© 2006/Dave Banks/Eyeconic I have an odd sort of profession compared to the rest of the population. I am a freelance documentary filmmaker and photojournalist - my specialty being (or at least used to be) remote and hostile locations. My assignments have ranged from hanging off a mountainside at 14,000 feet during a blizzard to shooting Madonna's "Vogue" music video at Disney Studios. It's this unreality to reality that I've found addictive and there have been times I've been confused as to which world I’m in. Every job starts with a phone call - your reputation is your resume. When a call comes in, I never know where I am going to end up or for how long I will be gone. Travel is the core of my profession. What I do for a living is always hard work and often times dangerous. Beirut LA. Friday afternoon, April 9th, 1993 - I have been inundated by long distance calls from the A.D. Production company which produces the American Detective show. American Detective is a reality-based cop show that airs on ABC Network. It is also an entertainment show, not news. I had never seen American Detective until I got an earlier assignment with them. Unlike other reality shows, American Detective has its own look and feel, unlike so many production companies that I have worked with in the past. The production team of A.D. is unique. The Executive Producer, Paul Strajonovich, has a coiffure to die for and his driver is an ex-Navy frogman. The A.D. offices are located on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California, on the second floor of a peach colored stucco building. Out the office windows you can see Malibu pier 200 yards away and beyond the pier surfers in the bay. There is a connection between the surfers and the A.D. production team. No "Hodads or wannabees" here, just hot doggers riding the waves of a get-down-and-dirty reality show. I have been on the phone throughout the morning with Mark Hufnail the producer of the show. " Dave this is Mark...........we are expecting a verdict on the LAPD officers that beat Rodney King...if the cops are found not guilty there will be another riot...if they are found guilty there may be a riot anyway....what is your stand-by rate if a riot doesn't happen right away, and do you have a gyro-zoom lens for the helicopter shots?" "Well Mark, I'll stand by until another job comes down and there is no stand-by rate on my camera package and yes, I have a gyro-zoom lens". There is a pause from Mark. I can hear talking in the back- ground. I must be on a speaker phone. " OK, OK.......you will be positioned in the Special Enforcement Bureau command center of the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department in south-central L.A., and you have been given clearance to ride along in their helicopter.” " Sounds great Mark, I'll fax over the daily rate for a package. If you go a week, I'll pro-rate the week to 4 days". I wait for a response but there is more talking in the background. Mark returns to our conversation, " ....... By the way, Dave, we have body armor, gas masks, Flak jackets and Kevlar helmets for you.... we also have hired a bodyguard to be with you. Your bodyguard is on the SWAT team of the San Jose Police Department................. Do you have a sungun light for your camera ?". " Mark.....It has been my experience that a light on a camera makes for a good target." " Oh! good thinking ................ we will see you on the 12th of April, Monday morning, at the Wyndham Garden Hotel in Commerce, California............. By the way...... we will rent a bulletproof car for you guys if we reassign you" "How much is that going to cost you?" I ask. "$1,000.00 a day" is Marks reply. I am not surprised. You can rent anything in Hollywood. During the LA. riots of ‘92, when the same officers were found not guilty, I was a stringer and sold my footage to CBS network. The Rodney King riots happened just like any other news story. It just happened without warning - like an earthquake, a tornado or a wildfire. Of course a riot is not a natural disaster; It’s a human disaster. But not this time. The gearing up of this made-for-television event has gone beyond normalcy - possibly because the press was not allowed to really cover in detail the military actions in Granada, Panama, and Kuwait. The news organizations are not going to miss this opportunity to cover this war on their own shore. It feels odd to prep a shoot that is a news event but is being shot for entertainment. I have called Bexel, the largest vendor of broadcast equipment in the country, to sublease some extra wireless microphones and I am amazed by the lack of equipment on the shelves. "JB, this is Dave"...... do you.... " and before I could finish my sentence............ "Sorry Dave, CBS has 10 cameras and 2 gyro-zoom lens and ABC has just rented what is left on the shelves". From one vendor to the next I hear one common theme from them all. "Dave this is crazy, this is really crazy!" "The Networks and local stations are treating this trial as if this was the ‘84 Olympics. They’re staging this as if it were an Olympic venue." April 11, Sunday I travel to L. A., rent a van and make our way to our rented rooms and the on-sight production offices of American Detective at the Wyndham Garden Hotel in Commerce, California. April 12, Monday morning I meet our bodyguard and our ex-navy frogman driver. I'm issued a bulletproof vests, kevlar helmets and a Israeli gas masks. The big problem wasn't sizes for the vest or helmet it was the gas mask. The instructions for the gas masks were in Hebrew and no one on the crew read or spoke Hebrew. What a sight - The crew standing at the entrance of the Wyndham Garden Hotel in Commerce in full combat dress trying to pronounce and figure out the Hebrew instructions. While the three crews and bodyguards prep the gear and load equipment and their guns into the vehicles, someone announces, "There is nothing like the smell of fresh testosterone in the morning air". Then atomic fireball jawbreakers are thrown at the other crew members and their bodyguards. April 13, Tuesday We hurry up and wait in Commerce and eat Mexican food, recheck our gear. We are going on our third day of waiting for a verdict when ABC Network makes the decision to shut down this particular episode of American Detective. It was costing the Network $20,000.00 a day to keep three crews, four bodyguards, four drivers and the A.D. production team and a bulletproof car on stand-by. I make a decision to stay in L.A. until next Monday the 19th for some networking. 2:20 PM, April 16, 1993 I have invited Mark Hufnail the producer of American Detective to join me for a weekend of rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Monument. He brings along his cellular phone. (If you’re a Hollywood producer you don't leave home without it.) We are listening to vintage rock-and-roll on K-Earth 101 and looking forward to eating tacos in Twenty-nine Palms, California. We have now hit rush hour on a Friday afternoon. Our van has become a snail on a concrete track going one way. Thank God we have air-conditioning and a radio. The cellular phone rings. It's not for me but I listen anyway. "Yes....... Yes........ OK..... Pull off the freeway Dave". Ho-boy! I can't wait to hear this, but my instinct has already told me what’s coming down. As I drive I can hear the tone of the "End" button being hit on the cellular phone. "Dave, we have a mole on the LAPD. The verdict will be read tomorrow morning. Everything is back on." April 17, Saturday between 2:00 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. I'm watching Sting in a Science Fiction movie called Dune and eating Girl Scout peanut butter cookies and drinking coffee in our hotel room in Commerce. At 3:15 a.m. in the darkness of this early Saturday morning we leave the sheriff's station in Commerce and go to a holding area behind a hotel between Commerce and Lynwood. The platoon we ride with is made up of sixteen patrol cars and one armored hostage rescue vehicle. While at this location other platoons of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department roll in to attend the briefing on what to expect, arrest procedure and what radio frequencies to use. 8:25 a.m. It was also here that we hear the verdict of the second Rodney King trial while in search of coffee in the oversized parking lot. Several of the patrol cars have their trunks open with boom boxes tuned to KFWB all-news radio. The verdict is broadcast across the parking lot with that odd echo sound effect that two or more radios tuned to the same radio station give. The verdict - out of the four officers accused, two officers were found guilty and two found not guilty. There are no outward signs of reactions, just silence from the deputies. We leave this location for a substation located in the City Hall Complex in Lynwood. We are assigned to Lynwood just as other platoons are assigned all around L.A. County . 11:25 a.m. This is our first sit-down meal since Thursday night the 15th of April. Today is Saturday the 17th of April.......... I think. I'm sitting in a chair at a table where both have been bolted to the floor. This is Angelo's Burgers on Atlantic Blvd. in Lynwood. Teresa and I are getting ready to eat our breakfast burritos, in the company of fifty deputy sheriffs in this small burger joint. After the meal we talk with the deputies and drink coffee when I notice a home-made sign made of cardboard and a magic marker on the counter where you place your order. "The Movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas was filmed here on May 12th, 1992." It was at Angelo's that the famous scene where Michael Douglas is trying to order breakfast from a fast-food chain called "Whammy Burgers" was filmed. The menu has changed from breakfast to lunch and Michael wants breakfast not lunch. In short the movie is about a man in L. A. who goes bonkers. It’s ironic that we are sitting here at Angeleo's with the sheriffs deputies having breakfast waiting for a city to go bonkers. Saturday 2:15 p.m. It is not the result of the LAPD officers verdict that sent us from Lynwood to Valencia, California ( which is north of L.A.) but that of the rap concert featuring TLP at Magic Mountain. The concert has been oversold by thousands of tickets. Many kids were upset, windows were broken out of the restaurant just outside the entrance of the amusement park and there is a threat that it might spread to a nearby Mall. In the mean- time, we are cruising at about ninety to a hundred miles an hour in a caravan of twenty patrol cars with lights and sirens going. The freeway traffic was light leaving Lynwood but the closer we get to Valencia all four lanes become congested, which forces us to use the shoulder of the Golden State freeway. By the time we arrive, things are under control, thanks to the California Highway Patrol and the L.A. Sheriffs already assigned to this area. The platoon we are with is reassigned from Lynwood to Magic Mountain for the night after Magic Mountain management makes the decision to stay open for the rest of the evening regardless of what just happened. Saturday 4:35 p.m. We are in a holding pattern at the upper entrance to the park and everyone is starving. A supply of Atomic FireBall jawbreakers are passed around but they are only temporary relief from hunger, and they are too hot to keep in your mouth. The A.D. production team decides to get McDonald hamburgers for the crew and for the seventy plus deputies. After our quarterpounders we relocate to the back of the park and wait. 7:46p.m. The sun has set and a decision is made. I have been chosen to go along with seven deputies for a walk in the park. I tag along behind the deputies and take in the sights and sounds and wonder if we can stop long enough to get a corndog. Occasionally families and kids stop us and ask for directions. None of us are familiar with the park and we are not much help in answering their questions. We have not been in the park longer than fifteen or twenty minutes at the most when there is an atmospheric change in the night. It is as true in human nature as it is in mother nature. There is a calm before the storm. There is now a lull in the sounds - lower than that of a normal carnival atmosphere where laughter and screams of kids on a wild ride are mixed in the night air. There is something different happening here. The screaming continues until all laughter has been swallowed by the night. A swelling of emotions rises from my stomach and settles into my chest and heart. My instincts are telling me something that I don't yet consciously perceive. It is at this point that time becomes a series of different scenarios in slow motion and other craziness in “quick time”. Like locust swarming upon a field of grain, kids and families are pouring out of nowhere, surrounding us. The deputies react by creating a circle in the middle of a concrete walkway. If you were to look from overhead, you would see a circle of tan helmets surrounded by a sea of bodies. The sergeant is in the middle trying to hear the two-way radio above the human sounds. I can only assume he is calling to say that reality is happening. The camera is now on my shoulder and in my black and white viewfinder I zoom into the faces of mothers and fathers and see growing in their expressions, dread, concern, and confusion. The noise level rises another decibel. Somewhere in the park ahead of us panic strikes like lightning and like the delay of thunder, so is my reaction and that of the seven deputies. We catch the first swell of the crowd seeking safety. It is a stampede of hundreds of people coming right at us and we are a mere wall of eight. The noise levels of crying, shouting and screaming rises again to a decibel level near the threshold of pain I hear a deputy shouting " Was that gunfire ?.......... Was that gunfire?" The crowd recedes and confusion fills the void. Again and again gunshots or firecrackers are set off somewhere in the park ahead of us and a larger tidal wave of mothers, fathers, teenage girls and little boys in sheer panic descend upon us. Unlike the first riot we covered nearly a year ago to the day, this had the element of the vulnerability of families caught in the middle of a total breakdown of civil order. They have become a captive audience for Bugs Bunny’s Wild Ride and Freak Show. A group of teenage boys and girls run up to us screaming that a park security guy is getting beat up behind us. We turn but can't see anything but a wall of people one hundred yards deep. We move ahead, making our way across the park with intermittent swells of the crowd reacting again to the sounds of firecrackers or gunshots. I hear teenage girls crying and I see mothers and their children cling together. More deputies arrive and a helicopter flies overhead with its powerful spotlight shining down on the crowd. The spotlight from the helicopter creates a weird pattern from the tree limbs and roller coasters, crawling over the entire area like a black web. More deputies arrive out of nowhere and we make our way across a sea of glass shards and white plastic coat hangers to a store that sells professional sports team clothing. The store now stands as an empty shell of four walls. All the glass is knocked out of the large picture windows and metal doors. There were no jagged edges of glass in the aluminum frame which made it easy for me to lift my leg through the window and walk right into the store. For each store we come to as we move towards the entrance of the park the looting was noticeably done with such surgical precision that nothing was left but a carpet of coat hangers, broken glass mixed with paper images of Daffy Duck and other theme park cartoon characters and price tags. There is this one black and white image in the viewfinder of my camera that will stay with me for some time to come. I pass by a restaurant and notice that the doors are cracked. I press the lens of my camera to the split of darkness between the doors and open the iris of the camera and flip up the electronic gain and see in the grainy foreground silhouetted legs of chairs and tables. Beyond these barriers a young man dressed in his chef's whites and a chef's hat stares at me with a dazed and anxious look. I can only assume that he has chosen to stand sentry with fire extinguisher in hand as the world outside goes for a roller coaster ride into a momentary lapse of sanity. Every platoon of the Sheriffs Department in Los Angeles County is here or on its way to Magic Mountain. It takes three hundred and fifty deputies to move some twenty thousand people out of the park. At the entrance we pass lines of kids at a pay phone trying to call their parents and a marble statue of Bugs Bunny riding a marble horse waving goodby to his guests. It is here at the bottleneck of mass confusion that wandering parents cry out the names of their lost children. We worked forty-one hours in a three-day period while assigned with two shifts of the Special Enforcement Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department and for all we put into it, the fruits of our efforts will never be seen. This is not unusual. I have worked several shoots over the years that have never aired. Thursday April 22, 1993 I had picked-up an assignment shooting the Knots Landing Block Party Special for CBS. It was here in the cul-de-sac while I was drinking coffee that I ran into one of the production assistants from American Detective. We were sharing war stories and a few laughs when he informed me that the videotape masters of the Magic Mountain segment I shot were destroyed. I was shocked. So much had happened and yet so little was said or reported. Wednesday May 19, 1993 I learned today that there were 2 million dollars in damages and looting and that a body was found underneath the Viper Ride a couple of days after the riot. The victim was stabbed 4 times. Also that night 40 people were emergency evacuated. Governor Pete Wilson asked the media to keep a lid on this for fear that it might ignite larger unrest south of Magic Mountain. One last note, the show American Detective is partly owned by Lorimar which is owned by Time Warner which also owns Magic Mountain. I recently came across a quote in an article in Outside Magazine made by Ned Gillette, a professional adventurer. He said “ The camera forced me to really look at what was happening “. For 20 years I have practiced “I see, but say nothing”. Not any more. Footnote: The show American Detective was canceled on Sunday, May 16,1993. It was 16th in overall ratings and cheaper to produce than the average sitcom. Poem from 1992 L.A. Riots (I wrote this poem to exercise the images from my head) Enter Babylon..... your allowed to roam freely...There is no ticket... The angel burns on the desert floor where the yucca use to grow......the ghost of the ancient ones weep of heartache ..... The night is cool and the air smells like wet burning wood and urine.... Strangers in the parking lot carry boxes...”choose the bigger one “..the man says to his son............. Watch the choppers fly..... it is divine in flight under the ancient light...watch it swoop down clinging to the 405.. ..mixing the nights darkness with its carnival lights. Four Boy with hard-ons stroll the dry asphalt......... heard the broken glass beneath their feet.............Jim said the whole shit house will go up in flames Paul cackle with glee, He is the soulless man in blue light self -appointed as the divine messenger.......Here comes the weatherman watch as he taps and dance to tell us the highs and lows while the angel burns.......resident mockery what words can they speak. Did you know doubt consumed the spirit like cancer ? The night on fire in fantastic Hollywood........No forgiveness for all the souls listening to their car radios A thousand musicians play in silence under a vast orange sky.. The director in Beverly Hills cries because he has lost his cable signal.....he dresses like a Roman....... Hear the metal bird above.... its eye seek the prey and predator.............. Stage hands watch life and death on the tube next to the coffee as the sitcom continues to tape the lie. Men in darkness lurk in polished chrome cars.......what colors do they wear?........ red or blue.... maybe none at all..... young men with open shirts.......follow the procession......looking to perfect their high.....”where is the feast ?”............the young man ask Assembled troops without bullets.......squat on the corner of Vermont and Pico Blvd........look how frighten they are.....the used car salesman in his fatigues...... an idol with a catholic name sings then ask.... “will you believe in me........will you die for me ?..... Enter Babylon..... your allowed to roam freely...There is no ticket...