80s' Health and Safety: Dodgy Rigs, Near Misses and Saving Robert De Niro

The anticipated changes to the Health and Safety at Work Act in the second half of this year got cinematographer** Donald Duncan **thinking back to a time when there was no safety officer role on most shoots and a pretty cavalier attitude to our own mortality prevailed.

By the luck of the gods, however, most of us made it through the 1980s unscathed, despite I suspect, a rich catalogue of near misses. Before we had the luxury of purpose-built, professional equipment to cover every eventuality, lateral thinking and improvisation was the key to overcoming the challenges that presented themselves in our quest to tell compelling stories – but that often came with a considerable risk, which we seldom saw owing to our rampant enthusiasm at the time.

One of my first drama shoots as a freelance camera assistant was in 1980 on a TV movie filmed in Akaroa, called Hang on a Minute Mate, based on a classic _Barry Crump _novel. The DOP was Peter Read, and grips were Barry McGinn and Howard Moses. We didn’t have a crane, and the script called for a travelling crane shot, following a vehicle at speed on an open road, with the camera rising up from road level as we closed in. No problem. Barry and Howard simply knocked up a crane one day, using bits of scaff pipe, and anchored it off the roof rack and bull bar on the Land Cruiser. This of course was long before remote heads, so Pete happily rode the cobbled-together beast at 80 kmph and operated the camera, and lived to tell the tale. I’m not sure where I placed the focus, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to ride up on that thing too.

Later, on the same shoot, we had a day of driving scenes with an open-top Ford Model A and two actors. Highly experienced, ex-NFU sound-recordist Dianne Twiss decided the best place to record sound, and keep out of shot, was to lie on the running board, Nagra close to her chest, as the Ford rocked and rolled around the steep windy roads of Banks Peninsula. If you look closely, she does have a hunk of big rope loosely wrapped under her arm as a safety in case she felt just a little vulnerable!

In late ’83 I focus-pulled David Blyth’s Death Warmed Up feature for DOP James Bartle. Trou Bayliss was the grip, and one day while shooting a sequence on the car ferry to Waiheke, the camera had to be placed several metres beyond the handrail to look back at the actors having a conversation. No problem. Trou rustled up a couple of scaff planks, poked them through the scuppers (drain-holes), held them together with a couple of G clamps, and Al Locke and I clambered out to get the shot. Note the bowline around the waist as a safety, and of course, not a life jacket in sight!

We’ve all got a plethora of yarns that could fill a book, and many of them involve cranes of some description. Here’s another dodgy crane story, with a picture to match (see opposite page). If you didn’t have enough crane weights, or forgot to bring them, or were simply too lazy/rushed to go through all that heavy, grunting business of loading them into the weight bucket, then presto, quick solution! Human crane weights! On this occasion, Neil Taylor and Steve Latty clamber into the bucket and do a fine job as lead weights, while Waka Attewell operates the camera and AC Mark Olsen holds the crane (the grip nowhere to be seen methinks). To add to the jeopardy, ‘Heather,’ the Film Equipment Company crane, is placed perilously close to the edge of the stream, and Neil is casually standing on the bucket, hands in pockets. It would have been a great see-saw act with an unhappy ending if he’d lost his balance and slipped.

‘Back in the day’ we used to routinely use a helicopter with a strop and a cargo net to drop large expensive loads of camera gear into remote locations with difficult access. Around that time though, producers and insurance companies got nervous about this technique, and on a shoot in the Kawarau River rapids at the bottom of Nevis Bluff, we instead found ourselves with a 150ft truck-mounted crane parked at the top, lowering our net-load of camera gear. To avoid the cases going bump, bump on the rocks on the way down, Jimmy Cowley and I attached a rope to the bottom of the net and with help from the safety guys, rigged a quick pulley system to get leverage to haul the load away from the cliff as it was lowered. Unfortunately, our combined pulling force from the bottom of the cliff created such an exaggerated load, that we actually overbalanced the massive crane. The driver was terrified when the outrigger legs lifted off the ground, and he leapt out of the cab, fearing the whole lot was going over the cliff. Fortunately, a panicked call on the radio to cease our hauling averted a tragedy. We’d inadvertently almost pulled gear, crane, and truck down on top of ourselves.

This all took place in ’88 on a pick-up shoot for a US feature called Midnight Run, starring Robert De Niro. They had been shooting an action sequence in the Colorado River, but had gone over schedule and it had got too cold, so they relocated to a NZ summer. The sequences involved De Niro as a bounty hunter in pursuit of his fugitive, jumping into a river and struggling down through some serious rapids. To get realistic close-ups of De Niro in the white water, the crew had rigged a large raft with two cameras, a gene, a Maxi-brute light, operators, and paddlers, and De Niro hooked his legs around an underwater rigged T-section of scaff, to keep him a constant distance from the raft and cameras, as he flailed through the rapids. Rehearsals with doubles went well, but at the end of the first take with the actor, the paddlers were so exhausted they didn’t have enough energy to pull out of the rapid onto the beach, and instead went straight towards the next large, fearsome rapid, and everything quickly turned to custard.

The stunt coordinator yelled for De Niro to swim away from the raft, before he was crushed into an upcoming rock wall. James Cowley and I were in a jet-boat, standing by to assist cameras, but our boat was closer to De Niro than the actual safety boat, and we raced through the churning maelstrom towards him. Jimmy and I reached overboard and scooped him up by one arm each, moments before he would have been hurled downstream into a treacherous stretch of huge white water.

And that is how Jimmy Cowley and I can stake a claim to possibly saving Robert De Niro’s life that fine summer’s day.

After all that, I didn’t really scratch the surface on other near misses, not to mention the hot topic of electrical safety. That will have to wait until the next issue…