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9130 OU10 - Filming in New York
After Detroit, for the rest of our filming in the US, we switched to another director, Francis. I liked Francis much more than Hugh. He wasn't as bombastic as Hugh was. Unfortunately, Richard didn't get on well with him -- not least because Francis was vegetarian and got up-tight eating in all the very carnivorous American restaurants to which Richard insisted on taking us.
In New York we stayed at the G R Marriott; their normal top of the range hotel. This was directly on Times Square, which was being made more acceptable; via a makeover which saw all the seedy sex parlours exiled. The Marriott itself rose several hundred feet in the air, and the atrium which ran right the way up through the building was quite awe-inspiring -- unless you happened to be afraid of heights. I walked out of my room to a waist-high wall which looked down something like 300 feet to the pianist playing below. It was, though, a comfortable hotel.
Our time in New York was spent filming the heads of the television networks. We were hosted there, of course, by the BBC. We often went to their offices, which overlooked the Rockefeller Plaza. It was fascinating to see at first hand what we had so often seen on television. The studio that they used for their news reports turned out to be literally nothing more than a cupboard, with the cameras sitting in the corridor outside. It could only have been about three feet wide and about the same deep. In there sat all the famous correspondents, in front of a photographic a backdrop of New York, pretending that they were somewhere much more grand.
We went first to the head of NBC, then one of the top three networks in the US. It was a pretty pedestrian interview, so we didn't use much later. Then we went to VIACOM, one of the up-and-coming organisations in the TV industry, but again nothing much happened. Finally we went to CBS which was then headed by Howard Stringer -- a Brit working in the US. He was absolutely fascinating, and his comments on the future of television were remarkably insightful; just what you might have thought we wanted. The problem, I now realise this is a problem with much of television, was that his explanations were quite long. Accordingly, they didn't fit the sound-bite character of the programmes we were making. Thus, despite his very intelligent comments, even he didn't feature much in the final programme.
In terms of external locations, we also went to the New York office of CNN. The studio there, which sat in the middle of the office, was bigger than that of the BBC but all the cameras in there were remotely controlled from the head office in Atlanta. Accordingly, you had the rather strange phenomenon of a normal press office surrounding this room which had nothing to do with anyone else there.
I vividly remember, though, filming New York traffic from a vantage point in the centre of Fifth Avenue. There was no traffic island or anything like that. We just set up the camera in the middle-of-the-road, and the cars passed on either side of us. No-one seemed fazed by this.
Once more I had plenty of time for private sightseeing, and managed to get to Ellis Island for the first time. I also managed to wander around Lower Manhattan including the subways under the World Trade Centre and then up to take the view from the top of the World Trade Centre. The memory of that has an eerie quality now, in view of what happened later. I also went on one of the piers on the East River, which was intended to copy what they had done to the waterfront in San Francisco. It was a cheap copy, but interesting none the less.
I was intending to go to the opera at the Lincoln Centre, but discovered that - even though it was a Sunday matinee and there was no one of any note in the cast, all I could get was a seat behind a pillar without a view of the stage -- and, even worse, the price was 150 dollars. So, instead I went with the production assistant to a symphony concert on the same campus.
Another evening I went to see Jackie Mason, the Jewish comedian. I like Jackie Mason but I found the whole atmosphere actually quite threatening. The audience were almost entirely Jewish people and his jokes, which we used to think were against Jews themselves, actually took on quite a threatening nature in such a crowd. In particular I remember going to the gents in the interval and, looking along the row, suddenly realising that - for an obvious reason - I stood out from everyone else! The best treat, though, was to see the musical 'City of the Angels', which was the massive hit of the season. It really was wonderful even when I saw it again in London. In London though it wasn't taken as seriously, which was a shame.
Once more we ate reasonably well, though - walking to one restaurant - we were caught in a downpour. Within minutes there were street-sellers with umbrellas on every corner. We took a taxi, only to find the rear seat was inches deep in water. One restaurant I remember well was in Greenwich Village. It was very proud of its high standards, and had pictures of other top restaurants on the walls. Next to us was a picture of Roger Vergés restaurant in Cannes and we took great pleasure in telling the waiter that we had eaten there just a few weeks before. The problem with many so called good US restaurants is that they equate quality with sugar. On the other hand, the Carnegie Delicatessen, where we had a salt beef sandwich and cheesecake, was fabulous.
All good things come to an end, so we flew to Los Angeles. We were aboard a Delta wide-body jet, but there couldn't have been more than a dozen of us on board. Even then we got no particularly special treatment. It took five hours. What we don't realise, in the UK, is just how the immense United States is.
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