The Best Worst TV in Texas
(Page 4 of 4)
Although Channel 5's rise to the top was due in part to their skilled coverage of street news, it had more to do with successfully selling their anchor man, weather man, and sports caster as "personalities" rather than "newsmen." They joke on the air and talk to one another between stories like friends standing around barbecuing steaks. It is an approach that captured the audience of the Seventies as surely as Jim Logan's approach did in the late Fifties. The real heyday of street news is past, gone the way of the freelance ambulance driver. There will still be street news, just as there are still ambulances, but it will grow more "tasteful" and more infested with personality. And just as the greatest geniuses of cultural movements seem to appear at the very moment the movement itself begins to decline—Aristotle, Shakespeare, Wagner—street news produced a brilliant, erratic comet who flashed across the sky just as sunset was approaching.
Ironically, David Robinson worked, and still works, for Channel 5. They've put him on the day shift now, shooting Chamber of Commerce meetings and ground breaking ceremonies. Every now and then he drives the reporter with him crazy by trying new angles, new exposures, new lenses. But basically it is a change he has acceded to. Management's decision is firm: Robinson took too many chances, a verdict other film reporters agree with and they're men used to taking chances themselves. In one night David got six tickets; in less than a year he wrecked three of the station's cars. "I got burned out," he explains. "I was working at the station from three in the afternoon to ten at night, then going out till about seven in the morning running the police calls. After two years I was just burned out." Around the Dunkin' Donuts they called him Adam 12 because he would race after even the least likely stories. The frantic pace shows in his demeanor. Not far past his teens, he is thin and taut as a fencing foil and, like a foil, slightly bent, his shoulders and neck jutting forward in a posture more comfortable behind the wheel of a car than walking and even less comfortable when standing still.
Robinson grew up in San Antonio and went to work right out of high school as a delivery boy for the advertising department of The Express-News. At that time The News and Channel 5 were owned by the same interests, and pretty soon Robinson was performing a similar task for Channel 5. But in a manner that recalls the hardboiled mystique of Thirties newspaper novels, Robinson just couldn't stay out of the newsroom. "They kept telling me never to go in there again, but I liked it too much. I'd see the reporters jump in their cars. I admired them. I made friends with some of them and started riding with them when I could. I liked being on the streets. Even though I was working for 5 I used to go over to 12 late at night and bug them to show me things about taking film. I learned a lot, too, until the boss found out."
Eventually Robinson shelled out $120 for his own police radio, had it installed in his old VW, and started running after robberies, shoot-outs, collisions, and stabbings on his own, just for the hell of it. "I couldn't believe it. I'd hear over the radio that there was shooting going on. I'd race over and there it was, really happening. I got fascinated that something I'd hear on the radio...was real. After that, I spent every waking moment listening to the police radio."
The station gave him a camera to use and staked him to some film. David, using his own car and buying his own gas, began his career running freelance for $10 per story used on the air. After a while he was a regular staff member. And on the night of February 28 last year, he shot one of the best street films ever.
That night two young bandits robbed a Chinese-American grocery in San Antonio and took off up I.H. 35 toward New Braunfels. David was already up by Loop 410 at an accident. He heard the report of the robbery and didn't think much of it until he heard the fugitives were coming his way. He shot over to 35, pulled onto the median strip, and waited. He could hear the progress of the chase on the police radio. He hooked a miniature Craig recorder to his belt and started recording the calls. Then he put his camera in the seat next to him and made sure it was ready.
In a few moments the fugitives shot past, trailed by a growing number of police cars. David pulled in right behind them. When another police car would come up from behind, Robinson would pull over, let him by, then pull in behind again.
The chase lasted about 25 minutes and ended when waiting officers ambushed the car near New Braunfels. Speeds ranged from 120 down to 70, but even at slower speeds the cops stayed back because the fugitives were shooting. Robinson, meanwhile, tailing right behind, bullets flying by him, had propped his camera up on his shoulder ("You don't have to look through one of those things to make it work, ya know") and started filming through his windshield. So here he was driving sometimes at 120, steering with one hand, filming with the other, and tape recording the whole thing from his belt. Absolute genius. And he made it to the final scene before the last shots were fired.
The most amazing thing about the resulting film is that it exists at all. The second most amazing thing is how good it is. The third most amazing thing is that he got it back in time for the 10 o'clock news.
• It begins with a frontal shot of the Chinese-American grocery where the robbery took place. It is night. Not all the neon in the sign is working. The building fills the screen, a placid art deco structure, neither sinister nor inviting, neither consequential nor insignificant—nothing but blues and blacks surrounding bits of white and red neon. It is a completely flat statement.
• A sudden cut. The screen at first appears totally black. But then there are the white strips of dividing lines, the red lights and tail lights of an army of police cars. Judging by the rapidly moving dividing lines, everyone is going very fast; but the lights all stay in about the same place on the screen. It's as if the army of blazing police cars were absolutely still while the rest of the world whirred past, like the films in one of those arcade machines where the object is to steer a stationary car down an animated country road.
• Then another cut—to the final scene. Guns everywhere. Cops everywhere. The car of the hunted, a brown Mustang, already punctured with bullets and bullets, is in the middle distance. In the foreground muscles are locked, eyes are set, guns are hot. There's a white glow everywhere from headlights, from camera lights, from spotlights.
• Angles shift, scenes shift. Police, crouched, careful, stiff, approach the car, shotguns and rifles ready, pistols pointed straight ahead. One cop fires into the car with a rifle. Another appears in front of the windshield and fires through it.
• Another cut. They are dragging the bodies from the car. The front door, swung open, fills the screen. Scores of deep oval bullet holes looking cold grey around the edges. The camera is still, then moves suddenly closer. The holes are larger, more threatening, awesome. Strange that the inanimate, in the midst of all the motion, should provide the most intensity.
• Cut to the interior of the car. Chunks of green-edged glass everywhere, a crumpled paper sack stuffed with money wadded in the corner of the back seat. Stacks of bills have spilled across the seat. A hand at the end of a blue sleeve stuffs the bills back into the sack.
• Finally, the ridiculous. The fugitives, one dead, one unconscious and mortally wounded, are handcuffed. Robinson's film ends in the manner traditional to street news: The victims are loaded into a waiting ambulance.
Robinson's film is exceptional because the event it records is so exceptional; but all the films of San Antonio street news tend to look much alike. It's what makes the conventional vocabulary of film so useless in talking about them. Although there are some obvious gradations within the form—David Robinson is a better filmmaker than Larry Lightmeter—there is hardly any sense of individual style. The camera is the important thing, not the man behind it. You don't have to look through one of those things to make it work, ya know.
For the man must be worried about getting to the scene, about finding the gross facts that form the fabric of the story, about finishing quickly enough to be ready for the next thing that happens. And those facts with which he is concerned—who was hurt, how did it happen—are transient and boring compared to what the camera records: the interiors of homes, hovels, apartments, bars, grocerettes, filling stations, pawn shops; the shoes, shirts, hair-styles, jewelry of thieves and their victims, of unlucky drivers, of contemporary police, and of the crowds they attract; the postures, gaits, mannerisms, squints, and scars of all ages and all social classes.
The work of these filmmakers forms a documentary record of the seething and unseemly in an American city, and in the future that will be a valuable record. At the same time, the camera—it sometimes seems to be the same camera passed ceremoniously from man to man just as the same guns guard Buckingham palace though the guards change who carry them—that unblinking camera, was recording something even more valuable: the countless, obvious ephemeral details of style and manner and custom. The blood on the television screen, as politely unmentionable as money, is the price of admission.
The filmmakers themselves pay a slightly different price, a price that's sometimes paid with desperate hours: It is during those final moments of darkness around five o'clock when it seems the light of day will never come. No cars—the late hour revelers, seekers, pacers, and drinkers have curled somewhere amid the quiet; the early risers are still asleep. Everything is damp. The police radio is silent 20 minutes at a time.
Ed Bragg is sitting alone in the Dunkin' Donuts lot. He could have gone home hours ago, but he stays here waiting for a night of work to wear off his nerves. And waiting he thinks about various things, about friends now gone, about women, about Birmingham where he grew up, about other men with other jobs, about life on the street at night, about all he has seen, about fires, wrecks, shootings, robberies, stabbings, child-rapes, asphyxiations, manglings, deaths. They pass through his mind like a shudder. And then he thinks about his new pool table and the way the balls shine against the green felt and he starts his car and figures he'll go home and practice bank shots an hour or so before trying for some sleep.
My Library
