Stewart Morris was an ambitiously imaginative and innovative director who got things done that stretched the limits of the technology and abilities of the time, whether in the studio or out on Outside Broadcasts. He demanded to do things that produced an outstanding viewer experience for the time, but there was a lot of blood, sweat, tears, hot air, steam, fire along the way …
Alan Taylor
Mechanically minded bods may be interested in the Chapman Titan crane, which was mounted on an amazing lorry. The counterbalance for the camera crane was adjusted by pumping massive quantities of liquid mercury into a tank on the opposite end to the camera.
The lorry part featured all-wheel steering which meant that it could crab or manoeuvre in all sorts of weird ways. It could also drive along at a fair speed too.
I recall working on a dance routine for the Engelbert Humperdinck show around 1970 which was being shot on the set of the “Oliver” movie. Stewart Morris was directing and unsurprisingly, he insisted on having the biggest, bestest camera crane available, so a Titan was booked. Even with its super agility, it was a huge challenge manoeuvring it into the desired place on the set, but unfortunately what looked like a solid stone pavement turned out to be painted wood and was utterly crushed under the wheels.
That series of dance inserts for the Engelbert Humperdinck show was a chain of epic cock ups. Apart from wrecking the set of “Oliver”, we did another one from the Italian Garden in Blenheim Palace. On that occasion no camera crane was able deliver the sort of shot that Stewart envisioned, so he hired a helicopter instead. The idea was to start on a medium two shot of a pair of dancers and widen out to a shot of the whole Palace Garden and probably half of Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire with bits of Berkshire and Wiltshire. The camera zoomed in tight to achieve the shot while the helicopter hovered nice and still and then on Stewart’s cue, the cameraman zoomed out while the pilot gave it everything he had in order to quickly climb to a suitable altitude. Unfortunately the Italian Garden has fountains and because it was being filmed, they turned up the fountains to 11, no doubt at Stewart’s request. When the helicopter down-drought met the fountains, the contents of those fountains were instantly blown all over the dancers. It was at least an hour before all the costumes could be dried out and a re-take attempted.
One was shot in the full size mock up of Concord interior at Filton. They had taped out the interior floor plan on the floor of the rehearsal rooms and worked out a routine, but nobody had spotted that Concord is effectively a small diameter cylinder and when we got inside there was scarcely room to move, let alone dance about. The best they could do was to do a sort of hand jive, leaning into the aisles while seated.
Another routine was shot at the Bluebell railway. The day got off to a bad start when we arrived on site and discovered that all the chairs for the Scanner had been left in base, but we got some station benches into the Scanner which served the purpose. Stewart’s intention was that the steam loco would enter shot with the dancers draped all over the engine doing their routine but he also wanted the loco to not only arrive in shot at the correct point in the music, but also with it’s pistons going in time with the beat!
Stewart always insisted that the foldback speaker system for the dancers could also be used as a “Voice of God” system for talking to the artists. The first assistant was the long suffering Stanley Appel (before he became famous). Stewart gave Stanley the task of working out how to make loco enter shot as specified. Inevitably it didn’t work out that way and on multiple occasions the hills echoes with several kilowatts of Stewart yelling “Cut !!!” followed by ” Stanley – you’ve screwed it !!!”. Stewart also wanted the drain cocks on the engine cylinders open so that there were clouds of steam, which looked great on shot, but the boiler ran out of water prematurely, necessitating a long journey to fill up again before we could continue shooting. Much to everybody’s surprise, Stanley really did get the loco to enter shot on cue and with the pistons chugging in time with the beat.
Because we were using Editec, the only practical way to get the shot of the pistons in sync with the music was by it being the first shot, otherwise you’d be trying to sync up 50 tons of steam engine, a VT edit point and a music playback cue all at the same time.
The way Stewart explained it to Stanley made it sound easy. You try running the loco until the pistons are at the right tempo and make a note of the speed of the loco. You then start the loco from stationary and note how much distance is needed to reach that speed. After that, you reverse the appropriate amount, mark your spot and then move off to arrive at the given point with everything moving at the right speed. The music will be cued when the loco passes a particular spot. What could possibly go wrong?
One of the things that went wrong was that the test runs were done on a different stretch of track because Stewart didn’t want the loco rushing past and getting in the way of setting stuff up. Railway people will instantly know that even the most slight gradient affects a train’s performance and nobody spotted the difference in gradients between where the test runs were made and where the shooting was done.
As if that wasn’t enough, as I mentioned, the show was being recorded on video using Editec where a marker pulse was put on the recording and when the tape is run, it would play the video up to that mark and seamless go into recording after the mark. It allowed a single video recorder to produce an edited sequence. Unfortunately in the afternoon the video recorder went into record prematurely and wiped the entire sequence. The video engineer told Stewart what had happened and Stewart said “That’s not a joke is it? The recording has really been wiped?” The engineer was nearly in tears as he nodded and we all expected Stewart to explode. Stewart calmly said “OK everybody, reset for shot one, you know how to do it so let’s get it right first time”.
… and just as we were on a roll getting all the shots done amazingly swiftly, there was a huge bang on the side of the scanner. A member of the public was trying to turn her car around and struck our scanner. She was so flustered that she couldn’t extricate her car from the situation and I had to get in and reverse her car away from the trucks and park it safely while the rest of the crew raced to set up another shot before the light failed.
