoot stand-up 1, then 4, then 3, then 2. All I knew was that I was going to miss my plane, and I did. The next day, the animals performed perfectly, and I was out of there.
One shoot I did had an absolutely amazing effect. Actually, it was a shoot for a still photo, not for a program. In the 1970s, when a program of The Nature of Things failed to get more than a million and a half viewers, we would worry. But with cable and dozens of competing channels, our numbers fell steadily until our average, while still robust for a CBC program, sank below a million. I kept saying, half jokingly, that we could get dynamite numbers if we did a program on the penis, a perfectly good subject for a science show. When Michael Allder became the executive producer, I mentioned the idea and he immediately expressed interest. So he commissioned the program to be done and it focussed on the male obsession with size and some of the techniques used to enlarge the organ. The show was called “Phallacies.”
Michael had wanted a series of new style photos of me for publicity and arranged for a shoot at his cottage in Georgian Bay. As we were leaving the CBC for the shoot, Helicia Glucksman, our publicist handed me a couple of fig leafs and said “If you have time, please have a photo wearing this for ‘Phallacies'.” It was all said lightheartedly and I didn't know whether she was serious or not.
To get the best light, we shot very early the next morning with the rising sun. The photographer was very efficient and we soon had all the pictures Michael wanted, so as a lark, I taped the fig leaf to my crotch and we set up a bench to stand on and pose. Now it was quite cold out so I had to drape a blanket over my shoulders between shots so I wasn't covered in goosebumps. It was a very large fig leaf, so I felt it was pretty modest, but I can tell you, if it had fallen off, it wouldn't have made much difference. As I told you, it was cold. Of course, my Haida friends who saw the picture teased me for needing such a “small leaf.”
Helicia arranged for the photo to be on the cover of the Toronto Star TV Guide and I was astonished to see the reaction when it came out. It was picked up by dozens of newspapers across the country and written up as if it was incredible for me to pose that way. I did receive a couple of letters and one nasty phone call (all from women) expressing disgust at my “obscene photo.” Overwhelmingly, the response seemed to be surprise that even a 64 year old man could still be in reasonable shape. There was even a suggestion that my head had been superimposed on someone else's body. Well, I'll tell you, if we were going to do that, I would have selected a much better body.
I am not a bodybuilder and at my age, testosterone levels are too low to allow me to build up muscle mass, but I had been exercising regularly for decades, ever since I had married a much younger person. Once when my daughter admired a photo of someone's “abs” by saying “Wow, look at this six-pack,” I had interjected, “What about mine?” Sarika retorted, “Dad, you've got a ONE-pack!” I have been gratified that even in my sixties, my body has responded to exercise and after Sarika's jibe, I had developed a series of exercises for my belly and it worked.
We got the best rating for “Phallacies” than we had had for many years but it was bittersweet for me. Staff at my foundation worked hard for years for every story we got into the media on environmental issues. Then I take off my clothes for one shot and we get gangbuster exposure. It wasn't fair.