The Best Worst TV in Texas
THE AMBULANCE ATTENDANTS HAD ALREADY disappeared inside the dismal little bungalow. Ed Bragg, camera in hand, pursued them up a short flight of stairs to the front porch; at the same time a cop scurried out of the house and down the stairs. "It's a family matter," the cop said without breaking stride. "If they don't want me, I don't want them." Evidently, an argument between brothers had ended when they went after each other with knives. It was 11 o'clock at night.
On the porch, not far from the doorway, one brother stood holding a crumpled newspaper against his slashed forearm. Ed rushed past him and through the doorway, but pulled up just inside. The second brother was already on the stretcher. He had been stabbed in the neck and the shock of the wound had driven him to frenzy. He screamed curses and flailed his arms as the attendants tried to strap him to the stretcher. Ed Bragg started filming the scene. The two arc lights attached to his camera covered everything with brilliantly white, brutal light.
Around the edges of the tiny room stood an old man in brown khaki shirt and pants, an old woman with a black scarf around her head, several small children wearing once-white underwear and looking unperturbed. In one corner sprawled a pile of dirty clothes. Toys—yellow plastic ducks on wheels, a pink doll with one arm—lay about the room. Newspapers tacked across the windows made curtains; wadded sheets and mattress ticking made beds. A ragged couch dripped stuffing on the floor.
It was the kind of situation where ten years of filming television news in San Antonio had taught Ed to be wary. There were two other newsmen covering the story by now—a film man with another TV station and a reporter from The Express-News—and that was better than being alone. But the cop was gone, and taking film inside some strangers' house where blood has just been spilled is a risky business. The air seemed heavy, charged with violence. When he had arrived at the house, Ed had noticed small groups of neighborhood people, attracted by the commotion, standing in front of the bungalow.
Filming constantly, Ed and the other reporters backed onto the porch to let the stretcher by. The wounded man, screaming still, tried to lift himself off the stretcher when he saw his brother standing by the door. Ed's camera followed the stretcher down the stairs and toward the ambulance. The on-lookers outside parted to let them pass. The man with the wounded arm jumped into the front seat of the ambulance as if he were entering a cab. But the man on the stretcher kept jerking his head back and forth, wailing constantly. He was still screaming as the ambulance pulled away.
Ed walked, not quickly but surely, to his car parked a few yards down the street. He started the engine. The reporter from The Expess-News was in his own car ready to go, but the other television film man was having some trouble with his camera. He had opened the car's door and now stood in the glow from the courtesy light. The people in front of the house watched the three cars. The old man in khaki burst out of the house, moving faster than Ed would have thought possible for him, and took off in a battered pickup. Several of the lingering groups came together in a loose huddle. Arms gestured in the dark toward the house and toward the waiting newsmen.
"Dammit, hurry up," Ed murmured. The other television reporter was inside his car now. When it finally started moving, Ed and the man from The Express-News started driving away, too. A long-legged boy split off from the huddle and threw something at the cars. It missed.
Safe now, Ed was content that the tenseness had been in the air. Sometimes the film captured those undertones and made the story stand out when it was broadcast on the news.
Ed Bragg had filmed hundreds of similar scenes. He first came to San Antonio from Birmingham, Alabama, during a stint in the Army. While stationed at Fort Sam, he started substituting for a sergeant who worked the same job on weekends for Channel 12. Ed returned to Birmingham for two weeks after his hitch was up, then came back to San Antonio and has had this job ever since. Nice-Iooking, likeable, reserved, just now past 30, he has been married but presently lives alone in a duplex, whose front room is dominated by a regulation pool table he recently bought on time. In the ten years he's been a newsman, he's won nine Sigma Delta Chi awards for his work.
But the special skills that won him those awards might not be in such demand outside San Antonio. Television news in San Antonio is uniquely idiosyncratic, like the city itself. Of all the cities in Texas it is the most Latin (being far more important in Mexican history than El Paso), the least Southern, the least ostentatious, and except for two large breweries, several military bases, and one small cigar factory, the city with the least visible means of support. After Latins, the most important ethnic group among early settlers were diligent Germans, which explains why a city with a street named Dolorosa also has a street named Savings.
Nothing there is new; everything is old or used or forgotten or yellowed, as if all has conspired not to make the Alamo look outdated. Illogic abounds. Among the streets circling the central business district very few run parallel to one another and very few are perpendicular. Drivers on a one way street are occasionally confronted across a stoplight with drivers on that same street coming one way in the opposite direction. Then all are forced to turn down streets running at odd angles to the directions they wanted to continue. Along these streets are the Pulse Ambulance Service, the Liberal Loan Company, the Nix Alignment Service, the Hardy Nursing Home, and the Golden Star Cafe, whose menu is so varied and whose hours are so formless that huevos rancheros and sweet and sour pork can be had there at any time of the night or day. Although there are orange cabs, there is no Orange Cab Company. In San Antonio, Yellow Cabs are orange. It is one of the very best places in the world.
Best, however, does not imply perfect. San Antonio, though passionate, Romantic, and energetic, is also very poor. And passionate Romantic energy mixed with poverty breeds—CRIME. Crime is an obsession in San Antonio, an obsession the local media revel in. It dominates the newspapers and the television news. If there is no crime to report right that moment, then ordinary accidents, wrecks, and electrocutions will do. Local newspaper editors and television news directors will protest that they don't really emphasize crime and violence as much as everyone thinks they do. What they are forgetting is that for someone from the outside, used to the responsible pablum of his home town paper, a large photograph on the front page of two dead bodies with huge bellies and bloody bullet holes tends to stand out in his mind. And that same outsider sitting back to watch the news in the evening, holding a drink with one hand and loosening his tie with the other, is going to be raised right back out of his seat by film coverage of last night's two car pile up on I.H. 35 complete with shots of blood hardening on twisted steering wheels while the helpless victims are lifted into ambulances.
In the last few months local television, whose stories have the advantage over the newspapers of film and color, has broadcast these sights: the dead body of a black-haired burglar in a silver-studded black leather jacket; the capture of an armed robber after a long chase during which the robber was driving a stolen police car pursued by the bereft policeman in a private car he had commandeered; the body of a baby who drowned in his bathtub being carried from a suburban home; a raid on a pornographic movie house which turned out to have a seat wired so the projectionist could shock its occupant; countless automobile accidents and their countless victims, both mechanical and human; numberless barroom stabbings and shootings, mostly in bleak little places with torn screen doors and light fixtures with long hanging strings (in one such case a man's murder was inspired by an argument over whose selection of ballads would play first on the jukebox); the awkwardly sprawled body of a man who had jumped or fallen 17 floors to the sidewalk.
It's awesome. It's hypnotizing. In fact this solemn parade of death and destruction across the television screen is so hypnotizing that it's a surprise to learn that it seldom lasts more than five minutes of a newscast, sometimes even less than that. The images are so strong. The intimate hates, plots, jealousies, lusts of unknown citizens become suddenly public, become "news," when blood is spilled. Say what you will about what television news should be, say what you will condemning perverse fascinations with violence, the first time you turn on a TV and see the blue-green glow of a hallway in the police station under camera lights and see coming through that glow a thick-skinned, thick-necked, tattooed prisoner wearing a worn-gray T-shirt stretched tightly over fat sweating arms and see that he's been wounded and bandaged near the shoulder and see his raging eyes glare into the camera while two cops, one on each arm, semi-shove him past the cameras down the blue-green hall—well, seeing that is just a lot more powerful experience than listening to a pale, polysyllabic drone from Eric Sevareid.
The people love it. Local newscasts which shun blood n' guts news are punished with an immediate drop in ratings. The rest of the newscasts are appalling, filling out the time with boring little stories about ground breaking ceremonies, Chamber of Commerce meetings, and church socials. No imagination, no fun, no nothing. Violence is the only subject the television stations in San Antonio really know how to cover.
And San Antonio's lust for street news, the trade name for violent story has engendered a small, unselfconscious group of filmmakers who are both dedicated and reckless in pursuit of their subjects, who spend long hours waiting for something to pursue, who earn for their trouble very little money and less attention, and whose work—those awesome, powerful, hypnotizing films—is as difficult to discuss in the language of conventional film criticism as describing the impact on a downtown street of two saucy prostitutes and their pomaded, peacocking pimp in the conventional language of the dance.
FACEBOOK
RSS
TUMBLR
TM
Read Later