was a big city with big-city problems. It was also booming. The newsroom was full of talented people determined to make the show a success, so there was lots of competition but also lots of opportunity. I was now part of the CBC network, with a chance to get national exposure. Daily news assignments were thrown at me—city hall, traffic accidents, crimes and school board meetings—but the short features are what really gave me a chance to explore the craft and learn.
News items ran like a commuter train. B-roll (footage over which the reporter speaks), clip, B-roll, clip, stand-up closer. Most news items were around a minute and a half long—we called those “buck and a halfs.” But features could be up to five minutes long. Features gave you a chance to set the scene using beautiful shots, music and pacing, and great camera people and editors helped you turn the scripts into appealing television.
I now had more time and support to develop a story than ever before, and this had a power all its own. Especially with the right characters.
PloWing New Ground
I first learned that early in 1985. I was assigned to tell a story about the spring planting. Many farmers were having a tough time of it and some were on the brink of going under. I had been asked to find a family in exactly that situation. I quickly discovered that people in the farming community were a lot like people in the fishing community. Coming from Newfoundland, where many of my relatives fished, I found that these were my people—fiercely proud, down-to-earth, honest and hard-working.
Eventually I found myself on the phone, talking to a family near Vulcan, Alberta. They had farmed for generations, but each season in recent years they hadn’t quite been able to break even and were always losing a little more money. It was becoming a slow and painful demise for this family’s farm. Even so, they invited me to come for a visit.
I could feel the financial strain the family was under just to get the ground seeded. I felt bad that Mom had cooked a big roast beef dinner for us, spending money they probably couldn’t afford. But they were determined to be good hosts. As we sat around the kitchen table eating, Mom was polite, but somewhat quiet and withdrawn. She had also steadfastly refused to do an interview—that big imposing camera was just too intimidating.
Like many kitchens, it held a table, a kitchen counter island with cabinets above, and on the opposite side, with a big window over it, the kitchen sink. I knew that she had spent a lot of time at that sink, just like my own mother, washing dishes, looking out the window—and thinking.
We set up the camera where the kitchen table was. I asked my cameraman to shoot through the space between the counter and the hanging cabinets; I wanted a profile shot of Mom at the sink with the window included. Then I asked her if I could help do the dishes, where we could talk without that big camera in her face. She agreed, and while she washed and I dried, we began talking about the good old days.
Every time she looked up and out that window, she was seeing another time, a much happier time. As she talked about preparing a big lunch and driving out in the family station wagon to the fields where the men were harvesting, you could see her emotion building. “Everybody sat around the tailgate enjoying their dinner,” she said. Then she paused, looked down into the sink and began to cry. “Nowadays everything is so different,” she sobbed. “You try to keep everybody happy and you can’t.”
I was choking back tears myself. Her words would have moved anyone. I could feel them. I knew if it was half as powerful on videotape as it was in that kitchen, it would do more to illustrate what this farm family was going through than anything else we had taped that day.
Writing the script, I realized everything had to build to that moment. In the edit suite, the magical talents of editor Annie Churka helped bring it to life. She created pauses in the script, allowing time for viewers to absorb the story, which gave the actual moment even more impact. And she added music to squeeze every ounce of emotion from the videotape.
Would it work? I got my answer back in the newsroom. We were all young, career-addicted journalists, working stories right to deadline, and we’d sit around the newsroom yakking and watching as the show went to air. It could be a hard room. If your peers didn’t like what they saw, they had no problem pointing it out.
My piece came on. It grew quieter in that newsroom as the story progressed. When the emotional mother began crying at the sink, there wasn’t a sound. Some of the people watching had tears in their eyes. The piece had moved even these jaded journalists.
It was one of the most valuable lessons in my young career. Really, it was about two things. People—characters—are critical in any great story. Do everything you can to make them comfortable enough to tell you how they really feel, even if it means perhaps not having the best shot or the right lighting. Do everything possible to make the camera seem invisible.
Second, emotion is the most powerful thing television can deliver. Anger, fear, sadness, joy—the camera will show it all if you do it right. Television is not like a newspaper or magazine. You can’t pick it up and read it again. It goes by so quickly that you have only one chance to capture viewers’ attention, and if you can deliver real emotion, the story can have a lasting impression.
Learning those lessons served me well many times during my time in Alberta. A one-year contract stretched into two.
The Shuttle
On the morning of January 28, 1986, I was in a small office in the Calgary police building, interviewing an officer who wasn’t much older than me. The day before, early in the morning out on the Deerfoot Trail, my cameraman and I had come upon a terrible scene. A fellow driving a yellow Chevy Malibu had lost control, jumped the guardrail and nose-dived down a steep embankment. Neither he nor and his female passenger had been wearing seatbelts and they were thrown from the vehicle. Both were killed. A truck driver had seen the wreckage and pulled over, and we pulled in behind him just as emergency responders arrived. I still dream sometimes about what we saw that morning. It was a horrible sight.
Now we were doing a follow-up interview, but just as we started, another officer burst through the door and said, “The space shuttle just blew up.” We all rushed down the hall to watch the coverage on a small black-and-white TV in the lunchroom. Nobody said a word. I think this must have been our generation’s biggest news event, before the tragedy of 9/11; our response was akin to the previous generation’s horror when John F. Kennedy was killed. Most of them could tell you exactly where they were when they heard the president was shot, and most of the people I grew up with can tell you where they were when the Challenger space shuttle was lost. (I have another space shuttle story to tell, but you’ll have to wait until later for that one.)
The tragic story of the car crash we had set out to tell that morning was unfortunately lost in the enormity of the coverage about the Challenger disaster.
It’s a Wild World
Lots of stories were waiting to be told, great stories, all over Southern Alberta. Outside the city rose those beautiful Rocky Mountains, and whether it was ghosts at the Banff Springs Hotel or cougars in Kananaskis Country, there was a rarely a dull moment.
I had been talking with a good-natured big-game biologist, a fellow named Orval Pall, about a capture program he was running for the provincial wildlife department. He agreed that showing a capture would be a great way to help explain the pressure cougars were under because of urban sprawl. People were concerned about increased sightings. (Although we were the ones invading their territory, not the other way around.) Orval would capture the big cats and put radio collars on them to assess their movements. But in order to place a radio collar on a cougar, first you had to catch one—no small feat. I wanted to capture it all on camera. That proved to be much more difficult than I thought.
First we tried filming from the air as Orval attempted to pick up a radio-collar signal. Camera operator Morris Cruise, a Brit with a dry sense of humour, agreed to go up in the small Cessna. It had no room for me, which turned out to be a good thing. The wind was rough as they dipped and doodled in the hills,